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I'm using an Android phone with Sprint. The Sprint Touch/HTC Vogue runs Android like a champ.

http://cs-alb-pc3.massey.ac.nz/vogue/

You can get Android running on a bunch of the HTC phones . Not sure if it works well enough to use full time...

Tuataras are similarly unchanging throughout the years, but they're evolving faster than most other animals.

Whoa. What a strange experience. I started a reply to your post that went, "By Jove! You are right! Now where will I get airfare to New Zealand?", but before I could click "Submit" I was transported to this room full of monitors with this guy staring me in the face. He said, "I am the Architect. I created the Matrix. I've been waiting for you. You have many questions, and although the process has altered your consciousness, you remain irrevocably human. Ergo, some of my answers you will understand, and some of them you will not. Concordantly, while your first question may be the most pertinent, you may or may not realize it is also the most irrelevant." He went on like this for some time until I gave him the finger and walked out the door. Strangely, I was back at my desk, my cursor hovering over "submit."

Brian Whitworth, the author of the paper, is a senior lecturer in information technology at Massey University in New Zealand.

http://www.massey.ac.nz/~wwiims/people/b.whitworth/

Here are his degrees: BSc (Maths), BA (Psych), MA (Hons), IS Doctorate
Masters Thesis: Brian Systems and the Concept of Self
PhD Thesis: Generating Group Agreement in Cooperative Computer Mediated Groups

He also suggests that our universe could be running on a "three-dimensional space-time screen", which doesn't make any sense given that space-time is 4 dimensional. The verbiage on page 2 of his paper continues to make it clear that besides not having any formal training in physics, he seems to only have a layperson's understanding of the modern physical concepts that would be needed to begin to make a coherent argument on this topic. The idea isn't total crap, but this guy does not seem qualified to champion it.

It is suggested that whether the world is an objective reality or a virtual reality is a matter for science to resolve.

This article argues that the idea that our physical world is a virtual reality, which is normally a topic of science fiction, religion or philosophy, should be considered as a possible theory of physics. Whether this is true or not, the reader is asked to keep an open mind, as one has to at least consider a theory to reject it. ... The paper asks if a world that behaves just like the world we live in could arise from a VR simulation, and whether physical data from this world supports (or denies) this possibility. The first considers if VR theory is logically possible, and the second if it explains known facts better than other theories.

a VR processor cannot logically exist within the virtual reality its processing creates. It is logically impossible for a processor to create itself because the virtual world creation could not start if a processor did not initially exist outside it.

http://masseynews.massey.ac.nz/2003/press_releases/13_05_03e.html

clicky here

Hi, David here, when was that?

When I was working on the cluster during the first 3 months of 2003, and setting up various parts of the software ( a few custom code alterations needed to be made to PBS, as it had a very serious bug that stopped the system from functioning properly at all ), I was sure that there was a bit more than just single node work occurring. You are correct about suspending a node etc, but then again you could also choose a node or node set to run jobs on ( and given the price to run jobs on the cluster it really should not have been too much of an issue unless 16 people had 4 node jobs running at once ). Personally just adding the job to the queue would be sensible, as it would allow the job to run when a free node, or node set, was available.

Check http://helix.massey.ac.nz/pbs.html As it gives a good overview of how the scheduling system works.

Additionally its a 65 Node system, and has since been superseded by Helix 2, much like the Sisters cluster was.

Naturally this will have changed over the last 4 years, but I'm pretty sure it's not quite as bad as described.

Regards,
David Keenleyside B.Sc. CS & IS

I've used a 64 node Beowulf cluster on occasion. The queue was generally full of single-node jobs and multi-node jobs hardly ever ran. There really is no good way of scheduling in this environment without the ability to suspend a job on one node and later resume it on another. So far as I know, our scheduling software was not capable of this. (Fortunately, I was just submitting single node jobs.)

Starting with the information in the summary, I spent a few minutes web searching. "bproc" appears not to be capable of this: it just means that your primary node can "see" the processes running on other nodes, so you can use 'ps', 'kill' etc. on them. However OpenSSI has "process migration". Is this the ability to move processes from one node to another?

To achieve a goal of getting to 10% of PV power in one year, you'd need to put in 10% * 10 = 100% of current electrical power. That would require first doubling existing electrical generation capacity. Even a 2% PV goal requires 20% of current generation capacity which is still way too high (and 2% per year is hardly going to make any significant inroads - it would not even address growth).

Clearly PV will only ever work with a huge mindshift that goes away from curent silicon-based strategies to a new silicon-based strategy, or radically different strategy, with a far better payback. There are alternatives, but they lack funding and support eg. http://masseynews.massey.ac.nz/2007/Press_Releases /04-04-07.html This is not the only such different approach - there have been quite a few through the years.

The major labs are still focussed on silicon and high performance and fighting over conversion efficiency rather than $/W which is the important measurement for general usage. Until $/W is targetted as a primaray goal, these technologies will get nowhere useful.

Perhaps it is telling that many major oil companies (BP, Shell and others), with a vested interest in preserving the status quo, are directing a significant portion of the industry research.

Many improvements in efficiency are through more expensive processing etc resulting in more expensive PV. The World Solar Race favours the team with the best efficiency, even if that costs hundreds of thousands of dollars. Much of the PV research is geared towards efficiency and this is the measure by which they compete (eg. http://www.boeing.com/ids/news/2006/q4/061206b_nr. html).

This focus is detremental from a practical position of solving the energy crisis. While the big research dollars are focussed on efficiency we will continue to have PV that has useless $/W. It is far more important to ignore efficiency and focus on $/W.

I won't use PV if it costs me $20,000 to fit a PV array. If I could fit a $2000 PV array we'd be talking. So what if that takes up 50 square metres of roof space instead of 5? Cheap stuff could even be made into roofing tiles. It is reducing the $/W that makes PV practical.

It is a real shame that Boeing will spend huge dollars to inflate their egos with high efficiency while more practical programs like http://masseynews.massey.ac.nz/2007/Press_Releases /04-04-07.html struggle.

As humans brains develop, they go through many developmental phases along the way. Piaget came up with a developmental stage theory. The most important thing to remember is that primary kids are in the "Concrete Operational Stage" and can do well with concrete ideas like numbers, colors, linear procedures, and facts. However, kids at this age (especially boys, who typically develop slower than girls) can not handle abstract concepts. An abstract concept would be something like the equation 'X + Y = 4' or 'if x+5 > y+10 then'. As long as your programming languages don't get too abstract the kids should be able to process it fine. I find that HTML doesn't really process in kids minds until 7th or 8th grade.

Also, you have to apply the 80/20 rule. We are all different and our brains develop differently. But Piaget's theory applies to 80% of kids. I like to use the Lego Mindstorms Robots. The robotics invention system supports big blocks e.g "Turn Left" or small blocks e.g. "Turn on Motor A, Turn off Motor B, Wait 5 Secs, Turn on Motor B". The Legos give kids the change to try to work with abstract problems, but they can drop back to the concrete stage very easily by using the cause and effect process.

I believe that someone mentioned Logo. That is a great 'cause and effect' type of programming language in which kids can create a small abstract program and then see concrete results. Allowing the young brains to move back and forth easily between concrete and abstract is the key to teaching programming at this age.

Hope that helped.

Military justice is one of the very few examples of law which has extra territorial effect. This is a common feature in the military justice system in all countries. However soemtimes where a law has been breached on the soil of a host nation, service members might be subject to the laws of that host nation. It depends if there is an 'agreement' withthat host or not.

Extra territorial effect is required becauce commanders need a tool to keep their members disciplined and obedient to the chain of command at all times. I know this because I am currently studying military law

Perhaps this will be useful.
And now you can also use vi on your ipod ;-)
I wonder if I could get emacs to work...

I'm unclear as to why they chose GPS. Surely the same result could be achieved used a terrestrial or local area wireless sensor system set up around the track.

The article mentions the problem of speeds differing depending on the start gate, and improved accuracy of GPS is within "a few metres" which is accurate enough. "Good enough" is a long-standing principle in technology deployments but it's not very clear from the article what specific advantage GPS has over other systems beyond the obvious.

This link to the Equine Research New Zealand project at Massey University is slim on details but they may post more info once they get a good Slashdotting.

The system sounds similar to this 2002 Kentucky GPS horse tracking system.

Here's a photograph at the Massey Uni. site.

Massey university just announced that it is going to build a 128 node beowulf cluster (no imagination necessary!). Auckland University have recently got an IBM Regatta class machine.

Just a (quite impressive) stone's throw away from Weta is NIWA's Cray T3E
bash-2.03$ uname -a
sn6908 kupe 2.0.5.51 unicosmk CRAY T3E

I love running that uname :-)

However due to lack of funding, the university didn't have any Win2k installs, so I was told to aim to have a Haskell to Java converter.

It proved to be impossibly large for a 4th year project, but I got a working framework, and a skeletal converter (i.e. it compiles simple single file programs).

I'm still waiting on the marking of it (supervisor problems). However nhc98 claims to be open source, which I believe would mean that my one would also have to be so as well. If I can get the university to put what I've done up on a web page I'll do so, and notify those at nhc98 so they can do what they want with it.

I have no idea what M$ are doing with it now (if anything at all) - as they went through my supervisor, and I was only interested in getting it done as a project.

However due to lack of funding, the university didn't have any Win2k installs, so I was told to aim to have a Haskell to Java converter.

It proved to be impossibly large for a 4th year project, but I got a working framework, and a skeletal converter (i.e. it compiles simple single file programs).

I'm still waiting on the marking of it (supervisor problems). However nhc98 claims to be open source, which I believe would mean that my one would also have to be so as well. If I can get the university to put what I've done up on a web page I'll do so, and notify those at nhc98 so they can do what they want with it.

I have no idea what M$ are doing with it now (if anything at all) - as they went through my supervisor, and I was only interested in getting it done as a project.