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1. They use snort. Which is a good tool, but recently had a remote root exploit. Don't get me wrong; snort's a cool tool; however, it's not as carefully checked as OpenBSD. So the overall system is only as strong as the weakest link.
2. They use static rules. IDS systems that use first generation rules are always behind the power curve: they can't detect new attacks until someone writes a rule. Looks like he has a system to push new rules; however, this does not stop all new attacks. The second generation IDS systems use dynamic anomoly detection (AI-like) rules.
3. I like snort, but why not use a real tool like bro. Read more. Everyone has their own favorite tool, but bro is head and shoulders above all others--it's has its own language tailored for writing rules. (A kind of bash/C++ OO language.) And it's GPL, folks.
4. It uses SSL for admin. This makes it nice for novice administration--which worries me. Moreover, it could be vulnerable to man-in-the-middle attacks. We don't know if there's strong (x509) authentication of the client who attempts to admin the box. This is an attractive marketing feature for the box, but ultimately one of its weakest features.
5. We need more details on how new rules are dynamically updated/pushed. Obviously, he's put some thought into a protocol for making this secure, but let's hear more. (I suspect there might be some weaknesses, but can't say for sure.)

Genes contain introns and exons. The introns are discarded, but the exons can discarded or included in the final protein. So for one gene we can code two similar, but functionally different proteins.

e.g. (numbers correspond to exons)

gene: 1 - 2 - 3 - 4 - 5
protein 1: 1 - 2 - 4 - 5
protein 2: 2 - 3 - 4 - 5

So in this case exon 1 and exon 3 could be different domains that completely change the functionality of the protein.

Another phenomenon that can happen from this is that the reading frame can be shifted from the splicing (if exon_length % 3 != 0) event and you get a completely different protein. This is usually found in organisms with smaller genomes.

More info available here.

There is actually a database dedicated to this phenonmena here.

Note: I am a crystallography and I admit to knowing very little about genetics, so take this at its face value

According to the article, it's only "a couple thousand atoms" so you probably wouldn't even notice if it hit you. Ordinary objects (e.g. pretzel, human being) contain at least 10 orders of magnitude more atoms. Personally, I'd be more worried about the containment apparatus blowing up.

before we collapse the fabric of the universe or something like that

Antimatter behaves just like ordinary matter, except (a) opposite electric charge, (b) opposite parity (left-right orientation, e.g. of spin), (c) opposite direction in time (whatever that means). I wouldn't worry. Besides, how would we stop these people anyway? :-)

Richard Muller at Berkeley used lunar soil gathered by the Apollo astronauts to demonstrate that impact cratering significantly increased around 500 million years ago. Moreover, the craters appear to cluster around every 26 million years (last cluster occured 13 million years ago.)

Muller hypothesized that the periodic cratering is due to a star that orbits the sun. Every 26 million years, it comes swinging closer into the sundragging debris from the Oort cloud. Some of that debris ends up hitting either the earth or the moon.

500 million years ago is referred to as the Cambrian explosion because the fossil record shows a huge proliferation of different species. There have been a number of hypothesis as to what precipated the increase in life forms and Muller's data does an excellent job of supporting comet/asteroid impact. There's more at Lawrence Livermore

It may be that the Apollo program has yielded a significant clue as to why we aren't all just a bunch of jellyfish.

• NIST Center for Neutron Research
• Los Alamos Neutron Science Center, Los Alamos
• High Flux Isotope Reactor, Oak Ridge National Lab
• Advanced Photon Source, Argonne National Lab
• Advanced Light Source, Lawrence Berkley Lab

-S

There are freely available and very powerful diagramming tools

Yes, try xfig it's the best one I've played around with yet. On top of this, download pstoedit to convert your postscript files/drawings to xfig format (or a multitude of other formats for that matter) and then use xfig to modify it more if you want. Xfig takes some time to get used to (not very intuitive), but if you need to work with vector graphics, I haven't come across any better in linux.

The only downside I can think of is the learning curve.

True. However, I bought Helmut Kopka and Patrick Daly's "A Guide to LaTeX" and have found it to be an invaluable source. Couple this book to help you get started and all the resources on the net (searchable by google, of course) and you'll find yourself starting in no time.

There's a lure in having a program that is able to deal with all the typesetting nightmares and all you really have to worry about, after learning how to write LaTeX documents, is your content.

There's a video on this page, and here's the story.

this page lists the half life of cesium isotopes. Apparently they need a new entry for the half life of Cesium OS when slashdotted...

Ferrofluids are colloidal suspensions of nanoscale magnetic particles in a carrier fluid; the particles form magnetic domains separated by coats of dispersant only a molecule thick. These magnetic fluids have been used in many ways--to form airtight seals around rapidly moving parts, to move drugs in the bloodstream and rocket propellants in spacecraft, even to cool and dampen powerful audio speakers. Now steerable ferrofluids may give rise to new tools for subsurface environmental engineering and laboratory safety.

At Berkeley, they use magnetic fluids to control movement of underground fluids without any contact. Interesting stuff. For an introduction to ferrofluids, see University of Wisconsin's excellent article.

• 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.

I worked over the summer at a federally funded research and development corporation (think ``military industrial complex'') in a department that develops various remote sensors such as are flown on General Atomics' ``Predator'' unmanned aerial vehicle. Nearly all of the engineers in my department preferred Linux to Windows, but due to Navy requirements they were required to deliver a Windows NT-based product. Their response was essentially to bring unix to NT. By using Cygwin they were able to program in what looked and smelled liked a Linux development environment, yet it was really Windows NT. Furthermore the code could easily be adapted for customers who were more open minded about Linux. I found Cygwin to be very impressive indeed.

I also have worked at LBL where Linux is nothing short of pervasive. We even have experiments at the south pole run by Linux machines, such as the AMANDA project, a giant neutrino telescope embedded kilometers down in the ice at the pole.

Typically the larger projects are the ones that aleady have so many people involved, in the interests of sanity, code must be rejected and some questions in mailing lists ignored. However, smaller projects are EXTREMELY rewarding and really collaborative on a truly cool level.

If you want an example of some small projects that work well, check out the COMEDI project as well as the RT-Linux project.

Also, if you want to join something with the potential to be cool and sexy, go to rtlab.org and join my project! We are developing a generic scientific experiment interface. The software is built on top of RT-Linux (real-time OS's are sexy!) and the COMEDI data acquisition drivers. This is a great opportunity to work on sexy code, as you get to do both Kernel level programming when working on the RT thread, and user-level programming for the user interface (we use Qt/GUI). Join now! Email me at calin@rtlab.org if you are interested in finding out more about the software and/or think you can help! -Calin

What do you mean by "frequency of light"? Light can have any frequency, just about.

As you know, Visible light actually only encompasses a very narrow band of frequencies. Even if you include all frequencies in the ultra-violet and infrared regions, you still haven't covered but a portion of the detectable electromagnetic spectrum.

A simplified picture of the spectrum is here

Radiance comes immediately to mind for open source. Not-so-open source programs like Blender and BMRT are also good.

That's a very interesting question. According to Webelements Ununhexium (element 116) only existed as a shortlived decay product of 118.

The WebElements page for 118 has information about, and a link to, the retraction (the 116 page doens't) But reading the retraction, though it mentions 116, doesn't retract any claim regarding the existence of 116. So its possible that when the krypton collided with the Lead, an alpha particle was thrown off in the creation of Ununhexium, rather than during the decay of Ununoctium.

However, IANANP (I am not a nuclear physicist), so what do I know?

You mean Lars Mooseantlers writes:

"Hmmm... first the Higgs Boson doesn't exist, now Element 118 turns out to be a myth too. Or is it all just part of some wider, cosmic conspiracy? ;)"

Remember, the stuff in italics and quoted up there is written by the submitter. The only thing michael added was:

Mmmmm, ununoctium. Well, I guess this story's out of date, and so is this paper.

--

Besides, how else are you supposed to do to show you are a 1337 g33k if you can't rattle off a couple hundred digits of the most famous infinitely long constant.

D - M - C - A

Lawrence Berkley lab has the orignial story their website

http://www.lbl.gov/Science-Articles/Archive/pi-ran dom.html

I couldn't get the link in the story to work, and found this while searching for the story.

And if I remember the study on tape adhesives, duct tape failed badly compared to the average masking tape (duct tape doesn't stand up well when subjected to the high temperatures of a furnace's air flow). The biggest problem is in the level of stickyness on the adhesive is much lower than it should be. No insult on Red Green's comedy staple, but duct tape is probably best used for taping ducks.

http://www.lbl.gov/Science-Articles/Archive/duct-t ape-HVAC.html
Can Duct Tape Take the Heat?
http://hem.dis.anl.gov/eehem/98/980710.html

There is a really good web page at http://hit.lbl.gov/ with more information about reducing your utility bills.

I suppose I can see how one might get that impression. But that's not really what the theory is about. It's a spare theory in case we break the current better theory. Sure, you can't drive the The Big Bump faster than 35 mph, or more than 100 miles; but it is better than having to walk to the nearest accredited cosmological institution. Oddly enough, the theory is specific enough in its assumptions, that it should produce quite different predictions that are testable not only through future observations, but even through projects like COBE.

The COBE homepage

Pictures of the ashes of the fires of creation

Woo early web based learning from MIT (umm Harvard).
Acctual instruction is left as an exercise for the reader.

Early results seem to support inflation IIRC, but I'm not a cosmotologist either. While I know you're not one, I was curious as to what you think the future of nail polish for men is? And I'm not talking about just Carson Daley BTW. I kid cause we're good like that.

For full disclosure, I am a physics graduate student working in the astronomy department at Berkeley. Although I am not a cosmologist, I heard the latest on the supernova searches from one of the key investigators yesterday at an informal brown bag lunch. As a regular /. reader, I thought I would put in my own two cents worth of corrections and additional info.

First, the existence of a cosmological constant is NOT at all news. Prior observations by both the LBL group doing observations of supernovae type Ia (group page) and the BOOMERANG group doing observations of the cosmic microwave background (group page) verified the existence of a cosmological constant several years ago.

Second, as a previous poster has stated, the geometry of the universe is NOT necessarily open.
See especially this informative figure which shows the allowed region of parameter space based on both the SNIa and the BOOMERANG results. As you can easily see, the combined results are consistent with a flat universe with a cosmological constant, but the flat universe is a critical case, and one cannot exclude either an open or closed universe.

Third, what IS new is the detection of an extremely distant SN at redshift z = 1.6. The discovery, made largely by Adam Riess, who is now at the Hubble Space Telescope Institute, was largely serendipitous; it was detected in the Hubble Deep Field, and a number of prior observations allowed Riess to piece together a light curve from which he could infer the intrinsic luminosity. The NEW results are remarkable for two main reasons :

1) Critics have argued that a thin smattering of grey dust in intergalactic space could mimic the effect of a cosmological constant (ie, for a fixed redshift, objects seen are dimmer not due to an acceleration of the expansion of the universe, but instead due to obscuring dust along the line of sight, where the dust must absorb equally well at all frequencies). However, at very high redshift, the relative contribution of matter is higher, and so objects seen are BRIGHTER than what one expects in a freely coasting universe. This is not the trend predicted by the simplest dust model. So the recent evidence is one further advance for the non-zero cosmological constant model.

2) At such high redshifts, clocks appear to be moving faster because of the relative expansion of the universe since then (a photon wavelength is stretched out, but c remains constant, hence the photon frequency is also slowing in time in the universe, as are all clocks). The high redshift SNIa light curve exhibits this general relativistic time effect, and one cannot make sense of the curve without correcting for it.

It is nice to see it in Scientific American, but I think EUVL has been brought up in discussions of other NGLs here on /. The article does take a good broad perspective on the issues as they stand.

Intel has a paper on their website (if you can find it) that describes the process pretty straightforward as well (it might help the read to have a little bit of background).

Here is that and some other URLs:

http://www.llnl.gov/str/Sweeney.html

http://developer.intel.com/technology/itj/q31998/a rticles/art_4.htm

http://lithonet.eecs.berkeley.edu/network/backgrou nd.html

http://lasers.llnl.gov/IST/euvl.html

http://www.lbl.gov/Science-Articles/Research-Revie w/Highlights/1998/ALS_chips.html

http://chomsky.stanford.edu/~kevbert/neha_poster/s ld001.htm

http://www.cr.org/publications/MSM2000/html/W3202. html

http://www.google.com/search?client=googlet&q=EUV% 20lithography

-nicole

Problem solved :)

Of course, there is xfig http://www-epb.lbl.gov/BVSmith/xfig/ but it isn't really CAD (doesn't have dimensioning, but v3.2.3c has layers). You can do exact drawings, but the lack of dimensioning makes it a little bit tiresome. Advantages: it runs on many Unices and doesn't require Qt, good user-interface.

For 2D CAD I can recommend Qcad http://www.qcad.org, it runs under linux (requires Qt 2.x), of course you can always try to compile it for other platforms. Advantages: supports DXF (Autocad), has dimensioning, multiple undo, advanced snapping functions. Disadvantages: slow user interface (too much clicking required). Qcad has also a non-free brother "CAM Expert".

Radiance which is a Radiosity Renderer capable of every bit as much as lightscape (and the new enhancements in lightwave) but is a touch more advanced.. You can check it out here:
http://radsite.lbl.gov/radiance
It's got my vote for best free renderer in linux
(And it can be set up to do cluster rendering too)

While I agree with many of the points raised here about server reliability and such, i'm amazed that nobody is mentioning the real cost of the extra power usage. What about the environment? Almost all of that electricity comes from fossil fuel burning, emitting greenhouse gases and possibly other pollutants. Strip Mining. Radioactive Waste from fission power. Birds killed by windmills. Valley habitats destroyed by damming rivers. Figuring out how to make computers (and everything else) use less power is really important. For an interesting related read, see Leaking Electricity for a discussion of power usage by household appliances.

Speaking of power management... I send all my students to read this site, in the hopes that some power will be saved somewhere as a result. It's a noble cause... Users Guide to Power Management

Ref: http://eetd.lbl.gov/Standby/Articles/Purdue.html

Sorry, wrong. The character '' is a fully-paid up member of ISO 8859-1, the default charset on the Web. You can spell it ² as well. The worst offenders are the "smart quotes" and various dashes.

Ah, electrochromic technology. That's neat stuff, especially the LBL-developed material that uses power to change the tinting, and holds its current tint when the power is removed.

You're right, it's still expensive, but the costs are coming down. We're already seeing electrochromics being used for auto-dimming rearview mirrors on everything from VWs to Buicks, and it's showing up in larger panels on show cars like the Cadillac Imaj and Mercedes Maybach. There's also a big push (and a US DOE Initiative) for developing electrochromic windows to make buildings more efficient.

Ah, electrochromic technology. That's neat stuff, especially the LBL-developed material that uses power to change the tinting, and holds its current tint when the power is removed.

You're right, it's still expensive, but the costs are coming down. We're already seeing electrochromics being used for auto-dimming rearview mirrors on everything from VWs to Buicks, and it's showing up in larger panels on show cars like the Cadillac Imaj and Mercedes Maybach. There's also a big push (and a US DOE Initiative) for developing electrochromic windows to make buildings more efficient.

Here is a rebuttal to this story from the Lawrence Berkeley Labs. They contend that nationally, computers use less than 2% of the power.

For those who just want a quick summary of what a Higgs boson is, jump straight to that page here

For those who just want a quick summary of what a Higgs boson is, jump straight to that page here

There is also an ns version 2 available.

I don't know if this is exactly what you're looking for, but it might help.

and yes, for large numbers of receivers it would be considerably more efficient

look at the SRM protocol and variants for an example.

why dont we use them then? because MBONE penetration is still dismally low...because no one has thought to ask for it. which is strange given the new unicast (wasteful) emphasis on streaming media..the internet had live video and audio more than 8 years ago..with open source tools

even if you have MBONE traffic its still very much a second-class citizen...its not uncommon to see loss rates in excess of 30% due to provider imposed rate limits

There are two sources are, the story in a 99 Forbes article based on this report

These figures have been disputed here , with much lower estimates

POV-Ray is a freeware opensource ray tracer. It is very well supported in the community as there are many different patches that inhance POV-Ray in itself. Not only is this program open source and freeware, it's on every damn operating system I can think of (Very short list hehe) But you'll find it for Windows, Linux, Macs, Amiga, DOS, etc.

There are several others such as, sPatch (kind if dead, but if you can find it you'll love it. It's a modeller that lets you export to POV-Ray or export DXF files.)

Another fun little program which I haven't had the time to play with is Blue Moon Rendering Tools. Read this for more info on BMRT.

Finally there is Radiance. I haven't had time to mess with this program, but it can make stunningly realistic images through the programs usage of realistic lighting. This is only for UNIX users at the moment. There is no known port (that I know about) that is in the works.

Well that's just a list of some 3d goodies. I've wanted to toy around with 3ds Max for a while. Sure I could have warezed it off, but I've given up on that. Now I can play around with a free stripped down version of 3dsmax. Yippie skippy or something.

-PovRayMan

Leptons refer to the "light" particles. There are six leptons known of today, the electron, the muon, the tauon, the electron-neutrino, muon-neutrino, and tauon-neutrino.

Their are six flavors of quarks, the combination of them produces the mesons and hadrons. The mesons are particles like Kaons, they are the middle particles composed of two quarks. Protons and neutrons are examples of hadrons, or heavy particles composed of three quarks.
The 6 flavors of quarks are:
Up
Down
Charm
Strange
Bottom (originally called beauty)
Top (originally called truth)

Each of these quarks have their respective anti-quarks. The proton has the combination of Up Up Down, and the neutron has Up Down Down. Quarks are always found in groups of two or three, the search for a single quark is being conducted but many believe that it will never be found. The last quark to be found was the Top quark, and it was theorised many years before it was actually found. There is a lot of research still be conducted on Top quarks because they are so new to the playing field.

There are a couple other fundemental particles that no one has mentioned. Those are the force particles and the Higgs Boson Field particle.

Both quarks and leptons are considered fermions, which is the classification of any particle with spin 1/2, 3/2, 5/2... The fundemental force particles, the photon, Z, W, gluon, and, assuming it exists, the graviton are considered bosons, or those with integer spin. All of those, except the graviton have spin 1, while the graviton has spin 2. The Higgs Boson is the really wierd one, is theoretically has spin zero, and is the fudge factor for giving particles mass in the standard model (its existance also breaks the standard model because it would technically have infinite mass).

There are theories out there like Supersymmetry which believe that at high energies all fundemental particles and forces have a supersymmetric partner. This supersymmetric partner has +/- 1/2 spin off of the low energy particle/force, so a fermions supersymmetric partner is a boson, and a bosons partner is a fermion. If Supersymmetry is true then we will roughly double the number of elementary particles.

If you want to learn more about particle physics then go to the particle data group site.

Anway, here are some links:

• Heat Island Group
• The Use of NOAA AVHRR Data for Assessment of the Urban Heat Island Effect
• The Urban Environment
• Cities Are Heat Islands

From http://cedr.lbl.gov/CEDRStaff.html:

Allan M. Konrad
email: konrad@sims.berkeley.edu
phone: (510) 486-5458
mail: Mailstop 50B-3238
Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory
Berkeley, CA 94720

From http://www.lbl.gov:

amkonrad@lbl.gov
tel. (510) 486 5458
fax (510) 486 4004

From Yahoo! People Search:

konrad@cmsa.berkeley.edu

Finally, there's also the CEDR admin contact, cedr@lbl.gov, which on the CEDR website lists as directed to Mr Konrad.

A call to AC (510) Directory Assistance yielded no listing for an Allan M Konrad, Allan Konrad, nor for A M Konrad. Maybe others will have better luck.

Later.

From http://cedr.lbl.gov/CEDRStaff.html:

Allan M. Konrad
email: konrad@sims.berkeley.edu
phone: (510) 486-5458
mail: Mailstop 50B-3238
Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory
Berkeley, CA 94720

From http://www.lbl.gov:

amkonrad@lbl.gov
tel. (510) 486 5458
fax (510) 486 4004

From Yahoo! People Search:

konrad@cmsa.berkeley.edu

Finally, there's also the CEDR admin contact, cedr@lbl.gov, which on the CEDR website lists as directed to Mr Konrad.

A call to AC (510) Directory Assistance yielded no listing for an Allan M Konrad, Allan Konrad, nor for A M Konrad. Maybe others will have better luck.

Later.

From http://cedr.lbl.gov/CEDRStaff.html:

Allan M. Konrad
email: konrad@sims.berkeley.edu
phone: (510) 486-5458
mail: Mailstop 50B-3238
Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory
Berkeley, CA 94720

From http://www.lbl.gov:

amkonrad@lbl.gov
tel. (510) 486 5458
fax (510) 486 4004

From Yahoo! People Search:

konrad@cmsa.berkeley.edu

Finally, there's also the CEDR admin contact, cedr@lbl.gov, which on the CEDR website lists as directed to Mr Konrad.

A call to AC (510) Directory Assistance yielded no listing for an Allan M Konrad, Allan Konrad, nor for A M Konrad. Maybe others will have better luck.

Later.

Allan M. Konrad
P.O. Box 4023
Berkeley, CA 94704

Allan M. Konrad
P.O. Box 4023
Berkeley, CA 94704

because he's the webmaster of the web pages at cedr.lbl.gov which include, amoung other things, textbook examples of POST and GET