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Highest detectable spatial frequency at high ambient light levels, 50-60 cpd; low ambient light levels, 20-30 cpd.http://white.stanford.edu/~brian/numbers/node1 .html. A brief experiment I performed on myself 5 minutes ago indicates Stanford is closer to correct at 1 arc-minute than you are at three.

No, they don't. The creator has a monopoly by the virtue of a system that grants copyright on creation. This is something that's only as new as the 1970s. Before that point, you had to actually register to obtain this monopoly.

When I paint a painting, or write an original manuscript - I have a monopoly on that item. Only one exists. You didn't understand what I was saying.

Wrong. Plagarism is the act of misattributing an idea as if it were one's own. Copyright infringement is misusing too much or in an unacceptable way part or whole of a copyrighted work. You can commit plagarism on works that aren't copyrighted. The fact is, some reference works can be copyrighted because the artful arrangement of information can be considered a creative work and hence copyrightable. Obviously the phone book isn't artful and can't be copyrighted.

You need to look at the definition for Plagiarism.

As for artists being able to mimic or copy each other, flat out copying wouldn't be any more copyrightable than using a xerox machine.

Not true. Sometimes what people are interested in buying is an artists style. The comparison of someone copying a masterwork by hand and using a xerox machine is inaccurate. The mechanism used for duplication makes all the difference in this area as it is a regarded element of these goods.

Actually, playing a work live could be considered a performance, and that entails paying money to the copyright holder. Further, samlping sections of a song and using them in your song is rather questionable, especially if you plan to copyright and sell such a song.

Sorry, playing a song live is not a performance. Performing a play is a performance. Performing a whole album by another band, recording the live show, and then selling the album is a performance. The content in question is taken into account on every matter. Stanford has pretty good material on the subject. Sampling is questionable in a case by case basis.

Again, fair use isn't so clear cut as to say that a lack of profit is sufficient to say that George Lucas is unable to stop people from using "Light Saber" in a work. This is especially the case when one is writing fiction of one's own and not simply citing it as a non-fiction reference. Obviously, non-fiction will have a smaller market effect on fiction than other fiction.

You're right. It also has to negatively impact the revenue generated by the creator's original work. See the Stanford link above.

How? Is the land the product of creativity (and I mean the land itself, not its usage which itself is not what land ownership is about; such would be land usageship)? I guess in some extent, managing to claim ownership of land is an amount of creativity, since clearly that's not an innate property of land. But the abstract idea of owning land stopped being creative and unique the second someone else was doing it too. The idea for land ownership is based on the innate finiteness of land. You can't copy land nor can two people utilize the same land in all ways at the same time. The same can't be said of copyrighted works.

You're over analyzing. The land is finite. The created work is finite at inception. Do not confuse the creative work (a finite resource) with the delivery vehicle of the creative work (often renewable, and in the case of digital infinte, resource). While the creative work may be emulated, duplicated, or built upon. The original work created is very finite.

I can't argue about the novelty of being able to "produce a nine million digit prime number by memorizing eight digits", but I'll take issue with your comment about the patent portfolio. Stanford have stated that they'll make the results available to everyone.

I run Folding@Home since my computers are on 24/7 anyway--and if it leads to a cure for cancer/leukemia/Hodgekins'/alsheimer's/whatever-ot her-cancer-related-disease, I won't mind if someone makes money off producing the cure.

Your right some compact cameras have good lenses .. i had a Vivatar - the lens was wonderful on it.. it took pictures i never thought a 2.1 mp camera could. but then it died on me so i got a rebel tx.. spent weeks finding a lens i liked for it.. got a sigma 18-125.. ho so much better.

the sensor size makes alot of diffrence but when you get to the dSLR's that realy isn't the worrie as all of them have good sensors.. the worrie is the lens... while i like my sigma i some times use a friends canon lens.. it is a night and day diffrence.. but he paid 600$ where i paid 200$ for the lens..

personaly i am waiting for that lens that uses micro lens' so that you can do the focusing in software. http://graphics.stanford.edu/~renng/

• SOHO (LASCO C2/EIT)
• Vortex Dynamics in Superconductor
• TRACE

Just the other day, there was a /. story about opposition to HS students having laptops [slashdot.org], which pointed out the obvious: the students are using the technology to send IMs and play on networking sites like myspace. The laptops get beat to the ground and loaded full of spyware, the kids don't learn, and it becomes a giant waste of money.

You've definitely hit a peeve of mine there. Every time I hear this whole line about how students have to have laptops, otherwise they will be left behind and never be able to keep up with the technological elite, I always think, "Gee, that's funny. I've managed to get a degree in computer science and have held a number of high-tech jobs including one at NASA, and I don't own a laptop."

Back when Dijkstra was alive and was a professor at The University of Texas, he even advocated disallowing undergrad computer science majors from using computers in their coursework for the first year or two, on the theory that this would make them better at computer science in the long run. He wasn't able to push such a radical change through, but the point is that one of the brightest minds in technology actually believed less exposure to computers might be more beneficial. And I might also mention Donald Knuth's opinion of e-mail (or email, as he would spell it), namely that he doesn't have an e-mail account and doesn't want one.

I'm not sure if I would go as far as Dijkstra, but one thing is for sure: I think it's very poor reasoning to conclude that laptops are going to have any kind of magical positive effect on students. I can see how they're helpful tools for information retrieval and for computation, but I don't know that I see why they would help with learning.

The thing that makes me horribly depressed by all this is that so many educators (or school officials or whatever) seem to think they can just throw laptops at the problem, and suddenly the students will have what it takes to compete in today's high-tech world. It's a shallow, cargo-cult approach, and it makes me wonder if educators have any understanding at all of technology.

I'm not against and don't mean to offend old people -- at 35 I'm rapidly becoming one -- but I wonder if part of the problem may be that many of the people in charge of the schools are old. There are older people who have kept current, but many old people simply don't want to do that, and they have no freakin' idea about anything having to do with technology. And they're the ones making the decisions. (It takes a decade or two to work your way up into management in a school district...)

Actually, I might be off track with the old people thing there, but the point is that there has to be some sort of reason why school districts make such completely boneheaded decisions about technology so often.

Folding@home is already working on that. Dunno the deal between them and the Big S though. They may suck Stanford a heavy sum for devkits/license I think.

"Why should any part of my brain deal with abstract objects unless they actually exist?"

(I'm assuming here that the poster would personally agree with the stronger statement: 'My brain deals with abstract objects because they actually exist.')

That's begging the question here in the same manner as Plantinga's ontological argument. (The question is, "Does my brain deal with 'abstract objects,' or is this just metaphor for a process that reacts to similarities in experience?")

Not to mention the false dichotomies this implies: "Either my brain does not deal with abstract objects, or they exist" and "Either my brain deals with abstract objects, or they do not exist." There is no logical implication of the truth of either side of the proposition on the basis of the other side; we are not necessitated to accept either.

Of course, one can believe that the brain manipulates abstract objects or that abstract objects have some transcendant form of existence. That's different, however, from asserting the logical necessity of their existence, which is a bit presumptuous with regards to the cause/effect relationship of language and reality.

One needn't posit unnecessary entities, however. And it's great that these scientists are learning more about process that can be shown repeatedly to have a direct causal effect on cognition.

Some light reading for anyone interested in the philosophy surrounding these sort of ontological arguments: http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/ontological-argu ments/

If you are going to claim that as CO2 went up, the climate changed, and vice versa, then you are stating, unequivocally, that CO2 drives climate.

... and vice versa, yes. You said that right in the previous sentence -- you should wait at least a few sentences before you claim that someone said it was a one way street :-).

So, the question then becomes, if the CO2 varies from 200-300ppm over the last 800,000 years, then what drove those changes?

Wait -- are you saying that their measurements are in error, or are you saying that you believe the measurements, but would like more explanation of the process they reflect?

Once again, this article confuses correlation with causation. If you are going to state that CO2 changes cause climate change, then you must also demonstrate a mechanism for the changing CO2.

The article didn't actually state this, but it is accepted science at this point. All the article really stated was that the level of CO2 is drastically higher now than it has been within the visible past.

If, on the other hand, climate change causes changes in CO2 levels

It does. It works both ways.

, then you need only explain climate change, something which has been adequately explained by solar cycles. http://solar-center.stanford.edu/sun-on-earth/vars un.html and http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/paleo/milankovitch.html

These are fascinating links. The first is to a discussion on usenet, and the second is to an ice age causation theory from 1941 (which may well be true -- it's just that that being true doesn't magically mean that the connection between CO2 and climate is untrue). I would find them more compelling if they were links to, say, papers published in peer reviewed journals which cast the "CO2 theory" of global warming into question. I can understand that you might have trouble finding one of those, of course, since there aren't any to speak of.

(I know, I know, the scientists are all league in a secret cabal. They all know it's a lie, but they keep saying it is so they can get their grant money. The global warming "skeptics" like Bjørn Lomberg are in it for the pure love of truth, but the poor fellows just can't get their reports published because it threatens the monied orthodoxy. I know. I know.)

In fact, it's more correctly stated that CO2 levels tend to lag behind climate changes by up to 900 years. http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/abstract/299 /5613/1728 Although the folks at RealClimate like to just sweep this little fact under the carpet as unimportant. http://www.realclimate.org/index.php?p=13 To them, apparently, man made CO2 causes instant warming, but natural CO2 takes up to 800 years to have an effect.

The realclimate.org rebuttal you linked to above is actually pretty good on its own. For the peanut gallery, I'll quote the nut of it: "The reason has to do with the fact that the warmings take about 5000 years to be complete. The lag is only 800 years. All that the lag shows is that CO2 did not cause the first 800 years of warming, out of the 5000 year trend. The other 4200 years of warming could in fact have been caused by CO2, as far as we can tell from this ice core data. ... It comes as no surprise that other factors besides CO2 affect climate. Changes in the amount of summer sunshine, due to changes in the Earth's orbit around the sun

If you are going to claim that as CO2 went up, the climate changed, and vice versa, then you are stating, unequivocally, that CO2 drives climate. So, the question then becomes, if the CO2 varies from 200-300ppm over the last 800,000 years, then what drove those changes?

Once again, this article confuses correlation with causation. If you are going to state that CO2 changes cause climate change, then you must also demonstrate a mechanism for the changing CO2. If, on the other hand, climate change causes changes in CO2 levels, then you need only explain climate change, something which has been adequately explained by solar cycles. http://solar-center.stanford.edu/sun-on-earth/vars un.html and http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/paleo/milankovitch.html

In fact, it's more correctly stated that CO2 levels tend to lag behind climate changes by up to 900 years. http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/abstract/299 /5613/1728 Although the folks at RealClimate like to just sweep this little fact under the carpet as unimportant. http://www.realclimate.org/index.php?p=13 To them, apparently, man made CO2 causes instant warming, but natural CO2 takes up to 800 years to have an effect.

Again, be very careful about assigning cause and effect in a system as complex as the atmosphere.

In other words, this extra datum is nice to have, but it changes nothing in any ongoing debate.

Stanford has a wealth of class- and non-class material online. See the Entrepreneurial Thought Leader series the student led iinnovate interview series.

This system only requires one bit to represent a specific word, if the sampling size can be dynamically increased. The issue isn't so much about the size of the resulting hashed information, its about the sample size of audio and whether this can be dynamically increased and specific k ey wor ds mapped to specific bits. All one would have to do is decide on the words to be mapped to bits; this of course would not be contingent upon the bandwidth of architecture datapath to CPU but the network protocol used ... one packet could contain 'maximum data field size' * bits' ... for TCP packets this is 1460 ...

http://www.slac.stanford.edu/comp/net/wan-mon/thru -vs-loss.html ... and 1460 times 8 (octets) which comes to ... 11680 possible bits. This system provides for mapping nearly 12,000 ke y wo rds to a single TCP packet, assuming that the sample size of audio could be increased dynamically. One could easily imagine nearly 12,000 words that could be considered dodgy ... and how many packets could be sent without arousing user submission^h^h^h^h sus pic ion in a given time?

{
One packet per hour of sample equals 11680 possible ke y wo rds.
One packet per minute of sample equals 11680 possible ke y w or ds ...
One packet per second of sample equals 11680 possible ke y wo rds ...
} (assuming TCP is the protocol used, however this is not necessary to this system as protocols can be t unn elle d)

This system theoretically provides for near real time audio s ur ve ila nce focusing automagically on 'interesting' words, thus making the system cheaper to use than employing biological machines ... cough, I mean, people ... to mo ni t or conversations. With speech recognition algorithims you can map words to genders and possibly ages (I'm not sure about the latter, but am about the former, I forget my phonology course).

One could well turn a microphone off ... but do you trust its firmware? Remember, computer architectures are about to radically change with the widescale increase in DRM planned. Their digital, their rights, their management. And CPU load would not necessarily show this activity as it could be farmed off to firmware.

Well, I'm off to check my gmail inbox!

Don't forget to say hi to the google dataminers every time you send (or even type - remember the autosaving of drafts in gmail!) an email. Soon we won't have to even type to say hello to them ... maybe they're really nice people and would like to come around soon ... uninvited of course.

To quote Jar-Jar ... "How rude!"

And if they didn't think of this before ... DOH! Sorry everybody.

Don Knuth takes that a step further. And understandably so too...

You'ld need a very good AI to do that.

Join Stanford's Folding Project.

Watch it buddy, there are limits on those educational fair uses. See http://fairuse.stanford.edu/ for more detail.

One of my jobs as a grad student involved working at a sleep research lab at Stanford University, and I get questions from a lot of people about insomnia (it's part of my job). I usually point them to this page of Dr. William Dement who wrote a number of books on sleep (go do your own Amazon.com research ;) ). The page lists about 10 other things you can do to help with your sleep. Give that a try for two weeks, get into that pattern, and your sleep should improve.

Good question. What was it they said to the people who got screwed by Enron again?

They got damages from the directors, and others, (in addition to any possible jail terms). Same with WorldCom.

Most of the settlements were out of court though (eg. http://www.ucop.edu/news/archives/2002/aug27art1.h tm, http://www.law.stanford.edu/publications/stanford_ lawyer/issues/71/klausner.html).

No, it is NOT banned. Federal funding of research involving new lines is banned. That is all. Check out Stanford's stem cell research institute. Private funding for harvesting new stem cell lines is still possible. Perhaps you should get your facts straight, idiot.

As a long time Folding At Home contributor, I found the following statement to be incorrect:

"Total power of their distributed computing network to 1-10 petaflops. At the upper end of that target, the network would be faster than any current supercomputer, at least in terms of FLOPS."

The fastest supercomputer in the world is IBM's Blue Gene/L, which clocks in at 280.6 teraflops http://www.top500.org/. The distributed network of Folding at Home is currently 171.2 teraflops http://folding.stanford.edu/stats.html/ as measured by sustained contributions from active members. The Folding At Home network is already the second most powerful, if ranked by the Top 500 list criteria. At any range from 1-10 petaflops, the Folding at Home network would be more powerful than the most powerful supercomputer in the world.

It has took a long time, but the Folding@home will soon have a GPU port:
http://folding.stanford.edu/FAQ-ATI.html
For the time being it will be for ATI 1900 and upward series only.

Btw: Also, there will be a PS3 Folding@home client:
http://folding.stanford.edu/FAQ-PS3.html

It has took a long time, but the Folding@home will soon have a GPU port:
http://folding.stanford.edu/FAQ-ATI.html
For the time being it will be for ATI 1900 and upward series only.

Btw: Also, there will be a PS3 Folding@home client:
http://folding.stanford.edu/FAQ-PS3.html

What is the value of money ?

Would you rather earn $100 in the US where it buys you 39 Big Macs, or in China where you get 83 for the same amount of money ?

Would you rather earn $100 when everybody is making $100, or $150 when everybody else is making $200 ?

AC

I have two words for you: Game Theory

Andreessen was hardly the only one who 'invented' Mosaic:
        * Marc Andreessen was an undergrad when he co-wrote the first version of Mosaic, for UNIX/X Windows, with Eric Bina.
        * Eric Bina co-wrote the first version.
        * Aleks Totic ported Mosaic to the Macintosh.
        * Jon Mittelhauser and Chris Wilson ported Mosaic to Microsoft Windows on the PC.
        * Rob McCool and his brother Mike did the HTTP development.
        * Chris Houck did most of the cross-platform work, but claims that in reality he "kept everyone reasonably sane with lots of late night coffee and beer runs."
http://cse.stanford.edu/class/sophomore-college/pr ojects-99/internet/netscape.html

You can 'see' polarity of sunspots almost directly. In fact, here are some pictures. You can read the strength of the magnetic field by looking how the energy levels of atoms are modified. As an electron falls from one level to another it emits electromagnetic radiation with an energy corresponding to the difference. In particular, certain configurations of atoms which are normally indistinguishable, because the difference between them is simply that electron spins have been flipped, become distinct in the presence of magnetic fields, because a magentic field causes one or other energy level to be 'preferred'. This modifies the frequencies of the emitted radiation which we can then observe. This is known as Zeeman splitting. Additionally, we can read off the polarity of the fields from the polarisation of the radiation.

Greets! http://sloan.stanford.edu/mousesite/1968Demo.html The Sloan MouseSite has better video where you can actually read what Doug has on the screen! I've been lucky enough to see this video with commentary by Doug - he's still around, still has ideas relevant and ahead of most of the rest of the computing world and is always glad to discuss his ideas with people. You can find out his current plans at the Bootstrap Institute: http://www.bootstrap.org/

Some folks at Stanford do this. They call their system the Collective. They use VMWare and support Windows VMs and Linux VMs, depending on the app that's needed, at least according to the paper.

Some folks at Stanford do this. They call their system the Collective. They use VMWare and support Windows VMs and Linux VMs, depending on the app that's needed, at least according to the paper.

[IBM] invented ... timesharing OSs.

Not by themselves, they didn't.

(10 points) In his early years he was a submarine captain in World War I, but decades later he became a pacifist, helping to produce the Stuttgart Confession of Guilt and winning the 1967 Lenin Peace Prize.

(5 points) People who like to complain a lot will often justify themselves with his lines, "I didn't speak up for the Jews because I wasn't a Jew... Then they came for me, and by that time there was no one left to speak up for me."

ANSWER: Pastor Martin Niemoller

"Unix needs a bulletproof implementation"

Actually wasn't the Unix philosophy traditionally not really a stickler for good implementation? Go back to the whole "PC Losering" issue and "Worse is Better" design philosophy:

http://www.stanford.edu/~stinson/cs240/cs240_1/WIB .txt
http://www.jwz.org/doc/worse-is-better.html

I know I'm going to be perceived as a pariah for saying so, but guys, there isn't anything great about Unix. It's an old crusty design, which has succeeded through a combination of (some would say naive) simplicity and an overwhelming force of young software engineers that can easily understand, improve, and maintain the system (which to it's credit is a really great and powerful force that has kept *nix legitimate over the years).

As Rob Pike himself says: "I started keeping a list of these annoyances but it got too long and depressing so I just learned to live with them again. We really are using a 1970s era operating system well past its sell-by date. We get a lot done, and we have fun, but let's face it, the fundamental design of Unix is older than many of the readers of Slashdot, while lots of different, great ideas about computing and networks have been developed in the last 30 years. Using Unix is the computing equivalent of listening only to music by David Cassidy."

They could make it really robust and easier to develop had they used a fuzzy logic controller. But that would be a little too imaginative for American engineers. The Japanese have been doing stuff like this for more than 20 years. Some old American guy rolls a bowling ball across the floor, calls it a "Ballbot", and everyone jumps up and shouts.

Perhaps those tapes were on stock not vulnerable to the binder degrading over time causing the oxide to literally fall off the backing, or that has a problem often known as "vinegar syndrome" where the binder reacts with the backing producing a sticky residue (I believe certain Ampex tapes from the 70's/80's are good examples of this). Many recording studios have been stung by these problems, particularly the residue one, to the point that specialist companies have sprung up to deal with the problems. One solution is to cool or bake the tapes respectively, but it doesn't always work.

One large classical music label in the UK (sadly now dead) had major issues with these problems in the early 90's, and decided to take action before it was too late. They played all of their tapes through a specially modified deck which I believe had basically huge swabs to catch the residue before the tape passed any of the mechanism. The audio was then recorded onto modern DAT tape. Those master tapes were all almost certainly ruined in the process, but at least there is a backup on modern DAT using tape which is supposedly not susceptible to the problem.

More information at http://palimpsest.stanford.edu/byauth/st-laurent/c are.html and http://www.tiguersound.com/Studio_Information/Tape Bake.html

In response to the GP, it's not even a matter of implementing multicast. Almost all of the networking hardware out there has it in place, it's just turned off.

The reason? The original implementation is hard for ISPs to charge for. But there is hope. At SIGCOMM 2006, there was a proposal that would be more ISP friendly, with a minimal performance hit. Its called Free Riding Multicast and essentially piggybacks off BGP's unicast routes.

I use Planet CCRMA components with Fedora Core 5 and this seems to bring me very close to rivalling what I could do with a Mac running Pro Tools, etc. Any plans to integrate these ideas into the main Fedora package, such as the ability to choose "music" or "recording" on initial install the same way you can choose "home", "office", etc?

Or, really, any plans for any other speciallising options?

Every single school, from the community college on up, is going to do everything it can to convince its alumni, students, faculty, and benefactors that it's doing useful and important work. Even "MIT, CMU, Stanford, etc." issue the exact same kind of PR. It's necessary everywhere.

The Bad Thing is confusing the explanation in the PR with the real research or discovery, or assuming that it's actually important because the school PR office thought it sounded neat. Which is how Roland Piquepaille wound up propagating the PR writer's mistake on the terminology ("demultiplier").

The evaluated http://gate.ac.uk/ which is GPL software but ended up using http://search.cpan.org/~acoburn/Lingua-EN-Tagger/. There are several other tools in this space that can be glued together to create this type of software:

http://www-nlp.stanford.edu/
http://tcc.itc.it/research/textec/tools-resources/ jinfil.html
http://wordnet.princeton.edu/
http://www.alias-i.com/lingpipe/web/faq.html
http://www.isi.edu/licensed-sw/halogen/index.html

Not trivial, but if you wanted to DIY, you don't need to start from scratch. Though, having a bunch of hardware to chug through 1000s of documents would still be needed :).

Here's a link. Well worth checking out, it's a good resource.

L7_ is correct. We had a choice between Physics, Experimental physics, or Computational physics. I forget what exactly it says on my diploma that distinguishes it but it is all the same dept. It really was just the choice of electives and a research topic. The research was optional but it was the single most valuable piece of work I did in college.

If I were to go back i would have done something more like this. http://www.stanford.edu/group/mathcompsci/intro.ht ml

Also, if you are looking for a good terminal masters there is this program.http://www.physics.sjsu.edu/degreeprogs.ht ml

John McCarthy has posted a list of menaces and why they are relatively unthreatening.

Applied Physics is rooted in the fundamental truths and basic concepts of the physical sciences but is concerned with the utilization of scientific principles in practical devices and systems, and in the application of physics in other areas of science. "Applied" is distinguished from "pure" by a subtle combination of factors such as the motivation and attitude of researchers and the nature of the relationship to the technology or science that may be affected by the work.

I think you'll find the bioinformatics field to be broad enough to meet just about any interest that you may have - work ranges from programming pattern recognition/alignment software (for protein or DNA work) to mathematical modeling of protein networks. Don't worry if biology isn't your greatest strength as you'll be working as a programmer/mathematician solving a biological problem, not as a biologist working with computers (in fact, graduate level programs in bioinformatics tend to recruit computer science majors as the biology/biochem/etc majors don't have the required background).

Some links for further information:
International Society for Computational Biology
National Institute of Health
UCSD
Stanford
IBM

For all of those not lucky enough to walk into the William Gates Computer Science building at Stanford here's my photo of their 1967 hard disk: http://www.slac.stanford.edu/~ajh/harddisk.jpg. The dark line around the edge is the result of the head crashing into the disk. The disk cost $300,000 and held an impressive 48Mbytes over the 10 inner surfaces of 6 of these platters. Each platter's diameter is over 1m. Disk startup time was 5 minutes, access time was 35msec and transfer speed was 2.7Mb/s!

Stanford actually sued for $580,000 because of this crash and it not working within specifications. One bugbear was that it "cannot be used for longterm storage"!

Is it actually cheaper to run large programs like SETI@HOME on a supercomputer?

As such, it would probably work quite nicely for Stanford's folding@home project (which studies protein folding, i.e. molecular dynamics). It probably would not work very well for seti@home, because SETI isn't studying molecular dynamics, and it would probably be difficult to cast the problems they're working on into a form that would "look" enough like molecular dynamics to work well on this machine (this, BTW, is why this machine probably shouldn't go onto the top500 list or anything like that -- it's really not a general purpose computer at all).

As far as using other supercomputers for these kinds of jobs, here's what the folding@home FAQ has to say about it (from the F@H FAQ):

Why not just use a supercomputer? Modern supercomputers are essentially clusters of hundreds of processors linked by fast networking. The speed of these processors is comparable to (and often slower than) those found in PCs! Thus, if an algorithm (like ours) does not need the fast networking, it will run just as fast on a supercluster as a supercomputer. However, our application needs not the hundreds of processors found in modern supercomputers, but hundreds of thousands of processors. Hence, the calculations performed on Folding@Home would not be possible by any other means! Moreover, even if we were given exclusive access to all of the supercomputers in the world, we would still have fewer cycles than we do with the Folding@Home cluster! This is possible since PC processors are now very fast and there are hundreds of millions of PCs sitting idle in the world.

To put that into perspective, consider that the Blue Gene/L has 65536 processors. seti@home has over a million hosts and folding@home has a couple hundred thousand more. As the quote above notes, most supercomputers aren't drastically faster on a per-processor basis than PCs -- not nearly enough to make up this deficiency in sheer number of processors.

My guess is that the Blue Gene/L is probably somewhat more power efficient than the average contributor to seti@home or folding@home -- but mostly because the majority of the latter are probably Pentium 4's, which are notoriously inefficient in terms of power usage. As the world transitions away from the Netbust architecture, it's nearly certain that the efficiency of seti@home, folding@home, etc., will go up (considerably).

That brings up another point worth considering: the way things are right now, the computers used for seti@home, folding@home, BOINC, etc., get updated on quite a regular basis. If they spent millions of dollars for a single fast machine, it would might be more efficient right now -- but in a few years it would fall behind the curve -- but most budget committees (and such) would be reluctant to spend millions of dollars to replace it simply because something better was available.

Is it actually cheaper to run large programs like SETI@HOME on a supercomputer?

As such, it would probably work quite nicely for Stanford's folding@home project (which studies protein folding, i.e. molecular dynamics). It probably would not work very well for seti@home, because SETI isn't studying molecular dynamics, and it would probably be difficult to cast the problems they're working on into a form that would "look" enough like molecular dynamics to work well on this machine (this, BTW, is why this machine probably shouldn't go onto the top500 list or anything like that -- it's really not a general purpose computer at all).

As far as using other supercomputers for these kinds of jobs, here's what the folding@home FAQ has to say about it (from the F@H FAQ):

Why not just use a supercomputer? Modern supercomputers are essentially clusters of hundreds of processors linked by fast networking. The speed of these processors is comparable to (and often slower than) those found in PCs! Thus, if an algorithm (like ours) does not need the fast networking, it will run just as fast on a supercluster as a supercomputer. However, our application needs not the hundreds of processors found in modern supercomputers, but hundreds of thousands of processors. Hence, the calculations performed on Folding@Home would not be possible by any other means! Moreover, even if we were given exclusive access to all of the supercomputers in the world, we would still have fewer cycles than we do with the Folding@Home cluster! This is possible since PC processors are now very fast and there are hundreds of millions of PCs sitting idle in the world.

To put that into perspective, consider that the Blue Gene/L has 65536 processors. seti@home has over a million hosts and folding@home has a couple hundred thousand more. As the quote above notes, most supercomputers aren't drastically faster on a per-processor basis than PCs -- not nearly enough to make up this deficiency in sheer number of processors.

My guess is that the Blue Gene/L is probably somewhat more power efficient than the average contributor to seti@home or folding@home -- but mostly because the majority of the latter are probably Pentium 4's, which are notoriously inefficient in terms of power usage. As the world transitions away from the Netbust architecture, it's nearly certain that the efficiency of seti@home, folding@home, etc., will go up (considerably).

That brings up another point worth considering: the way things are right now, the computers used for seti@home, folding@home, BOINC, etc., get updated on quite a regular basis. If they spent millions of dollars for a single fast machine, it would might be more efficient right now -- but in a few years it would fall behind the curve -- but most budget committees (and such) would be reluctant to spend millions of dollars to replace it simply because something better was available.

Hofstadter also gave a talk at the Singularity Summit at Stanford. Also, here's a summary of the Artificial Life X talk.

For some more information on network visualization check out David Glecih's website http://www.stanford.edu/~dgleich/. He is one of the authors of the World of Music Paper mentioned in the paper. He has done a lot of work on visualizing high dimensional datasets. He has also done a lot of work on the computational side of complex network research. He released a number of Matlab packages that related to the subject. Also check out his artistic visualizations of the Flickr network http://www.stanford.edu/~dgleich/demos/visualizati ons/index.html.

For some more information on network visualization check out David Glecih's website http://www.stanford.edu/~dgleich/. He is one of the authors of the World of Music Paper mentioned in the paper. He has done a lot of work on visualizing high dimensional datasets. He has also done a lot of work on the computational side of complex network research. He released a number of Matlab packages that related to the subject. Also check out his artistic visualizations of the Flickr network http://www.stanford.edu/~dgleich/demos/visualizati ons/index.html.

Hmm, I count 47 syscalls

http://swtch.com/usr/local/plan9/acid/syscall

No mmap huh? No shared libraries? Er, nice!

BTW I found these notes on Plan 9 interesting:

http://www.scs.stanford.edu/nyu/04fa/notes/l5d.txt