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I did most interesting things with voice mail (including "visual voice mail") and telephones in my Master's thesis in 1984. this predates by a good margin most voice mail systems. for the best quick overview see the video at http://xenia.media.mit.edu/~barons/phone-slave-video.html for full references, including my thesis, see the "Phone Slave" section near the bottom of http://xenia.media.mit.edu/~barons/AronsAnnotatedBibliography.html

It was announced this year that most of the genes of ecoli are now "understood" to the degree that we can now remove the genes we don't understand and still get a working system. It really is amazing how fast biotech is moving..

J. Craig Venter is still the leading force. Next year he plans to publish a full artificial genome for a "minimalist" microbe. This thing can metabolize a feedstock and reproduce. All the genes are well understood. The structure of the proteins they make have been described. How the proteins interact has been studied. There are system schematics.

This really is like an "operating system" for a cell. The kinds of "applications" you will run on it will likely not be anything like the biological processes. Using standardized parts like Biobricks from MIT, you'll be able to hack together multicellular systems for performing some exotic task. Anything from producing wanted biological products to computation.

They just need to reallocate some blocks, MIT has a Class A, 4 Class B's and a host of Class C's. That's enough to get most countries online. HP has TWO class A's thanks to the consumption of Compaq/DEC, ham's have a class A as does Xerox and Halliburton. Combined that makes for 100+ million additional IP's to become available if a couple large organizations simply re-ip. Now I know a large scale re-ip can be painful, but they have years to do it if they start now.

According to the IBM paper html 5 is being done independently of the W3C. "In April 2007, the W3C voted on a proposal to adopt HTML V5 for review" is about as much as W3C has with html 5.

Editor of HTML5 conducted large scale (Google-scale) study of pages and concluded that 93% pages on the net contain syntax errors.

You can't tell browser vendors to stop displaying 93% pages on the web. Creating a new XML-only language won't make it go away either. In fact, W3C already tried that and it failed.

So these "idiots" have already done what you're fuming about, learned that it will not work, and already found a new way of solving this problem. HTML5 defines, in gory details, how to parse tag soup, so every browser can read it the same way.

And countering yours:

• From it's inventor:

  Unlike Vorbis and Speex, legitimate best-in-class codecs, Theora's coding quality is obviously poor relative to contemporary competition. This poor performance stems both from implementation and design deficiencies. As a seperate problem, Theora is also poorly integrated with Ogg due to incomplete multiplexing software and documentation on the Ogg side. Without guidance from Xiph.Org, outside development and implementation of Theora-in-Ogg has been chaotic and of low quality.

• It's safe to say that MPEG4 and it's codecs have been more thoroughly researched than Theora. Remember the FOSS mantra: "many eyes make all bugs shallow"? That applies to lots of things, such as many video producers' legal teams checking this stuff out.
• I absolutely, positively promise you that Youtube serves more video than Wikipedia, and they don't stream Theora.
• You're imagining that Theora is equivalent to H.264, etc. It's not. There's no first-mover advantage to it because it's already been overtaken by, well, pretty much everything.
• There's no standard web image format. By convention, most people use GIF and JPG (with a few PNGs sprinkled about for good measure), but that's just the way it happened to work out. I'm not sure why people have this wrong impression, but it's simply not true. Don't believe me? Read the spec yourself. If that isn't clear enough, W3 explicitly states that

  The HTML specification does not prescribe or limit which graphics format you can use.

I'm a huge FOSS buff, but that doesn't mean I have to blindly love everything pushed out the door as "freedom friendly". I don't have anything against Theora except that it's just not very competitive. I wouldn't want to see it as the official video file format any more than I'd want to see ASCII text as the official document file format; both have clear limitations when compared to their competitors.

The W3 made the right choice. As much as I like the idea of Theora, I'm glad we don't have to be saddled with the reality of it.

Holy crap, not only did they censor the pictures of the mating water striders, but they hid their faces to protect their identities too! I'm glad to see some researches take privacy concerns seriously.

I remember going to a conference presentation by John Bush back in 2005 which detailed the physics behind water striders. His presentation was very good, and the video footage he presented was absolutely fantastic (see here and here). I think the work referenced in the main article isn't quite as groundbreaking as they'd have you believe. There has been quite a lot of work in this area over the last five years.

I remember going to a conference presentation by John Bush back in 2005 which detailed the physics behind water striders. His presentation was very good, and the video footage he presented was absolutely fantastic (see here and here). I think the work referenced in the main article isn't quite as groundbreaking as they'd have you believe. There has been quite a lot of work in this area over the last five years.

I remember going to a conference presentation by John Bush back in 2005 which detailed the physics behind water striders. His presentation was very good, and the video footage he presented was absolutely fantastic (see here and here). I think the work referenced in the main article isn't quite as groundbreaking as they'd have you believe. There has been quite a lot of work in this area over the last five years.

But I believe we've had a theory for this for awhile now. In August of 2003, MIT published some information on the subject. Here's a link:

http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2003/robostrider.html

Here's some relevant content from that link:

MIT researchers report in the Aug. 7 issue of Nature that they now understand how the insects known as water striders skim effortlessly across the surface of ponds and oceans.

And:

Using mathematics, high-speed photography and a variety of flow visualization techniques, Bush, mathematics graduate student David L. Hu and mechanical engineering graduate student Brian Chan uncovered the true way in which water striders walk on water.

As the insect rests on the surface, the tips of its thin legs create miniscule valleys. It sculls the middle set of its three pairs of legs like oars, causing the water behind those legs to propel it forward as the surface of the valley rebounds like a trampoline. Although the rowing motion does create tiny waves, "the waves do not play a significant role in the momentum transfer necessary for propulsion," the researchers wrote. "The momentum transfer is primarily in the form of subsurface vortices."

Nuclear power leaves people's safety in the hands of distant, nameless technicians. People don't like that. They will never like it--at most they may tolerate it or head-in-sand ignore it. While it is possible for a nuclear plant not to kill people, surely you do agree that radioactive material is dangerous.

You get what you pay for.

Compare the salary of this job:
http://web.mit.edu/jobs/listings/02-0001076.html

With this job:
http://web.mit.edu/jobs/listings/02-0000056.html

Nuclear power leaves people's safety in the hands of distant, nameless technicians. People don't like that. They will never like it--at most they may tolerate it or head-in-sand ignore it. While it is possible for a nuclear plant not to kill people, surely you do agree that radioactive material is dangerous.

You get what you pay for.

Compare the salary of this job:
http://web.mit.edu/jobs/listings/02-0001076.html

With this job:
http://web.mit.edu/jobs/listings/02-0000056.html

That still have people living around it.

Yes, but it's still a dead city. 2,800 Sq Km that is too dangerous to live in for any length of time. Why do you insist on minimizing this?

That would have happened even without the accident. Cancer is one of the leading causes of death today, Chernobyl or no Chernobyl. Cancer rates have been worse for several neighboring areas with not particularly clean chemical production facilities.

Forgive me, I assumed that you would understand that I meant "cancers that otherwise would not have happened." Obviously you can't tell the exact cause for most cancers, but, depending on which study you look at, a whole lot more than 60 people have died from that accident. (That study, from the WHO, has a lot more credibility for me than a study that comes from what is in effect a nuclear power lobby group)

She lacks credibility because she ignores, as you also choose to ignore, evidence (and, in the case of the dead zone, blindingly obvious facts) that contradict the point she tries to make.

To answer your question about green baseload replacements, try googling "pumped storage." Proven, simple and efficient. After that, think about (and google) tidal power and hydrogen generation/burning. There are others as well. The world is not as hopeless as the nuclear power industry wants you to believe.

And the cost of nuclear power is FAR more than what you claim. First, did you notice that your link points to a paper from an Australian uranium mining lobby group? Second, that study vastly underestimated the cost of commissioning new plants, which the study pegs at close to $1000/KW, is in reality always at least double that. A decent wikipedia discussion of this exists. See also the MIT study. (which, by the ways, puts the current lifecycle cost of nuke at 6.7 cents/KWh, which is far more then any mainstream power source)

I used to be very much for nuclear power, until I did research with an open mind. The truth is that it's very expensive, has a poor safety track record (and, in case you need something to keep you up at night, think about the dangers and potential for sabotage when we move all this radioactive material around), and is unnecessary. You can talk as much as you want about safeguards to the nuke process, but in the end either government (corrupt) or private industry (more corrupt) has to build and run these things. If we spent the money and energy that is currently going to nuke on developing and building truly green power, we'd all be much better off.

-Daniel

Just take a look at this recent opinion piece to MIT's newspaper. Here's a student who believes that "the free flow of information" (as he says twice) is the ultimate good. Lots of students still don't understand why copyright exists. In fact, some will even try to explain that physical property is the only kind that should have value. It's totally mind-boggling, even when these students are the ones who will be going out and making the next generation of intellectual works.

Even the GPL and all copyleft mechanisms rely on copyright laws. If people want their wishes as content creators to be respected (whether that is to allow some forms of redistribution, like CC-NC, or not, like "All rights reserved"), they need to respect copyright law and not subvert it.

--
Educational microcontroller kits for the digital generation.

Theora video is somewhat based on H.261 and is obsolete in regards with recent developments such as H.264 and VP8 from On2. Can someone knowledgable about Theora make any comment on this assertion?

Monty (the inventor of Vorbis) can comment on it: http://web.mit.edu/xiphmont/Public/theora/demo.html

"Unlike Vorbis and Speex, legitimate best-in-class codecs, Theora's coding quality is obviously poor relative to contemporary competition. This poor performance stems both from implementation and design deficiencies."

I've got a Commodore 64 still in active service here at MIT. It provides the tracking control that keeps this telescope pointed at stars:

http://web.mit.edu/wallace/16Index.html

Though not quite the same as programming your own C64 games, my son uses Scratch to learn programming concepts with fun graphics and sound. He's only 9 years old (younger than I was when I got my first computer) and he's taken off with it. To me, it represents a twist on "the old days" of computing with a modern arsenal of features.

... but I am as confident as I am that the Sun will rise tomorrow that it will be safe from terrorists. After all, we have the children to think about.

July 12, 2005

Copyright © 2005 Michael David Crawford.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivs 2.5 License.

It seems that David Clark, who led the development of the Internet way back in the '70's - did you know there even was a '70's? - wants to create a whole new Internet that will fix many of the problems the current Internet is plagued with. The New Internet's engineers will be much more careful this time around to make sure it works better than the first one did.

I'm afraid, though, that the engineers are not the only ones who will be deciding how our New Internet will work.

If one is able to find any privacy or anonymity in this New Internet, it will be because of some undiscovered security hole, which will be quickly repaired, rather than any kind of conscious design decision. Probably one reason they are accepting proposals before rolling it out is to avoid the sort of accidental security holes that enable pr0n, peer-to-peer filesharing and left-wing political activism.

Microsoft, a leading contributor both to this nation's technology base and to the campaign coffers of its leaders, will embrace this new technology and extend it in such a way that the development and dissemination of Open Source software will be, if not mathematically and physically impossible, at least as intractible as factoring a 2048-bit public key.

Imagine, if you will, Trusted Computing implemented at the router level, in such a way that any packets that go farther than one hop are certified not only to support protocols whose patent licenses are fully paid-up and on file with the legal department in Redmond, but whose content is compliant with the Windows standard. The faintest whisp of a Public License, GNU or otherwise, will result in the dropping not only of the individual packet, not only in the cancellation of the entire file transmission, but, within microseconds, the reporting of the physical location of the offending server to responsible law enforcement personnel. The identities of its rogue administrators will be fetched instantly from the database maintained by the Department of Homeland Security. (You will have to submit fingerprints and DNA samples to obtain a Windows server license, as after all, Internet servers can be used to disseminate explosives r

Just wait for the inevitable leak of their methodology (via stolen laptops, incompetence, etc.) and you just gave real terrorists a way to evade suspicion.

Not needed: we already know how to defeat such systems without the algorithm.

That's the problem with any "model" for suspicious behavior -- once its known, it's easily exploited.

True. Combine that with the ever-popular myth of security-through-obscurity, and you've got a recipe for a government that will continuously try to do something, and continuously fail at it.

Telemaintenance (I think) prior to ~1995 was systems-sensors reporting status of equipment at remote locations.
Telemaintenance (I think) post ~1996 becomes the wearable wireless computer diagnostic tool-set for telemaintence.

http://www.media.mit.edu/
http://www.media.mit.edu/wearables/mithril/
http://www.cacr.caltech.edu/
http://e-science.caltech.edu/

I am an old guy ... I remember .... You can Yahoo/Google "Telemaintenance YYYY" to confirm/learn.

In ~1996 (I think, I remember) the telemaintenance acronym APES [Avatar Populated Experience/Environment Simulations/Synergy] in a CCT [Collaborative Community Technologies] proposal/paper. Considering present social-web environments, games .... Anyway, it is all still very interesting.

For SoA (State of Art), Yahoo/Google ("wearable computer" MIT CalTech hardware software) or ("ubiquitous computing" MIT CalTech hardware software 2007) to confirm/learn.

Nope, I never attended MIT, CalTech ..., I ain't got a college degree, I dropped out of high school in 1969, then too the USMC at 17yo, Honorable Discharge at 19yo ... I always think about where education is going for individuals like me (more of US than there was), I mean, look at POTUS Bush ... he is far less educated then most folks I talk to every day, and VPDryDick has more ability to deliver humor/torture/terror than a POTUS-puppet performance. Oh, I do have a GED and over 160SemHrs in many subjects.

!HAVEFUN!

Telemaintenance (I think) prior to ~1995 was systems-sensors reporting status of equipment at remote locations.
Telemaintenance (I think) post ~1996 becomes the wearable wireless computer diagnostic tool-set for telemaintence.

http://www.media.mit.edu/
http://www.media.mit.edu/wearables/mithril/
http://www.cacr.caltech.edu/
http://e-science.caltech.edu/

I am an old guy ... I remember .... You can Yahoo/Google "Telemaintenance YYYY" to confirm/learn.

In ~1996 (I think, I remember) the telemaintenance acronym APES [Avatar Populated Experience/Environment Simulations/Synergy] in a CCT [Collaborative Community Technologies] proposal/paper. Considering present social-web environments, games .... Anyway, it is all still very interesting.

For SoA (State of Art), Yahoo/Google ("wearable computer" MIT CalTech hardware software) or ("ubiquitous computing" MIT CalTech hardware software 2007) to confirm/learn.

Nope, I never attended MIT, CalTech ..., I ain't got a college degree, I dropped out of high school in 1969, then too the USMC at 17yo, Honorable Discharge at 19yo ... I always think about where education is going for individuals like me (more of US than there was), I mean, look at POTUS Bush ... he is far less educated then most folks I talk to every day, and VPDryDick has more ability to deliver humor/torture/terror than a POTUS-puppet performance. Oh, I do have a GED and over 160SemHrs in many subjects.

!HAVEFUN!

Anyone know what I would need to learn and do in order to get involved on a theoretical or practical level?

Another poster anticipated your reply, so I will keep it short.

There is plenty of demand for low-grade oil. If American oil companies refuse to upgrade their infrastructure, someone else will do it overseas. Canadian oil sands are selling like hotcakes. Somebody's got to refine it, somewhere. In China, for instance.

Dirty oil, just like evil foreign oil, is a fungible commodity.

It's not DOUBLE.
It's 180 dollars.

$399 + $25 shipping buys two. Looks like the price is $199 dollars. Which is within 1% of DOUBLE.

One of the first google hits is this: http://www.techspot.com/news/27662-olpc-price-reaches-200-per-unit.html

Anyhow, just because the press said it was a hundred dollar laptop it doesn't mean it was a main objective, and and exact amount.

Who said it was a hundred dollar laptop? Re-writing history are we?

Localized power generation is definitely the way to go for power generation - along with things like portable pebble bed reactors for higher capacity installations.

No need for big power grids, along with all the inefficiencies and expense they entail.

Only one problem: It has the word "nuclear" in its name so it'll never be accepted by the ignorant hippies, the cold-war-contitioned public or the politicians. Even though coal power is much worse on all levels (but the hippies can hold a lump of coal and feel how natural it is...)

It could be used in places like India or China to prevent them from destroying the planet via fossil fuels. I for one sincerely hope it is. China is already messing about with pebble bed reactors, this is the next logical step for them to reduce their dependence on oil.

Umm... before more people accuse me of killing babies, spreading fud, and being a tool of all kinds, I'll just say that I was, in fact, speaking from memory of college courses. I am not a physicist or engineer -- I am a mathematician.

With that out of the way, figure 3.11 in http://web.mit.edu/16.unified/www/SPRING/propulsion/notes/node25.html shows that theoretical thermal efficiency of an internal combustion engine peaks at 70%. I was trying to be conservative when I wrote the original post, so I said 55%. Yes, there is loss during friction, but I was assuming that the same loss would occur for an electric engine. One of the posts above pointed out that an electric engine has less moving parts so less is lost due to friction. I am willing to accept that on faith at this point.

The 2-3 times number that I came up with was based on the assumption that with electricity there is 2 costs of inefficiency -- first in generation and second in the engine itself. I was also assuming that the cost of "generating" (ie, pumping) oil was nominal. But as someone pointed out in a different post, there is a large cost of delivering oil compared to the cost delivering electricity. And, of course, as everyone points out, I did mess up the efficiency of an electric engine.

So mia culpa on the facts.

Maison Fleury glosses over patent protection too glibly. The Open Source Software community has been aware of the threats from software patents for years, yet has done little more than argue that software should not be patentable. During this time, OSS developers have created countless innovations. Had some of these innovations been patented, software patents would not pose as much of a risk because the OSS community would have powerful leverage. Even the risk from patent trolls would be somewhat mitigated because OSS developers could withhold licenses for key innovations from potential licensors of the patent trolls' technologies, drying up all streams of revenue. OSS would also have greater political leverage because it would be easier for groups like the FSF and the OSI to point to the patents as evidence that OSS spurs innovation, not just high-quality craftsmanship.

Patent protection is known to be expensive. But, a lot of money has been invested in OSS. Some of that money could go to paying the costs of securing and maintaining patent rights for OSS innovations. Furthermore, many law firms encourage pro bono work. The OSS community could probably leverage those free legal hours as easily as it leverages developers' hours. The real obstacle to securing patent protection for OSS is political: OSS developers tend to boycott the entire patent system and hope that it will just go away. Unfortunately, ignoring the value of this form of intellectual property protection is a mistake.

Some of the rights that can be secured through software patents are much better suited to OSS goals than copyrights or trademarks. Some OSS developers try to bend copyright and trademark protection in ways that, if accepted, would be harmful to the OSS community, if not the entire software industry. For example, "[s]ome have claimed that an application program that needs a library for its operation is a derivative work of that library." This line of thinking would make Gimp for Windows a derivative work of the Win32 API, making Gimp a product that is ultimately owned by Microsoft. Using patent rights to exclude use of a library by non-OSS would produce the desired result of encouraging the development of OSS without distorting copyright law in such a self-destructive manner.

There are many, many examples of problems when that balance is disrupted. AIDS on one hand when you don't have enough of an immune response, Lupus when your immune system is too jazzed up. Furthermore, the immune system is incredibly complex and has layers and layers of feedback systems, redundancies, control loops and things we really don't understand well. I suppose AIDS would be a Windows box hooked up to a cable modem. Not long for this world.... Lupus might be what Doctorow is complaining about - too much "immune" activity.

Unlike the Internet, the immune system has had millions of years to evolve to it's present state - and it is still hardly a perfect system. Perhaps some up and coming "Internet Immunologist" might start out with this course to take advantage of those millenniums of experiments

Or perhaps we should just chuck the immune system thing and try to come up with a car analogy.

The Inca apparently didn't use the wheel, and they had no system of writing.

There's a growing trend in math (and maybe other disciplines, for all I know) away from non-free publishing.

Prominent mathematicians have been complaining for years (more links here) about overpriced journals, and entire editorial boards of some journals have resigned in protest (see a list of mass resignations and similar changes here). There are now plenty of entirely free journals in combinatorics, topology, and other fields, and pretty much everything that gets published these days is either available on the author's website or on the arXiv.

So modern research tends to be free, but what about all the books you need to read before you understand this research? Sure, a copy of Rudin may be expensive and there's not much we can do about that, but maybe you can learn from the free analysis course notes at MIT's OCW site. You complain that EGA is out of print, but basically everything Grothendieck wrote is available for free, and you can even get them along with tons of other old French publications through NUMDAM. (There's even a project to transcribe SGA into LaTeX.) Lots of other books are free to download legally (and this is by no means a complete list), even though many are commercially published as well.

Finally, you can complain all you want about university tuition, but I really doubt that free tuition is going to open up mathematics to the masses. Ultimately the very top students who can't afford it are getting scholarships and grants to cover their education (and I do know some people who got free rides at Princeton because they couldn't afford it -- that school is definitely more generous than most), and since most other people couldn't get into Princeton anyway the tuition is never even an issue for them. The best way to make mathematics more accessible is to give everyone access to free textbooks and current research, and the "marxist university professors" you deride have been gradually moving in that direction for years now.

By the way, what do you think has been done to damage the Princeton math department's reputation? Whatever you think Shapiro and Tilghman have done to the university, nobody in their right mind would deny that it's one of the top few in the world and I doubt most people would openly proclaim any one department to be the best anyway.

These guys are advocating setting up a peer-review process for open source software in machine learning. The idea is that this would encourage researchers to spend more time on the software component of the publication, and perhaps produce something that others can use aswell.
The article is in the Journal of Machine Learning Research.

If you read the timeline of that day you'll see that the police did determine pretty quickly that is wasn't a bomb. The main issue during the day was that the streets had to be be closed so investigators could safely access the devices - even if the authorities didn't think it was a bomb, the street would still have to be closed to workers could safely remove them. There was also the issue that a real pipe bomb turned up at New England Medical Center during that ordeal.

As I wrote before, the biggest mistake those guys made was hanging the devices off of public property - even before 9/11, doing something like that is just guaranteed to get the bomb squad out there (and contrary to popular opinion, the device that was first called in to the police had only been there for less than 24 hours). Some of the other devices on storefronts though had been there longer.

IMHO the police reaction in this one instance was reasonable - up to the arrest & prosecution part. There were no mass evacuations, no arrests of Middle-eastern people for being Middle-Eastern. They closed the roads, investigated the devices, and reopened the roads. The arrests and press releases after that though were clearly CYA.

On the other hand, the arrest of Star Simpson was a fucking travesty, and my alma mater's response to the incident ("reckless"? WTF? Is wearing a blinking tie to the airport also reckless?) has ended my participation in their alumni fundraising activities.

Tesla died broke because he spent all his money trying to create a "wireless power distribution" that made no sense. If he had spent more time reading physics and less time building 100+ foot Tesla coils. Were some of his inventions stolen? Undoubtedly. But I think he has only himself to blame for losing all his money.

Except that now MIT has developed wireless power transmission. Guess they need to learn physics as well, oh and stop faking having powered a light bulb wirelessly.

I was a participant in the iGEM competition this year (Davidson/Missouri Western, check out our wiki). Some people are talking about the potential dangers these BioBricks have if they are publically available and easy to use. First, it might be important to clarify what they are. Four restriction enzyme sites on plasmids allow the stitching together of DNA sequences into any desired configuration. The registry contains hundreds (soon to be thousands) of parts that can be put together and dropped into cells. Most of these parts, though, already existed in nature. People have just thought of new ways of using them together.

There are no easy answers to the questions about the dangers of engineering life, but we have to think of the benefits of making science accessible and affordable. If you look at the projects these predominantly undergraduate teams have done, they all have so much creativity and show the great potential for engineering life. Teams have worked on developing cures for diseases (HIV, look at Slovenia's project), and this is only within the first couple years of the competition. Imagine what ten years will bring!

Furthermore, the rapid adoption and development of computers was a huge worry to the United States government. The USSR could develop nuclear weapons much more effectively and quickly with computers (think 8086's) than with pen and paper, and we were trying our hardest to prevent them from getting the technology. And yet we see that the benefits of open science in an open society are tremendous, as the internet has permanently shaped how we live in a positive way. There are risks out there, but science marches on, and we have to instead focus on what we can do to accept change and how to use it to our advantage.

Take a look at this set of videos from MIT's 6.004 Computation Structures class. They basically walk through the design of a simple 32-bit CPU from transistors, to gates, to functional blocks, to a full processor.

Anyway, reading about how hard it was to recreate the source code from the 4004 makes me wonder how easily we could find source code for some apps from even a decade ago. Lots of companies have gone bankrupt / discontinued products / been sold / etc, and we all know that lots of people aren't good about backing up their code. It's neat to go to the Linux Kernel Archives and look at the Historic Linux sources.

--
Educational microcontroller kits for the digital generation.

ian

I just had a look at the source and found (in http://web.mit.edu/multics-history/source/ldd_listings/sss/adjust_cutoff_.list ):

              43 dcl NEVER fixed bin (71) int static options (constant) init /* This date is 12/31/99 2359. */
              44 (1011000110010110011001001110100110111010100100000000b); /* .. if Multics last this long we will have to fix */

Still, Multics was running till the end of October 2000. Are there any updates to the source?

As long as we're playing usage nazi: it should be "MULTICS", because the word's an acronym (according to the official programmer's manual). But "Multics" is used officially, and that trumps ordinary usage nazism.

"UNIX" is the inverse example. It should be "Unix" because it's not an acronym, but rather a play on "Multics". But AT&T decided early on that it was "UNIX".

(it's the complete MR12.5 source dumped at CGI in Calgary in 2000, including the PL/1 compiler)

Looking at random files, I see copyright notices dated 2006, so how can this be a dump from 2000?
See the bottom of http://web.mit.edu/multics-history/source/Multics/tools/install_volume_backup.ec for example.

Do you think that is time for Complete Rewrite of RDBMS as Stonebraker says?

Thank you.

STMs and AFMs are important because they let us see things much smaller than conventional optical microscopes can. Increasing the scan rate by a factor of 1000 might yield new applications, taking better STM movies, and elucidating mechanisms that run that much faster.

The only public data released on the RF STM stuff seems to be this one lonely chart. The gamma variable (on the Y axis) has to do with electrical reflections that come about because of impedance mismatches on transmission lines. For more information, take a look at these lecture notes (2.5MB PDF) which start from voltage and current, and end with the gamma plane.

In conventional (non-RF) STM, the tunneling current is exponentially related to the distance above the surface. This is a part of why control systems for STMs, which are supposed to keep the tip hovering a few nanometers or less above the surface, are challenging to get right. In general, the surface and scanning tip are kept at a constant bias voltage of a few volts, and there is a feedback loop which attempts to maintain a constant current (and thus constant height over the sample) by adjusting the displacement of the tip.

In this system, it appears that they've found that the small-signal impedance of the tunneling junction varies significantly enough to make a large impact on the reflection coefficient, and (more importantly) that that's a good way to go.

Considering they've released so little technical data, there's only one really obvious savings here to me: noise. If you're an electrical engineer, you'll know that most devices (and thus most circuits) have noise at all frequencies, but that things get particularly bad for low frequencies around DC. This is often called 1/f noise, and if you take f to zero (DC), you've clearly got a problem! Additionally, you get other nasty effects at DC, like drift related to temperature, etc, which tend to be much worse than at high frequencies. By designing their system to work with small signals at high frequencies, they're able to avoid 1/f noise yet still make the height measurement they want. Pretty smart.

--
NerdKits: Educational microcontroller kits for the digital generation.

One and all, you really need to check out world leaders, such as MIT :-)

Over 1,700 university levels courses in many fields, free of charge! :-)
OpenCourseWare:

http://ocw.mit.edu/OcwWeb/web/home/home/index.htm

The main open-access journals in my field don't require author payment at all. They're run through a combination of volunteer labor, frugality, and institutional or professional-society sponsorship. And they're among the top journals in their areas, maybe even the top journals now: JAIR and JMLR. There are a lot of top-tier open-access, no-publication-fee statistics journals as well. Seems to vary by area.

In the world of computer science, statistics, and related areas, many of us have put our volunteer effort where our ideology is and actually do run top journals in the field, completely for free. Some generous assistance is provided by sponsoring institutions in most cases, which isn't hard to get if you just ask, as many institutions are keen to get their name associated with a journal.

Exhibit A
Exhibit B
Exhibit C
etc.

In fact, you can just take a look at this directory and scan for the entries that say "Publication fee: no"---hundreds of them.

The main journal in my field has a similar model: open access, no fees for either publication or reading. Oh, and authors retain full copyright. I guess these examples are all impossible eh?

It's true; the building is broken by design. I do work in the Stata Center, and it is as bad as everyone says it is.

All these wonderful posts make me want to resurrect the stata-haters mailing list that somebody set up when we first moved in. Maybe at this point we could get some of the higher up MIT executives to join, now that they've seen the light and started hating the building along with us poor souls who have to try to work in it.

noah

That story is actually attributed to the famous G.E. Electrical Engineer Charles Steinmetz, and the story was told by Charles Vest as part of the 1999 MIT commencement address.

I can't guarantee that the story is true, but that's where it's from.