Domain: princeton.edu
Stories and comments across the archive that link to princeton.edu.
Comments · 1,515
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Re:A monopoly can be more than one companydictionary...
What dictionaries say not really what's important. What is important is how much opportunity firms have to increases prices (above cost of producing whatever they sell) without losing customers. The more firms there are, the less opportunity each firm has to do this. But even with more than one firm, there is still some opportunity.
Free-market economic theory would indicate that CEOs would never do this
Not necessarily. You can look at it as a repeated prisoners dilemma, which case, your best strategy is usually cooperating (i.e. keeping prices high). Try for yourself here.
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Re:Astronomy Picture of the Day
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too farPlease Mr. Katz,
Read real information like this
This information is from a university expert and trial witness.
It would improve your perspective.Johan.
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Re:Gravity.....
...except, of course, for quintessence . Current research seems to indicate that this is actually the strongest force at the largest scales.
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Re:prisoner's dilemna...(information)
I'm not sure this is pro-cooperative. Oh well.
If you know you will be playing only one round, it is indeed not pro-cooperation.
The game becomes much more interesting when you play the game over and over with the same partner. Then cooperation can pay off.
There is a a vast literature on the topic; the original work on the iterated prisoner's dilemma was done by Robert Axelrod at the Univeristy of Michigan. He has also has a web site for his book The Complexity of Cooperation: Agent-Based Models of Competition and Collaboration.
For those interested in the evolution of social behavior, this stuff is fascinating. And it lends itself to all sorts of cool simulations, so there's a high geek enjoyment factor in it all. -
CultivationThe rites of spring have traditionally been positive sum games dating from the neolithic and the associated creative activities. Anything you can do to get kids involved with gardening, planting cultivation and harvesting can be fun, educational and give them no-nonsense positive-sum skills.
WARNING: The most important positive-sum group activity where multiple clans are involved is detection and exclusion of defectors in the sense of the prisoner's dilemma. Otherwise you will get cycles where people come together, cooperate, build up a wonderful environment and then attract parasites who multiply until your little society collapses and everything has to start over. This is very much like the real life cycles of civilizations.
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from my experience
If you use zlib's replacements for fread, fseek, etc. things will be VERY slow. I tried this aproach with WordNet databases and it sucked. Well, WordNet does a lot of seeks, but still.
Teaching the Berkeley DB functions to use libz will be extremely painful too. I'd say, your best bet would be to try the new Linux's filesystem extension, mentioned already by someone else. But I'm not sure how efficient it is with respect to reading/uncompressing/compressing back things, which are read and/or mmaped. In any case, you will not be modifying any code -- just the file's attribute.
I'm afraid, you'll defeat most of the DB's tricks, that know about the sector size and other file-system details.
You could also just uncompress the file into memory and then give it to the database functions, but then you loose the automatic syncronization with the file on the filesystem, which for many is the main reason of using Berkley DB (or gdbm) in the first place.
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Re:Intel IXP1200 already does this (kinda)The IXP1200 has a single StrongARM core running at 166 MHz. There are 6 additional "microengines," each with 4 hardware threads. The microengines do not run the same machine code as the SA core, though; they use a custom machine language with support for asynchronous memory I/O. To me, they are like 6 very fancy and very programmable DMA controllers.
The chip does very well switching packets because hardware threads let it use the fast bus very efficiently. One hardware thread can schedule a memory access and go to sleep, while other threads run. Once the memory access completes, the thread which scheduled it continues.
There is a good technical report describing the performance of this architecture as a network processor at http://www.cs.princeton.edu/nsg/papers/ixp.html
~
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Re:Greenpeace LiesShell didn't kill Ken Saro-Wiwa. The Nigerian GOVERNMENT killed Ken Saro-Wiwa,...
How do you think the Nigerian government stays in power?
Check out this article.
The Nigerian government wouldn't stay in power if it wasn't for the revenue generated by shell. Shell may say one thing publicly, but their actions reveal where their best interests lie. It is in Shell's best interest to squelch protesters and prop up the Nigerian government, because it keeps the oil flowing. If you think a company like Shell isn't going to act in their best interests than you're crazy. The best that we can do as consumers of Shell is to raise a big enough stink. We need to shift Shell's best interests away from pumping oil out of Nigeria to recoving its image. Shell is not stupid, they relize that their image affects their bottom line.
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Re:Kernighan is retiring as well
He's "retiring" from Bell Labs, but he's joining the faculty of Princeton as a Full Professor - not quite leaving the field. See http://www.cs.princeton.edu/~bwk/
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SDMI will fail--so sorryThe most important point was made by the Princton team in their FAQs:
All hacks to SDMI attempted so far have been made without access to the watermarking algorithm. If SDMI is ever released to the public, however, someone will reverse engineer the algorithm--and post it on the web for all to see. As soon as that happens, SDMI will almost certainly be cracked more or less completely. The current contest wasn't at all close to a real-world test.
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DMCA == an "ignorance is bliss" approach
The group's portrayal of DMCA is interesting. From their FAQ:
We think the DMCA, by criminalizing some kinds of study of important technologies, represents an "ignorance is bliss" approach to technological copyright enforcement, which will not work in the long run. We lobbied against certain aspects of the DMCA while it was before Congress, and we still consider it to be a seriously flawed law.
If so many well-reputed groups lobbied against the law without any effect whatsoever, it really brings home how the legislature is already in the pockets of the corporations today. It's not a worry for the future. It's already with us now. -
Looks like the good guys won this timeFollowing are some quotes from the FAQs published by the researchers who broke the SDMI.
"We believe their [SDMI's] general security model is inherently vulnerable to a number of attacks no matter how sophisticated their watermarking technologies become. We can never say for certain, but we are confident that we can continue to develop attacks like we have if SDMI updates their technologies."
"The underlying problem that SDMI is trying to solve, that of protecting content from a hostile platform while allowing the platform to "play" the content, is inherent[ly] very difficult, both in theory and in practice. To overhaul their system, SDMI may well have to overhaul their business model."
"We would be deeply impressed if SDMI or anyone else developed a secure system for piracy prevention given the requirements of music listeners."
In other words, they believe that the whole idea behind SDMI is bound to fail technically.
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Karma whorish linkFor those of you too lazy to read the article for more links: FAQ for research group that is playing with SDMI.
+2 is high enough, thank you.
I'm awake cause I can't sleep. This sux, tomorrow is going to be a long day.
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Not exactly LCDs, but huge and very scalable...Take a look at Princeton's huge hi-res display wall: http://www.cs.princeton.edu/omnimedia/. Seems like this should transfer to LCDs.
Of course, I just want a 12ft x 9ft display wall in my living room -- now THAT would be worth 20K.
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irony, silvery and goldy
Indeed Baldricks definition of Irony is certainly better than Alannis Morrisette's.
It isn't just the net that is to blame, maybe I'm mistaken but generally the term seems to be accepted in the US as meaning coincidental.
Orv. -
Re:But what's the point?
po_boy wrote: I refuse to believe that in the few thousand years since humans started being "civilized" that we have caused more animal species to become extinct than in the few million years before that. Unless species are becoming extinct at several thousand times the previous rates of extinctions, this is pretty much impossible.
well, If you "refuse to believe" then you are mindlessly dogmatic and debate with you is pointless... but, on the offchance that you were just being melodramatic when you employed that damning phrase, I'll present an argument here. Even if you refuse to believe what you don't like to hear, others who have been misled by your dogma may ne more open minded.
Widley accepted figures indicate that current rates of extinction are 100 times the "natural" rate and climbing to something between 1,000 and 10,000 times the natural rate of extinction. According to an article in the Washington Post:
"The speed at which species are being lost is much faster than any we've seen in the past -- including those [extinctions] related to meteor collisions," said Daniel Simberloff, a University of Tennessee ecologist and prominent expert in biological diversity who participated in the museum's survey. [Note: the last mass extinction caused by a meteor collision was that of the dinosaurs, 65 million years ago.]
Most of his peers apparently agree. Nearly seven out of 10 of the biologists polled said they believed a "mass extinction" was underway, and an equal number predicted that up to one-fifth of all living species could disappear within 30 years. Nearly all attributed the losses to human activity, especially the destruction of plant and animal habitats.Other sources of depressing news you won't want to believe:
According to scientists at the American Museum of Natural History:"This mass extinction is the fastest in Earth's 4.5-billion-year history and, unlike prior extinctions, is mainly the result of human activity and not of natural phenomena." The same scientists note that "In strong contrast to the fears expressed by scientists, the general public is relatively unaware of the loss of species and the threats that it poses." I guess they've been talking to po_boy...
http://www.greenpeace.org/majordomo/index-press-r
e leases/1997/msg00184.htmlhttp://beacon-www. asa
.utk.edu/issues/v78/n2/asteroids.2n.htmlhttp://www.mapcruzin.com/ scr uztri/docs/news0922991.htm
http://www.well.com/user/davidu/ fie ldguide.html
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5100 more years?There's a Princeton astrophysicist, Richard Gott III, who predicts civilization will last somewhere between 5100 and 7.8 million more years. His argument is based on the idea that there's nothing "special" about our location in time. That is, he assumes that it's pretty unlikely we're either at the dawn or end of our existence, but more likely somewhere in between. From this assumption, he arrives at fuzzy timeframes for the age of our civilization. I'm not sure the initial assumption holds water, but then again, I'm no Princeton astrophysics professor.
There's been quite few things written about him and his theory, but at the moment, the only one I can find is this article, which summarizes most of his arguments.
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Is everything news?
When microsoft is involved even small news items gets blown up to be 1 of the 10 headlines of the day.
Is this really news?
Please answer that question after reading for example the hard legal stuff from a computer scientist who was an expert whitness in the trial.Just my 2 eurocents,
Johan -
Re:population density [getting a little OT... ]Look, I started to answer your post in detail, but realized i'd be putting up 5000 words just to disagree with nearly everything that you said.
The root of the problem is that farming is a system of producing commodities for the international markets, not of producing food for communities.
Fortunately, at least some Americans have a very good idea of what needs to be done, and we're not talking "idealistic Amish community" here.
- Derwen -
The politics of search enginesThese researchers at Princeton have written a cool report on the politics of search engines (unfortunately just an abstract, although I've read the entire article).
Even "good" search methods have embedded social values. For example, Google's backlinking methodology tends to reinforce traditional power structures since heavily commercial sites tend to link to each other a lot.
Search engines are in the business of controlling what you become aware of. There are lots of things that become interesting just because lots of other people are also aware of it (e.g., Survivor, Big Brother, etc.).
Search Engines don't really try to maximize relevancy; they try to be relevant enough so that you don't leave. That's why Yahoo uses google search results as a placeholder, but that's just to create more space to promote its own stuff.
Proprietary SE techniques are a bad thing(tm) from the perspective they obscure the embedded social values in their design.
Yes, this is lots of random thoughts but I think this is an important topic.
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Sort of...It's got little to do with moving off the planet, but the Repository for Germinal Choice is a DNA repository. They're the "genius sperm bank" out in California that was the focus of a lot of controversy when they began years ago. Forget germ-line engineering, they're improving folks the old fashioned way... breeding them with Nobel Prize laureates and Olympic champions.
I know this because they keep hassling me for my sperm.
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Re:whats up with the no keyboard fetish?
i think in the future we'll use our minds to control the computers... like this cartoon from Real Life Comics. How productive would it be to write a paper, or code, directly from your head to the page nothing lost in the translation. Aside from the privacy issues (and the technology issues despite what the people at Princeton's Engineering Anomalies Research would tell you).
thats just my opinion, i could be wrong. -
Academic perspective
There is a small, but growing, collection of historians of science and technology exploring the history of computing/computer technology (I'm just halfway through my master's program here: The Institute for the History and Philosophy of Science and Technology at the University of Toronto. There's only a couple of us doing computers, but it's a start
:)You might want to start at the library reading the Annals of the History of Computing. Off the top of my head, Michael Mahoney (who started in the History of Mathematics) has done a lot.
Historians of computing have looked at Babbage, Turing, and Wozniak, but you can start just about anywhere. The field has barely been touched - there are plenty of unexplored areas. And the great thing about the history of technology is that everybody can help: from engineers to economists.
Myself, as a recent University of Waterloo CompSci grad, I thought I'd return to my roots, and write my MA thesis about the early computer science program there. In particular, I'm thinking about looking at the birth of WatFor and the related successes achieved in undergraduate education. Hint: if you have a story to tell about Watfor, email me!
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The most useful project I ever did
...was to write a unix shell. That may not sound so exciting but it was a helluva change from all the math problems we got. Mine wasn't too complicated - piping, redirection, job control but not scripting - and totalled about 1700 lines of not-so-streamlined code (although it can be done in considerably fewer lines).
The nice thing about this project is that it teaches the gritty parts of c (system calls and such) but can be easily broken up into smaller parts (parsing, piping control, job structures) that aren't so hard to understand by themselves. This aspect makes it good for a group to work on as well. Just be sure you have some expendable developement machines. FOR loops, fork(), and Murphy's Law don't mix too well. (our server crashed few times right before the deadline from infinite forking loops).
This may sound like dull systems programming but its the only project that kept me interested the whole semester because of the challenge. -
Re:New Mexico SuperComputer Challenge
Wow, someone who remembers the Challenge...
Disclaimer: I'm the goofy wonk who wrote the original crypto code project some time ago...
A good place to look for information about potential projects for your class is the prior years' archive. http://www.challenge.nm.org/Archive/
Some of the projects have HTML reports -- let your students read those and see what others have done and it will probably spawn a few ideas for stuff to do.
An alternate solution is to browse through a few CS pages and see what's going on in the introductory CS classes. For quite a few good ideas, check out the assignments for Princeton's infamous COS126 assignments.
-Chris
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Re:Interesting
I really don't care for their choices at all. A lot of them are more like general approaches than algorthms, and I'm not at all sure they are the most influential. I think they are supposed to be "the cleverest of the common fancy methods"
Simple algorithms for common problems are much more widely used, and have far more impact and influence, but try telling *them* that!
I hope these links help. (Warning: many are technical) If anyone has personal favorites that are less dry than many of these, please post!.
10. 1987: Fast Multipole Method. A breakthrough in dealing with the complexity of n-body calculations, applied in problems ranging from celestial mechanics to protein folding. [Overview] [A math/visual approach]
9. 1977: Integer Relation Detection. A fast method for spotting simple equations satisfied by collections of seemingly unrelated numbers. [Nice article with links]
8. 1965: Fast Fourier Transform. Perhaps the most ubiquitous algorithm in use today, it breaks down waveforms (like sound) into periodic components. Everyone knows this one (or should) [Part II of my personal favorite FFT and wavelet tutorial]
7. 1962: Quicksort Algorithms for Sorting. For the efficient handling of large databases. [Definition][Basic Method][Mathworld][More technical explanation][A lecture with animations and simulations]
6. 1959: QR Algorithm for Computing Eigenvalues. Another crucial matrix operation made swift and practical. [Math] [Algorithm
5. 1957: The Fortran Optimizing Compiler. Turns high-level code into efficient computer-readable code. (pretty much self-explanatory) [History and lots of info]
4. 1951: The Decompositional Approach to Matrix Computations. A suite of techniques for numerical linear algebra. [matrix decomposition theorem] [Strategies]
3. 1950: Krylov Subspace Iteration Method. A technique for rapidly solving the linear equations that abound in scientific computation. [History] [various Krylov subspace iterative methods]
2. 1947: Simplex Method for Linear Programming. An elegant solution to a common problem in planning and decision-making. [English} [Explanation with Java simulator] [An interactive teaching tool
1. 1946: The Metropolis Algorithm for Monte Carlo. Through the use of random processes, this algorithm offers an efficient way to stumble toward answers to problems that are too complicated to solve exactly. [English] [Code and Math] [Math explained] -
home taping vs. napster
Have you read the 1989 OTA Report on home taping, which concluded that so-called "bootlegging" was no threat to music industry profits, and that it in fact served as free advertising? It turned out that the users making tapes illegally were also both more likely to buy more music themselves and more likely to encourage other fans to do so. While obviously the technology has improved significantly since 1989, aren't we really dealing with the same issues? After all, CD sales are way up, despite Napster. And you yourselves have credited bootleg tapes with your own popularity - why are you seeking to put napster out of business and deny other artists similar outlets?
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Re:Get OFF it, Jon!How interesting that someone with this perspective has a link to junkbuster in his sig.... one might just as well say, by using junkbuster you are literally stealing from the advertisers, and you are taking away the right of the web page owner to control the way in which his/her page is viewed. And who knows how much money is lost that you might have spent on the items advertised in the banner ads you missed reading....
You hate double standards? Why is it ok for you to deprive the poor helpless advertiser of the revenue they need to keep their cupboards stocked with Ramen noodles, but it is not ok to similarly deprive poor crybaby Lars of the revenue he might have had if you bought his crappy CD instead of downloading it?
You will say, the difference is legality - distributing illegal mp3s is illegal whereas junkbuster is not yet illegal. Frankly, if the advertisers had their way, they would make it illegal, just like the RIAA and other corporate captains of consciousness have had their way with the laws for years (trading cassette tapes is illegal, even though the RIAA has not gone after cassettes since the OTA answered their arguments in this study back in 1989). I mentioned this before - all the arguments are the same; the only change is the technology. Record companies (and, more importantly, artists) should embrace the implications of the new technologies and come up with a business model that allows them to profit off the new medium. This excellent article in Red Herring suggests just that, if anyone wants to read something more articulate than my own words. (heh - but if you want more of my own ranting, read more on nofuncharlie
You're right that Metallica is just telling Napster to enforce their own rules by handing them 300000 names. But it's notable that they only did that after they started the lawsuit. Which suggests the lawsuit was filed in bad faith and that their real goal was extortion of money from Napster, Inc. rather than "protecting intellectual property." (By the way, Lars claimed in the Metallica chat that their goal was to put Napster Inc. out of business). And I suspect that their real goal in "naming names" is intimidation of their fans rather than any desire to see "justice" done.
Someone else pointed out that trying to stop "piracy" by attacking Napster is like trying to soak up the ocean with a sponge. These millionaires are whining because they see that their unfettered monopoly over artists and consumers is soon coming to an end. The Commodore says, tough luck: evolve or die.
Commodore Sloat
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Re:Wow...
Forget him then. The only decent thing he's done recently is sign Eminem. Read my coverage of this on nofuncharlie here and here. This is not about "piracy" at all in my mind. Sure there are plenty people downloading copyrighted music out there, but there are also plenty of people taping stuff off the radio. CD sales are up despite napster and despite CD-R availability, and studies have shown that the people who copy music are also more likely the people buying more records. They also spread the news of new music to their friends who also buy more records. And mp3 may be better quality than tape but it ain't that great. This isn't about piracy at all - it's about an industry that is afraid to change with the times. Get over yourself, Dre, and take a hint from your buddy Chuck D: the reason the industry is scared of napster is because it gives small unknown artists the power of distribution without having their work extorted by music industry gatekeepers!
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Re:PEAR is a long-running joke at Princeton
Well, I did. I read their book. As a reader of Skeptical Inquirer, it dismayed me that there wasn't more controversy over this singular demonstration of the paranormal. It's no joke and they've gone to extremes to do rigorous science. However, the effect they found is so minute, that I decided it was indistinguishable from experimental artifact. Check it out at PEAR . IMHO there is a fundamental problem with these ideas: the presumption that there is some link between our mental representations of reality and reality itself. "willing" sub-atomic particles into particular states just don't happen folks... ...actually examined that data at any length... -
PEAR-anormal research?
Looking over the Princeton PEAR site, the research they describe there strikes me as very similar to that which friends of mine have participated in at the Rhine Research Center in Durham, North Carolina. The PEAR folks describe their work in the terminology of science and quantum mechanics. The Rhine folks are just call it psychokinesis.
Dr. J.B. Rhine started his research into paranormal phenomena at Duke University in the 1920s. Rhine's research applied scientific methods to the question of whether ESP and psychokinesis did in fact exist -- he coined the term "extrasensory perception" or "ESP" -- and tried to find out how such things worked. Eventually Duke got concerned about their public image and, in the early 60s, ran Rhine out of the University. Unperturbed, he moved his lab to a building directly across the street from Duke (where it remains to this day). His institute is continuing the research long after Rhine's death.
I don't begrudge continued academic research into "paranormal" phenomena -- in fact, I think mainstream-style research methods are the only way to go when examining whether ESP and psychokinesis exist. But I do find it ironic and humorous that image-conscious Duke University threw J.D. Rhine out for doing the same work which continues -- in another guise -- under the official sanction and aegis of Princeton University. (Dookies know another shade of irony, that the architecture of Duke's main campus was modeled after Princeton.)
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Very close to noise
If you read the papers on the PEAR site, you find that the best results they get are about 1e-4 from random, i.e. for random guessing, 10,000 out of 20,000 guesses would be right, but they claim to observe about 10,001 being right. That's awfully close to noise.
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Missed the reference
I refer you to http://WWW.Princeton.edu/~pear/corr elations.pdf.
-Hartwell
"It is as fatal as it is cowardly to blink facts because they are not to our taste." - John Tyndall -
When did Slashdot go bad?
When did Slashdot go bad?
I used to visit Slashdot on and off over about the past year until about October when I actually signed up for an account that I'd remember. There are stories I think they should post that they haven't (of course I'm referring to my own :-)), and trolls are annoying but I can ignore the trolls. The only thing I've noticed change on Slashdot for the worst are some of the posts by some readers.
One thing I've noticed about the posts is that so many are now lacking in any logical argument. an example would be this post. The post labels Japanese government as "a nasty, repressive, corrupt and unethically pro-corporate government." There's no actual evidence posted regarding that particular generalization (generalizations being illogical to begin with)other than his/her personal claim that "illegal to sell used video tapes and video games.
I'm not suggesting that everyone pull out their note cards and write up their posts on there, then take them to their nearest English or debate expert before posting. However, I do remember that most posts in the past actually were fairly logical, and if not, you could post a question below and have a polite discussion regarding the issue. There seems to be an extreme zealot attitude about many posts are not conducive to any discussion anymore. I'm not referring to a zealot attitude regarding any particular subject like Linux or Open Source. This seems to cover all positions on all subjects. I often am tempted to run around and post a reply referencing something like this. However, I'm not sure that it would actually help any, and might be trolling.
In the end I think Slashdot has not gone bad. It is still one of the best sites I've found that makes me think. While I do not like the changes in some of the posting that I think I've seen, I do what I can by moderating and meta-moderating fairly when I can, and move on. In the future maybe "Oh yeah? Well they suck anyway!" will be a legitimate argument,and those out there who post that way are just on the cutting edge. :-) It seems to work in politics sometimes anyway. -
An Introduction to DNA ComputingNo one is claiming that DNA computing can solve a problem better than silicon computing. Yet. That is viewed as the holy grail of the field. DNA computing is simply one way that we may end up doing molecular level computing. It has plenty of drawbacks, and the jury is still out on whether or not it will ever be useful, but the excitement is over the fact that you can do such massively parallel (optimistically 10^20 operations) computations. My guess is that it will won't replace silicon as a general purpose medium for computation, but rather that we will find some specialized uses for it. Laura Landweber (big shot in the field and cool person) at Princeton has some good ideas along these lines. It is a hot new field, and a lot of people are now working on it. There is a lot of work to be done just in quantifying and then controlling errors in the processes. It might also be noted that we have only begun to mine biology for useful enzymes to be used in computation.
If you want to read more about DNA computing, the best source is the set of 5 DIMACS proceedings (DNA Computers, DNA Computers II, etc.). If you would like a more in depth review of the field, I published one in Evolutionary Computation 6:201-230. You can find a postscript version here. It was designed to be readable by computer types and to bring you up to speed such that you could start contributing to the field. I don't know how well it fared in this department. Unfortunately, it now a bit out of date. A more up to date version will come out soon in a collection on Molecular Computing edited by Tanya Sienko from MIT Press.
Cheers, Carlo Maley
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Articles about this:Links and articles:
- Article in LinuxPlanet
- Princeton Linux for S/390 site
- Marist College Linux for S/390 site
- IBM's Linux for S/390 site
There are more given in the LinuxPlanet article (which is where I got the other links).
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RTcmix, MAX, and other stuffA few underrated/underknown projects:
- RTcmix - a real time sound synthesis/processing language/library. RTcmix is dope. I don't think the newest version (2.1), which adds really good Linux support, is publicly available yet, but it should be out the door real soon if it isn't yet. RTcmix can be easily interfaced with applications, because it can listen for commands on a TCP/IP socket. Trust me, it's very cool, and much easier to use/learn than CSOUND. Dave Topper (topper@virginia.edu) is the primary maintainer or RTcmix, as far as I know.
- Max - jMax was released by IRCAM under the GPL recently, but it needs crazy work in order to get to the state that the Mac version is in. Max is probably the coolest music application ever written. For those of you who don't know, it is a visual programming environment for real time control of anything MIDI controllable. Work is underway, as far as I know, to hook up RTcmix to Max as a signal processing engine (similar to MSP).
- Rt - Paul Lansky's real-time digital mixing program is a fabulous tool for mixing sounds. I haven't used it for performances yet, but it is damn good for constructing certain kinds of pieces. Several attempts at porting to Linux are in progress, but none of them are terribly stable yet. Check out Dave Phillips' page for more info.
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Re:[OT] RMS and open source Was: Re: WTF?This point in particular is one of the most annoying ones frequently made by anti-GNU revisionist. Much has been said about open source and the power of 'gotta scratch that itch' development. However, there are some problems which 'scratch the itch'-motivation do not solve very easily. No one would write a C compiler just to scratch an itch with the old one, at least not except for in the most severe of circumstances. GCC exists because RMS realised that it (or something like it) had to.
Why do you think that no-one else would have started a compiler project if RMS hadn't?
Come to think of it, why do you think that no-one else woudl have started a compiler project even if RMS had? You can get lcc from here or bcc from here.
Granted, I belive that gcc is a better compiler than bcc or lcc, but that's mainly because it is the most popular, and much work has been put into improving it by various parties. If gcc had not existed, and say bcc had been the standard compiler most people chose, then I'm sure that it's code generation & the number of targets would be as good as gcc's.
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Princeton OS course
I don't know any details, but I know our OS course uses Linux. I guess you could check the web page, here. Check under last semester's course listings.
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A couple interesting things...A couple interesting things here...
First, in the article, those "fine print software agreements" were discussed...the legal validity of such have been under question for a while now. Due to various legal details, those "click Next to continue installing" agreements are considered by many to be too automatic and do not require enough action on the agreeing party to be legally binding...
Second, I was amused that GoHip.com considers what they do a Browser Enhancement.
Third, ActiveX ever since it's first incarnation has been horribly gigantic a gaping security hole. Anyone even remotely self-respecting computer security-savvy individual would never dream of having ActiveX enabled on their computer. Unfortunately, the average Joe might not know this...hopefully, they will be educated in time.
Here's one (of many) place I definitely like Java a whole lot better...Fourth, in the end, this really isn't that big of a deal, as it was relatively benign. Hopefully, however, it will educate people as to the dangers of ActiveX, in general. I think David Kroll said it best: "I think it's pretty tacky what they did". Although he and Finjin did get it wrong when they said: "this is the first time a company has used ActiveX to alter personal information on someone's computer." Just see the ActiveX Exploder link mentioned above! I think they'd be more accurate in saying this is the first time it's been done purposefully and on a large scale by a corporation.
Fifth, this reveals an interesting problem with "signing" such programs with things like Verisign. That signature doesn't really mean as much as most people think that is does, as Verisign said: "Verisign spokesman Gray Chapman confirmed that GoHip is certified by Verisign, but stressed that his company was not in the business of passing judgment on the business practice of its client."
Sixth, GoHip.com sounds horribly sketchy. No phone numbers, bouncing e-mail addresses...is anyone surprised?...But finally, I have to admit to being horribly amused at the final quote by one of the "infected" GoHip.com visitors: "I compliment GoHip for a fine marketing effort as I certainly know who they are. I hate them, but I know who they are". In the end, capitalism seems to be all that matters again...
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About the authorScott reads slashdot (User Info: Cananian) and regularly posts here.
He maintains CUP and JLex, which is where I first ran into him.
I'm hoping he will come to the EFF Fundraiser in boston next week so I can meet him in person. Especially since he feels this way about this issue.
:-) While I'm at it, I hope you all come. -
Serious implications therein
This is one of the first things that I thought of when I read this article. There are alot of factors that have not been considered as far as the so-called 'metaphysical' goes. There is a rising sentiment not only in the social community, but in the scientific community, that there is more to humanity than just responsive thought. A noteable example of this is research that is being done at Princeton, with the Princeton Engineering Anomalies Research, or P.E.A.R.
We are getting to the point where we can almost empirically proove that the mind can alter something that otherwise should be random. That is just one area of research, there is much more. This page has many many links to similiar projects.
What are the consequences of simply replicating thought patterns in a machine? There is much to the brain that we do not understand, could it be that there is much with how it interfaces with what we have come to believe in as "reality."
What if, and this is highly speculatory, the reality as we know it, is highly controlled by our unconscious minds? What would happen to the stability of our reality if humanity were to inject itself into 'thought' machines? Can we even speculate? There could be alot of things that happen around us that we take for granted that are merely results of our unconscious will. If we injected ourselves into a machine, would that collapse? -
More sources of research
Lehigh University, my alma mater, and Princeton have been researching photonics for quite some time. Lehigh, being the engineering school that it is, has been focusing on the material considerations of actually building photonics systems and developing any new materials that will make it work properly. Princeton has an entire web site devoted to their research in photonics.
The field has been around for quite some time, so there's a lot of information on the web about it. Certainly, MIT's partnership will help push things along, but it is only a very small piece of the research puzzle. -
More sources of research
Lehigh University, my alma mater, and Princeton have been researching photonics for quite some time. Lehigh, being the engineering school that it is, has been focusing on the material considerations of actually building photonics systems and developing any new materials that will make it work properly. Princeton has an entire web site devoted to their research in photonics.
The field has been around for quite some time, so there's a lot of information on the web about it. Certainly, MIT's partnership will help push things along, but it is only a very small piece of the research puzzle. -
Re:Beowulfs?Beowulf was definately not the first clustering project, and also not the first clustering project on Linux. But they are currently the most popular. Some other clustering projects that preceeded Beowulf include:
- TreadMarks
- The Quarks DSM System (ports to other platforms are here and my port to Linux is here.)
- DIPC (or try here)
- SHRIMP, a high performance parallel system for Linux.
- PVM -- a message passing approach to parallel programming.
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Re:Linux and Copyright-Free ENGLISH DICTIONARY ?
Take a look at WordNet. You can use their online version or download it.
It has also been formatted for the DICT protocol. I wrote a web interface that accesses WordNet and a number of other dictionaries. (dict.org has one too, but I like mine more... and also I noticed theirs after I was finished.)
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Re:Linux and Copyright-Free ENGLISH DICTIONARY ?
Take a look at WordNet. You can use their online version or download it.
It has also been formatted for the DICT protocol. I wrote a web interface that accesses WordNet and a number of other dictionaries. (dict.org has one too, but I like mine more... and also I noticed theirs after I was finished.)
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Re:Linux and Copyright-Free ENGLISH DICTIONARY ?
Take a look at WordNet. You can use their online version or download it.
It has also been formatted for the DICT protocol. I wrote a web interface that accesses WordNet and a number of other dictionaries. (dict.org has one too, but I like mine more... and also I noticed theirs after I was finished.)
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Re:HmmmmQuoth the anonymous Coward:
Name a free compiler other than gcc.
One word:lcc
Anybody out there ever tried it? I haven't, it doesn't appear to be on a par with GCC, but the point is that it /does/ exist.