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Try Stanford University's online CS master's degree program, it is one of the best in the country and certainly just as well-regarded as a traditional master's degree. Visit http://scpd.stanford.edu/scpd/programs/mastersHCP/ mscs.htm for more info...

Computer Science courses are available through SITN Microwave Broadcast and on the internet through
Stanford Online. All remote students must register for Stanford Online. Tapes will not be available.

So, the real question is: Why is it fair that I pay a much larger portion of my wages than someone making less than me?

Go read up on John Rawl's and The Veil of Ignorance. The basic idea is that before you are born, you don't know if you will be born as the gifted child of a wealthy family or a mentally handicapped child of a poor family. What tax system would you choose for the society you will live in before you discover the actual alternative into which you are born? Is it fair to newborn children that some are born into wealthy families and others into poor families or that some are born with great talent and others with physical or mental handicaps? To me, a fair tax system is one that balances incentives to work hard and grow the economy with the moral understanding that people don't all start out equally.

Found a compiler for GPUs --> BrookGPU

wow, for once there's a slashdot article i have insight on! (whether it's modded that way remains to be seen.... ;) )

i would actually be shocked if there weren't linux support. the ability to do what they want only need to be in the drivers. i've been doing a gpgpu feasability study as an internship and did an mpi video compressor (based on ffmpeg) in school. using a gpu for compression/transcoding is a project i was thinking of starting once i finally had some free time since it seems built for it. something like 24 instances running at once at a ridiculous amount of flops (puts a lot of cpus to shame, actually). if you have a simd project with 4D or under vectors, this is the way to go.

like i said, it really depends on the drivers. as long as they support some of the latest opengl extensions, you're good to go. languages like Cg and BrookGPU, as well as other shader languages, are cross-platform. they can also be used with directx, but fuck that. i prefer Cg, but ymmv. actually, the project might not be that hard, just needs enought people porting the algorithms to something like Cg.

that said, don't expect this to be great unless your video card is pci-express. the agp bus is heavily asymmetric towards data going out to the gpu. as more people start getting the fatter, more symmetric pipes of pci-e, look for more gpgpu projects to take off.

If you really want to know, Stanford has been working on F@H on GPUs for a while now

http://folding.stanford.edu/FAQ-highperformance.ht ml

GPU's are designed to do parallel bulk vector processing (which is why they can transcode faster than a CPU) but this also limits what kind of applications or tasks you can reasonably offload to the GPU.

This means that the 'general purpose GPU' code, isn't really going to be general purpose, it going to be heavily vector orientated. On the other side the CPU is more general purpose, good at running many tasks and handling interrupts &co, for this reason the CPU won't replace the GPU and the GPU won't replace the CPU, no matter how many mflops you can squeeze out of either.

It would be nice to have protein folding done of the GPU, since it's a task the a GPU should be good at.

GPU Stream programming can be done with Brook http://graphics.stanford.edu/projects/brookgpu/. Brook supports the nVidia series, so that is what you purchase.

Pick up a 5200FX card (for SVIDEO/DVI output) and then use the GPU to do audio and video transcode. I have been thinking about audio (MP3) transcode as a first "trial" application.

"Heftier" GPUs may be used to assist in video transcode -- but it strikes me that the choice of stream programming system is most important (to allow code to move to other GPUs, driver permitting). I think that nVidia also supports developers using the GPU (there are comments and test results generated by nVidia available on the 'web). So far, not much from ATI, so I think nVidia gets the nod...

Ratboy.

With a great domain like that, I was curious about its history.

According to the Wayback machine, the domain live.com was owned from 1998 to November 2004 by one Ross Finlayson. The archived pages say that the company (Live Networks) has in business since 1995.

Some time after November 2004, the Wayback archive for the main page ends ... but Ross registered live555.com quite a bit earlier (August 2004). (Negotiation time?) Could this mean that Microsoft has been cooking this for a year or more? If so, I would have expected more from the debut.

As an afterthought ... it's really too bad that transactions of this type aren't disclosed. We could all make better domain-name choices if we had the vaguest ballpark idea of what the "going rate" was. And I have a feeling that it's usually not the small guy who benefits from the non-disclosure.

The Good Steve / Bad Steve gig has been around for a long time. It's hardly original and anyway is a very reductive way of looking at something as complex as a human being. If this is all legendary journo Lunchtime O'Booze, sorry Alan Deutschmann, can manage then he's not really worth spending time on, imho.

Much more interesting is the address Steve Jobs gave at Stanford earlier this year - see http://news-service.stanford.edu/news/2005/june15/ jobs-061505.html. There are plenty of luminaries and big-shot businessmen in the IT world but it's hard to imagine them coming up with an address like this. Being told you have terminal cancer is something we'd all pray to be spared, and the way Steve Jobs came through it suggests to me he's a very special person.

Just my 2 cents. I'm not an Apple user, either.

Copyrights and licenses are two different things. We're not talking about software -- where licenses are most relevant -- we're talking about published, thus copyrighted, documents. They may have some sort of license attached, but its doubtful that its a legitimate one given the requirements that a license must meet. Essentially, it must be contract, which has numerous subtle and sometimes mutable requirements that include something like an instrument of agreement. If something like such an instrument wasn't included in the first place, my understanding is there isn't a license or associated rights to revoke. Copyrighted works can be copied for various purposes -- parody, critical review, and most relevantly, education and research. Also, if the factual material in the letters is used in a textbook, well its just facts, theories and ideas -- which aren't subject to copyright or licensing. Short story is, yes fair use should apply -- unless a specific provision of copyright law protects the school system outside of fair use. Lemme toss in a helpful website: http://fairuse.stanford.edu/Copyright_and_Fair_Use _Overview/chapter7/7-b.html

ID is in fact the rebadging of the Teleological Argument for the existence of God. An old and venerable (and flawed) philosophical argument. This has always been a core component of Creationist ideas, and oft refuted (as in Dawkins' "The Blink Watchmaker"). It belongs in a philosophy class -- under its original name.

Zhenan Bao for that matter is already an assistant prof at Stanford.
http://chemeng.stanford.edu/01About_the_Department /03Faculty/Bao/bao.html

please read this text by artist and media theorist Tom Sherman. "The Finished Work of Art is a Thing of the Past" http://www.stanford.edu/class/history34q/readings/ MediaArchaeology/sherman.htm

You should get a Mac! They brought back that great puzzle game that made people flock to OS 7-9 back in the day.

lets put folding@home (http://folding.stanford.edu/) on that mother!

You might want to check out xrootd if this is read-only data. It does work for read-write but it isn't as performant as you might want without serious application work. This is a server that uses a redirector to send clients to the machine with the actual data. The web
site is http://xrootd.slac.stanford.edu/.

Tell everyone to stop folding http://folding.stanford.edu/ ?

in other news... R.V. Guha, the original author of RDF document recently joined Google.. it was Guha who also created TAP.. the effort to OWLize all Web content

Dudes own write-up...

http://www-ee.stanford.edu/~dabm/304.html

It would be 12 times faster than a CPU.

No. The G in GPU stands for Graphics, not Generic :P. They are x times faster than CPUs doing what they are designed to do, matrix computations, so the trick would be to use matrix-related algorithms to accomplish the same work you would do with a CPU.

More info at the BrookGPU web.

Only up to Iron. After that they're all made in supernovae, as iron fusion is endothermic.

I suspect you are right. But the parent said stars that quickly went supernova. So you are hardly correcting him.

However, just for interesting related reading: Composition of Solar Wind

Willie Fowler's Nobel Prize lecture

Oh, and the execs got about 6% pay increase this year.

Only 6%? That's not much... 2003 saw the average Fortune 500 CEO's salary up 22.18%.

In 1992 the average CEO made 82x the average employee's salary. By 2004 this ratio has climbed to 400x.

Don't forget Gary Smith who was awarded $41.2 million for overseeing the elimination of 93% of Ciena's value in just 4 years.

Is anyone else bothered by all these paternalistic, lead-the-unwashed-masses-by-the-hand approaches? Just give me my salary and I'll decide how I want to spend it. I'll make an exception for little things done in the name of tax efficiency though (buying bus passes for employees because it's a business tax deduction, etc), and even then only until the Flat Tax can be passed (alas, it won't be by President Bush).

If you want to learn how to *program*, then you need an itch you want to scratch. Taking a programming course, or reading a book and working the samples will teach you about programming, and maybe computer science (depending on the book), but won't teach you how to program. And learning about programming, or computer science, or computer hardware and engineering might be what you want - it's an interesting topic. But if what is bothering you is something like "this program sucks, I need something better" or "it'd be nice this program did this thing", or "I need a way to automate this because it's annoying", then you want to get a book on a appropriate language (I heavily recommend against Perl or C++, try Python or Ruby for local stuff) and start hacking on it until your problem goes away.

Greets!

OK, up front, I work with Ted, I know him personally, I admire him a lot, so feel free to ignore this post if you want to continue your bigoted, uninformed opinions instead of learning something.

First up, Ted is NOT an uninformed old man - he is the reason, along with Bush and Englebart, that you are all sitting in front of interconnected computers.

Author of two of the most influential books of the computer age, Literary Machines and Computer Lib/Dream Machines (not available in print - I have a copy or two if people are interested), creator of Xanadu WHICH IS AVAILABLE as the Udanax project [site down - Google cache] in both Gold and Green versions.

Victim of a Wired hatchet job - see his reply here

You'll have to take his word for it, but he's pretty sure when asked how his ideas could be simplified, he answered "you could make links one way and use a back button". Familiar?

Everyone that talks about transclusion or linking is refering back to Ted's work.

So show some respect, inform yoursleves and then perhaps, just for once, an informed debate can occur on slashdot!

17 light hours is roughly 113 AUs, if the star passes that close to the black hole, I wonder if the line of the node of the orbit will precess forward enough to measure due to the frame dragging from the spin of the black hole. That would also help prove it's a black hole. The spin of the black hole should be pretty fast since if formed by capturing matter in orbit. The Einstein "Gravity Probe B" tried to measure the same affect in earth orbit but it's so tiny in the Earth's case, a 2 Million Ms black hole would have a big frame drag effect. I guess it comes down to whether the star gets close enough and long enough to get dragged much. http://einstein.stanford.edu/ Mark

philosophers debated the existence of zombies.
http://www.thegreatdebate.org.uk/OfB&ZDLIntPrnt.ht ml
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/zombies/

Do zombies debate the existence of philosophers?
http://www.loris.net/zombie/zexperts.html
Philosophers disagree, but they may be covert zombies:
"Zombies won't be able to do philosophy." - last line
preceeding 7th major heading, and "A zombie has a different philosophy. That is the only difference. Therefore, zombies can only be detected if they happen to be philosophers." -from 8th major heading.

Then there is also the Catholic notion of being "dead in sin" - having comitted a mortal sin and feeling no remorse or contrition, rejecting Truth entirely, and embracing, or choosing to be consumed by, a different philosophy.

No, based on the fact that the strongest argument I've seen anyone make in this thread is some tentative claim about "fair use"

Sorry, no. If you are going to make the claim that they aren't covered by fair use, then the burden of proof is on you to show that. Google aren't guilty by default just because they copied.

without any legal references to back it up even in the US.

Nope. Start reading.

The burden of proof is clearly on Google here

Nope. The burden of proof might be on Google in court, but you, as a bystander, have proclaimed that they aren't covered by fair use, in this forum. The burden of proof is on you to show that your claim - about something that only a court can decide - is worthy of merit.

even their own publicity for Google Print has steered well clear of this subject so far AFAICS.

Come off it, their whole "this benefits humanity" publicity is a pretty damn obvious play for the transformative factor of fair use.

Google #1 in folding@home, basically..

Hate to break it to ya Steve old boy, but Google is curing cancer. The Google Toolbar includes Google Compute, which contributes unused CPU cycles to Folding@home, the Stanford research project on protein folding. Potential payoffs of the research include curing some types of cancer.

Hate to break it to ya Steve old boy, but Google is curing cancer. The Google Toolbar includes Google Compute, which contributes unused CPU cycles to Folding@home, the Stanford research project on protein folding. Potential payoffs of the research include curing some types of cancer.

...Or at least trying to. Google compute helps folding@home out, which does some work in cancer research.

I wonder if the Common Business Communication Language counts as prior art: http://www-formal.stanford.edu/jmc/cbcl.html

If showing sexual content and harsh language to children leads to the lowest birthrate among teenager, then we should do that...since we have the highest teenage birth rate. Japan's is 4, ours is 64, and this data comes from unicef.org, not exactly a obscure or untrustworthy source.

http://www.unicef.org/pon96/inbirth.htm


And do you know how many abortions are there in Japan?

Here it says that abortion in japanese teenagers has more than quadrupled. This article, even though it's old, states that abortion is under-reported.

...but that you have no idea that not only do people in Japan have less sex...


Guess that if you're talking about knowing japanese culture, you've heard of "enjo kosai" and its reality, or not?

As said in the other replies, the Internet tends to route around damage. Even if ISPs are forced to reveal all information know to them. The next step is even written as of today in the Darknet paper, by no one other than Microsoft! (DOC link, sorry but MS has a tendency to do that things)

What will happen is that you will have infringers sharing copyrighted content on invitation only, encrypted networks.

Then the ISPs will not be able to help RIAA and company because they will not be able to see into the encrypted channels (and that's the answer they will give since it's in their best interest that file sharing continues).

Sure, they will suspect such activity, but nothing will be proven unless someone screws up really bad (like inviting an informer to the closed net).

That paper is really interesting to read.

That's been historically true of a lot of reference books. For example Samuel Johnson's Dictionary

...download a Cheat Sheet and print it.

An excellent site with puzzles: Thirty Puzzles for Mathematicians and Computer Scientists

For example:

Bigger or Smaller: Alice chooses two distinct real numbers between 0 and 1, writes them onto two chits of papers and places the chits in a jar. Bob gets to select one of the chits randomly and open it. He then has to declare whether the number he sees is the bigger or smaller of the two. Is there any way he can be correct more than half the times Alice plays this game with him?

f(f(x)) == -x? Is it possible to write a function int f(int x) in C that satisfies f(f(x)) == -x? Without globals and static variables? Is it possible to construct a function f mapping rationals to rationals such that f(f(x)) = 1/x?

30 Coins: 30 coins of arbitrary denominations are laid out in a row. Ram and Maya alternately pick one of the two coins at the ends of the row. Could Maya ever collect more money than Ram?

The influenza virus had a profound virulence, with a mortality rate at 2.5% compared to the previous influenza epidemics, which were less than 0.1%

The Sound & MIDI Software For Linux site is a useful reference for all things Linux/Audio. (Yes the site is ugly but there is a lot of good info available there.) Here's their link to several audio-centric distros. One that I have not used but would love to try is Studio To Go! by Fervent Software. An installable LiveCD that is supposed to be end-all of Linux audio solutions. It's a pay-to-play disc, so you'll have to shell out some cash to give it a go. Sight unseen, I'm betting this distro is probably the most refined option available...

Also, another easy way -- next to Debian -- to use Ardour, Audacity, Jack, LADSPA or anything else, is to use Stanford's Planet.CCRMA project for Fedora.

It contains just about any decent audio app for GNU/Linux, including the ones mentioned in TFA, but also has custom kernels with the real-time patches and everything.

Definitely worth checking out!!

h357

fervent software

Offers a Linux distribution based on Debian designed for audio work.

http://ccrma.stanford.edu/planetccrma/software/

Offers packages to be installed over Fedora for audio.

-1 The End of Yahoo as we Know It

I happen to think that Yahoo! is doing some amazing, cool stuff - cool enough to be a major Google competitor. I like it that way, because in my opinion, neither company has a definitive edge, and they keep trying to out-innovate each other because of it. That's an incredibly good thing.

Yahoo! was the first Google - the site that strived to sort the web so mere mortals could get around. I first used it when it was http://akebono.stanford.edu/. The day it gets bought by Microsoft will be a sad day, indeed.

You might be interested to follow the money trail behind there. There are two major money sources behind this legislation (well, probably more, but it takes time to mine OpenSecrets): The national association of broadcasters and the national cable and telecommunications association. Together these groups have given over $300,000 to the people who signed this letter over the past two election cycles. That's an average of more than $15,000 per congressman. It's scary that I can buy a congressman's support on a bill for less than the cost of my Mazda. Of particular note is how representative Upton, the man who the letter was directed to has already received over $35,000 in this and the previous election cycle from these interests.

More analysis and complete listings can be found at this entry in my weblog.

Anyway, so in response, I called my congressman, Mike Doyle (PA-14), and asked to speak to the tech person to understand his position on the broadcast flag. It's important to note that not all legislators who signed the letter support the flag on the same level. I was informed that Doyle supported it to keep copy protected content off the internet, but still wanted to allow time shifting and burning to DVD, copying to PSP etc. Good, but misguided. If your legislator takes this stance, I highly suggest referencing the Darkent Paper from Microsoft Research. Basically, it says that DRM will fail in these endeavors. Also, when you call, try not to sound like a loony. Being able to cite specific examples of how it will hurt you is good (e.g. I travel a lot and this will prevent me from watching shows on my PSP or are you willing to explain to grandma why she can't tape Monday night football to watch it the next morning because she can't stay up past 10pm).

YOU are a mutant! :)

As are us all, actually, in all seriousness.

http://www.stanford.edu/group/hopes/causes/mutatio n/q0.html

"In fact, every person in the entire world has some sort of mutation in his or her DNA; in that sense, everyone is a mutant!"

well, they have Miles Davis and Vaughan Pratt in team

Maybe it has not incurred to anyone yet, but if you check out Sebastian Thurn's homepage, and download his C.V. http://robots.stanford.edu/cv.html (bottom of the page) or even check on the home page of the Carnegie Mellon University http://news.cs.cmu.edu/Releases/demo/33.html, he said correctly in German that he did obtain his VORDIPLOM. He, however translates this as having attained his B.Sc.. If you check with the German translation engine Leo (provided by the University of Munich), and enter the name VORDIPLOM into the box dict.leo.org, the following items come up: intermediate diploma das Vordiplom p intermediate examination das Vordiplom p pre-degree das Vordiplom p. Given that a Vordiplom is NOT a degree leading to a profession, but a pre-degree and that as a rule of thumb, it should be attained after TWO years of study, and a B.Sc. (Honours degree) can take up to FOUR years, Mr. Thrun has either a poor command in the English language, or for his U.S. employers, he has not told the truth, I am afraid to say. I think academic integrity should also entail the respective person's C.V.!

DARPA Grand Challange - Harnessing American Ingenuity ... as it turns out, the leader of the winning Stanford car team is a German.

This is an interesting moral question. Check out this article, you may find it interesting.