Slashdot Mirror

This type of combinatorial bio-computing was first done in 1994 by Adelman. He solved a Hamiltonian path problem by evolving a solution in DNA.

More info about bio-computing in general here.

Arrogance and ignorance are a bad combination.

• Mitre is not a 501(c)(3) non-profit nor does it claim to be a charity.

I direct your attention to this page, where it is stated:

• "Both companies will be not-for-profit charities, under the provisions of IRS Section 501(c)(3)."

Mitre was a 501(c)(3) that broke up recently into two 501(c)(3) companies, Mitre and Mitretek.

Being a 501(c)(3) doesn't mean you are a traditional "charity", although you could indeed give tax deductible contributions to Mitre.

Although I can't provide a web reference for CTC, I recently attended a briefing at CTCs headquarters where it was stated plainly that CTC is indeed a 501(c)(3) corporation. In fact, the briefing materials did mention that you can make tax deductible contributions to CTC!

So, perhaps I was right initially. People do routinely libel RMS. You accused him of committing criminal fraud in his incorporation of the FSF as a 501(c)(3) entity.

Gosh, do you need more examples of 501(c)(3) corporations that compete with for-profit corporations? Many Hospitals and some HMOs are 501(c)(3) corporations. There are both 501(c)(3) and for-profit consumer counseling services. I could go on. Your assertion that 501(c)(3) corporations are not allowed to compete with for-profit corporations is absurd.

I suppose the rest of your unfounded conjectures and suppositions are about as reliable.

It's no surprise that RMS, the FSF and the GPL are so negatively represented in the Computer Industry Press when columnists routinely bluster authoritatively on subjects about which they know nothing.

-Jordan Henderson

time's up : September 9th at 7:46:40 a.m. UTC.
Click here for other problem days.

2072, Exact Date TBD: Overflow of Milstar Operating System
If you're not dead by then put you're tin hat on!
.oO0Oo.

We actually know a lot more about this technology already than you might think. The basis of this technology is that these individual molecules are electrically conductive. They are designed to work just as traditional semiconductor devices do, except that they aren't semiconductors, they are molecules. We have to do some slightly different trickery to get the current-voltage behavior that we want, but the same principles of electrical engineering still apply.

If you are curious about the "bigger picture" of molecular electronics, this paper should answer your questions:

"Architecture 's for Molecular Electronic Computers" by James Ellenbogen and J. Chistopher Love

I actually contributed a large portion of the computational results to the above paper. See my post in the next thread for some more information.

I am actually somewhat an expert in this subject as I have been doing research on molecular electronics for about two years ago. I have been to most of the conferences so far on the subject. (All this reseach is being funded by DARPA) Anyway, the significance of this research is that it involves passing electrical current through molecules, not just a two-state system created by structural conformations. Although I do not have the specific details on this recent experiment, I know that the past work of Reed has involved synthesizing a molecular structure and then testing its electrical properties (I-V, C, etc.) by using a scanning tunneling microscope (STM) tip to apply varying voltages across the molecule and then measuring the results.

My guess is that they have fabricated a molecule with a high capacitance that can store charge in a similar fashion as conventional DRAM. However, such a molecule cannot be used in a memory array until a switch (molecular-sized transistor) can be fabricated. That should come soon. However, the above is only speculation on my part.

If you want some good introductory information on molecular electronics in general including both memory, switches, and higher level logic architecures (AND, OR, XOR, etc.) in molecules, download this paper:

"Architecture s for Molecular Electronic Computers" by James Ellenbogen and J. Christopher Love

The research in that paper was performed at the MITRE Corporation, which is also in the process of developing molecular electronic architectures. I contributed a large portion of the computational data to the above paper.

This one kicks ass. Period. cvw.mitre.org
White boards, chat, etc., etc., etc.

I'm not the one who originally responded to you, but a book from mid to late 80's is just too old. The interessant algorithms were found later ; for instance EZW (Embedded Zero Tree - patented ; published in 1993, historically well known) ; and one of the most efficient, SPIHT (Set Partitioning In Hierarchical Trees ; patented ; published in 1996).

Having tried that same wavelet compression engine, we compressed images with it at the highest possible quality. 640x480x8 images came out around 65-69K, with both wavelet and JPEG. The wavelets were of a quality we considered unacceptable. The JPEGs were very difficult to distinguish from the originals (excepting almost flat colour areas and sharp borders
Hmm... 640x480x8 compressed to 65K is a compression ration of 3 (or 9)... This may be the problem ; wavelets specially shine at higher levels of compression (or at least that's the impression I got from the research papers, their results seem to focus in the less-than-1-bpp range). This is why you don't see the blocking artifacts of JPEG ; but at high levels of compression, JPEG is really ugly.

You may also note that the first thing I said in my post was that this research was done more than a year ago. It was, admittedly, only done on the web, but I figured most companies touting such a technology at a level appropriate for multimedia applications for home-users would also be trying to provide us all with browser plug-ins.

Note that since there are many patents, the engines might use some suboptimal variant of wavelet.
If you don't have tested them, the following engines and results are still available:

• AWIC, works on Sun (compile on Linux, but doesn't work as is). Not a sophisticated compressor, but fast. Some results are on the WWW site.
• SPIHT home page. There are no (longer?) source code, but some binaries (for Windows, and some Unices - not Linux). Also there are some examples.
• "GNU Wavelet Image Codec" from a PhD, with program for Linux, and demo images on the page.
• PSNR results, gives numerical results for published algorithms (GWIC and AWIC would be at/near the bottom of the worse algorithms there).