Slashdot Mirror

ThinSkin writes "Stanford has recently released an update to their Folding@home GPU-accelerated client, which includes notable upgrades such as support for more current Radeon graphics cards and even a visualizer to see what's going on. ExtremeTech takes a good look at the new Folding@home GPU2 client and interviews Director Dr. Vijay Pande about the project. To the uninitiated, Folding@home is a distributed computing project in which hundreds of thousands of PCs and PS3s devote a portion of their computing power to crunch chunks of biological data. The goal is 'to understand protein folding, misfolding, and related diseases.'"

Tookis writes "Most of us are happy to take 2D happy snaps with single lens digital cameras. Imagine if you had a digital camera that could more accurately perceive the distance of all objects in its field of vision than your own eyes and brain. That's exactly what a team of researchers from Stanford University are working on — and it could even be affordable for ordinary consumers."

Umar Kalim writes "Analysts have been studying the effects of the fibre outage throughout the Mediterranean in terms of network performance, by examining the changes in packet losses, latencies and throughput. We initially discussed the outage yesterday. 'It is interesting that some countries such as Pakistan were mainly unaffected, despite the impact on neighboring countries such as India. This contrasts dramatically to the situation in June - July 2005, when due to a fibre cut of SEAMEWE3 off Karachi, Pakistan lost all terrestrial Internet connectivity which resulted, in many cases, in a complete 12 day outage of services. This is a tribute to the increased redundancy of international fibre connectivity installed for Pakistan in the last few years.'"

iandoh writes "A team of scientists at Stanford University has tracked the movement of carbon nanotubes through the digestive systems of mice. They've determined that the nanotubes do not exhibit any toxicity in the mice, and are safely expelled after delivering their payload. As a result, the study paves the way toward future applications of nanotubes in the treatment of illnesses. Previous research by the same team demonstrated that nanotubes can be used to fight cancer. The nanotubes do this in two ways. One method involves shining laser light on the nanotubes, which generates heat to destroy cancer cells. Another method involves attaching medicine to the nanotubes, which are able to accurately 'find' cancerous cells without impacting healthy cells."

iandoh writes "A team of scientists at Stanford University has tracked the movement of carbon nanotubes through the digestive systems of mice. They've determined that the nanotubes do not exhibit any toxicity in the mice, and are safely expelled after delivering their payload. As a result, the study paves the way toward future applications of nanotubes in the treatment of illnesses. Previous research by the same team demonstrated that nanotubes can be used to fight cancer. The nanotubes do this in two ways. One method involves shining laser light on the nanotubes, which generates heat to destroy cancer cells. Another method involves attaching medicine to the nanotubes, which are able to accurately 'find' cancerous cells without impacting healthy cells."

An anonymous reader writes to tell us that Stanford has a new website that not only shows you how cool their new 3-d modeling system is, but actually allows you to give it a try with your own photos. The system can take a 2-d still image and estimate a detailed 3-d structure which you can navigate. "For each small homogeneous patch in the image, we use a Markov Random Field (MRF) to infer a set of "plane parameters" that capture both the 3-d location and 3-d orientation of the patch. The MRF, trained via supervised learning, models both image depth cues as well as the relationships between different parts of the image. Other than assuming that the environment is made up of a number of small planes, our model makes no explicit assumptions about the structure of the scene; this enables the algorithm to capture much more detailed 3-d structure than does prior art (such as Saxena et al., 2005, Delage et al., 2005, and Hoiem et el., 2005), and also give a much richer experience in the 3-d flythroughs created using image-based rendering, even for scenes with significant non-vertical structure."

An anonymous reader writes to tell us that Stanford has a new website that not only shows you how cool their new 3-d modeling system is, but actually allows you to give it a try with your own photos. The system can take a 2-d still image and estimate a detailed 3-d structure which you can navigate. "For each small homogeneous patch in the image, we use a Markov Random Field (MRF) to infer a set of "plane parameters" that capture both the 3-d location and 3-d orientation of the patch. The MRF, trained via supervised learning, models both image depth cues as well as the relationships between different parts of the image. Other than assuming that the environment is made up of a number of small planes, our model makes no explicit assumptions about the structure of the scene; this enables the algorithm to capture much more detailed 3-d structure than does prior art (such as Saxena et al., 2005, Delage et al., 2005, and Hoiem et el., 2005), and also give a much richer experience in the 3-d flythroughs created using image-based rendering, even for scenes with significant non-vertical structure."

Reservoir Hill points us to a story about a group of computer scientists who are taking steps to bring the creation of 3-D worlds to the casual user. As a proof-of-concept, Vladlen Koltun and the Stanford Virtual Worlds Group, using data collected by botanists, have developed software to create virtual 3-D trees with roughly 100 different tree attributes, all of which are highly variable. Quoting: "The inability of casual computer users to build 3-D objects - you practically have to be a sculptor, Koltun says - is an anchor holding back the promise of virtual worlds. Koltun's software, Dryad (a tree nymph in Greek mythology,) lets users move through the 100-attribute tree space in a fashion similar to navigating city streets on Google Maps. As in real life, not all trees are equally desirable. Since no single user is capable of mapping out the best parts of the enormous tree space, this mapping of desirability is done collaboratively, leading to continuous refinement of the software."

Reservoir Hill points us to a story about a group of computer scientists who are taking steps to bring the creation of 3-D worlds to the casual user. As a proof-of-concept, Vladlen Koltun and the Stanford Virtual Worlds Group, using data collected by botanists, have developed software to create virtual 3-D trees with roughly 100 different tree attributes, all of which are highly variable. Quoting: "The inability of casual computer users to build 3-D objects - you practically have to be a sculptor, Koltun says - is an anchor holding back the promise of virtual worlds. Koltun's software, Dryad (a tree nymph in Greek mythology,) lets users move through the 100-attribute tree space in a fashion similar to navigating city streets on Google Maps. As in real life, not all trees are equally desirable. Since no single user is capable of mapping out the best parts of the enormous tree space, this mapping of desirability is done collaboratively, leading to continuous refinement of the software."

brianmed writes to tell us that Stanford researchers have created a new use for silicon nanowires that promise to reinvent lithium-ion batteries. "The new version, developed through research led by Yi Cui, assistant professor of materials science and engineering, produces 10 times the amount of electricity of existing lithium-ion, known as Li-ion, batteries. A laptop that now runs on battery for two hours could operate for 20 hours, a boon to ocean-hopping business travelers. [...] The lithium is stored in a forest of tiny silicon nanowires, each with a diameter one-thousandth the thickness of a sheet of paper. The nanowires inflate four times their normal size as they soak up lithium. But, unlike other silicon shapes, they do not fracture."

ThinkingInBinary writes "The results from the Urban Challenge are in! Carnegie Mellon's Tartan Racing team came in first (earning a $2 million prize), followed by Stanford's Stanford Racing team in second (earning $1 mil) and Virginia Tech's Victor Tango in third (earning $500k). Cornell's Team Cornell, University of Pennsylvania and Lehigh University's Ben Franklin Racing Team, and MIT, also finished the race in that order."

mytrip wrote with a note that the PlayStation 3 should be very proud of itself. Sony's monster-powerful console has lifted Stanford's very own distributed computing project (Folding@home) into the record books. "Guinness has apparently certified the project as the world's most powerful distributed computing system. According to a release from Sony, Folding@home topped 1 petaflop last month, meaning that it surpassed a thousand trillion floating point operations per second. By comparison, the well-known SETI@home project has topped out, according to Wikipedia, at around 265 teraflops, or 265 trillion floating point operations a second." There appears to be a team slashdot if you're looking for someone to support. Go fighting 006666!

mytrip wrote with a note that the PlayStation 3 should be very proud of itself. Sony's monster-powerful console has lifted Stanford's very own distributed computing project (Folding@home) into the record books. "Guinness has apparently certified the project as the world's most powerful distributed computing system. According to a release from Sony, Folding@home topped 1 petaflop last month, meaning that it surpassed a thousand trillion floating point operations per second. By comparison, the well-known SETI@home project has topped out, according to Wikipedia, at around 265 teraflops, or 265 trillion floating point operations a second." There appears to be a team slashdot if you're looking for someone to support. Go fighting 006666!

iandoh writes "Cool research: Geologists at Stanford University and the US Geological Survey have drilled a 2.5 mile deep borehole into the San Andreas fault. They've extracted over one ton of rock from 2 miles down, and they'll be installing sensors down the length of the borehole."

paleshadows writes "A year and a half has passed since SubVirt, the first VMM (virtual machine monitor) based rootkit, was introduced (PDF), covered in the tech press, and discussed here. Later Joanna Rutkowska made news by claiming she had a VMM-based attack on Vista that was undetectable — a claim that was roundly challenged. Now in this year's HotOS workshop, researchers from Stanford, CMU, VMware, and XenSource have published a paper titled Compatibility Is Not Transparency: VMM Detection Myths and Realities (PDF) showing that VMM-based rootkits are actually easily detectable."

The official PlayStation blog is reporting that the petaflop barrier has been crossed by the nodes participating in the Folding @ Home project. The article talks about what this means for computer science, and why this awesome amount of computational power was reachable. "Just six months after we launched the program, nearly 600,000 PS3 users have registered. Second, we made several improvements to the application (v 1.2) that helped make the computations more accurate and enabled us to squeeze even more work out of each and every PS3 console -- we went from 450 teraflops to 800 teraflops. These factors, combined with the contribution from all the other platforms, helped us cross the barrier, which happened sometime over the weekend."

doxology writes "The BBC reports that scientists have been able to create di-positronium molecules. A di-positronium molecule consists of two positronium atoms, exotic atoms which are made from an electron and a positron (the anti-particle of the electron). A potential use of these molecules is to make extremely powerful gamma-ray lasers, possibly on sharks."

modapi writes "According to the EPA, data centers — not including Google et al. — are on track to double power consumption in the next five years, to 3% of the US energy budget. That is a lot of expensive power. Can we cut the power requirement? We could, if we had a reliable way to benchmark power consumption across architectures. Which is what JouleSort: A Balanced Energy-Efficiency Benchmark (PDF), by a team from HP and Stanford, tries to do. StorageMojo summarizes the key findings of the paper and contrasts it with the recent Google paper, Power Provisioning for a Warehouse-sized Computer (PDF). The HP/Stanford authors use the benchmark to design a power-efficient server — with a mobile processor and lots of I/O — and to consider the role of software, RAM, and power supplies in power consumption."

Morty writes "DNS rebinding attacks can be used by hostile websites to get browsers to attack behind firewalls, or to attack third parties. Browsers use "pinning" to prevent this, but a paper describes so-called multi-pin vulnerabilities that bypass the existing protections. Note that, from a DNS perspective, this is a "feature" rather than an implementation bug, although it's possible that DNS servers could be modified to prevent external sources from being able to point at internal resources."

6 writes "Technology isn't just about design and hardware; sometimes it's about psychology, politics, sociology, and economics. The website of Stanford design prof Michael Shanks is hosting a student project by William Choi and Antoine Sindhu, a fascinating online course about slot machines. From the site: 'Much research has been devoted to studying gambling behavior from various points of view, including the psychological, social, economic, and political bases and implications of gambling ... [just the same,] focusing on slot machines reveals and inspires the study of many sociological issues that have come to express themselves specifically and notably on these machines. Here, we examine a number of these issues, attempting to link slot machines to them in an effort to better understand and explain them.'"

counterfriction writes "This month's issue of Symmetry, a magazine jointly published by SLAC and Fermilab, is featuring an article that points out the sometimes extemporaneous and unconventional solutions physicists have come up with in (and out of) the laboratory. From the article: 'Leon Lederman ... used a pocket knife, tape, and items on anyone's grocery list to confirm that interactions involving the weak force do now show perfect mirror symmetry, or parity, as scientists had long assumed.'"

Recently a pretty amazing video surfaced that used clips from Disney films to explain copyright law. It was created by Eric Faden of Bucknell University and must have taken an insane amount of time to assemble. Now you have to wonder how long before someone gets sued over it. Also here is a corel cache version as well as a link to the original page.

Tal Garfinkel writes "There has long been a disconnect between academic computer security and underground forums like Black Hat and Phrack. A new USENIX-sponsored workshop called WOOT (Workshop On Offensive Technologies) is looking to bridge that gap by providing a high-quality, peer-reviewed forum for attack papers, with top reviewers from the academic, open source, commercial IT, and information warfare communities. Got a great attack paper? See if it makes the cut at WOOT."

jakosc writes "The Economist has an interesting article about increasing the efficiency of wind-powered generators by turning them into flying wind farms. These tethered generators would harness high speed jet stream winds above 15,000 ft and in theory could give outputs of 40MW per generator (PDF). The developer's website has more details of some of the safety, technological, and economic issues."

hansamurai writes "As we've previously discussed, the Folding@Home client is now available on the PS3, and already some early results are in. The total number of teraflops generated by PS3s has already exceeded all other OS contributions combined and the entire project is heading towards one petaflop of distributed computing power. Stanford notes that their teraflops calculation is conservatively calculated so the total power could be under-appreciated. With the PS3 European release complete and the Folding client already available to them, the number of users will continue to grow for the time being, let's hope that the project does not run out of work units to pass out. Kotaku has some numbers that are a few hours old since the Stanford server is getting hit pretty hard with the renewed interest in the project."

BobB writes "Stanford University researchers have launched an initiative called the Clean Slate Design for the Internet. The project aims to make the network more secure, have higher throughput, and support better applications, all by essentially rebuilding the Internet from scratch. From the article: 'Among McKeown's cohorts on the effort is electrical engineering Professor Bernd Girod, a pioneer of Internet multimedia delivery. Vendors such as Cisco, Deutsche Telekom and NEC are also involved. The researchers already have projects underway to support their effort: Flow-level models for the future Internet; clean slate approach to wireless spectrum usage; fast dynamic optical light paths for the Internet core; and a clean slate approach to enterprise network security (Ethane).'"

mikemuch writes "Imran Haque has developed a mashup of Google Earth with data from the U.S. Census Bureau, called gCensus. The app uses the XML format known as KML (Keyhole Markup Language), which can create shapes and colors on the maps displayed by GE. Haque had to build custom code libraries (which he's made available as open source) that could generate KML for the project. He also had to extract the relevant data from the highly counter-intuitive Census Bureau files and store them in a database that could handle geographic data. gCensus lets you do stuff like create colorful overlays on maps showing population ages, race, and family size distributions."

doom writes "I think they call them "exit polls" because people bolt for the exits when you mention them, but I'm still fascinated by the subject myself, and this book is one of the reasons why. In Was the 2004 Presidential Election Stolen?, the central focus is, of course, on the infamous exit-poll discrepancies of the 2004 US Presidential election; but the authors also put it into context: they discuss the 2000 election, the irregularities in Ohio in 2004, the electronic voting machines issues, and the media's strange reluctance to report on any of these problems. Further, in the chapter "How did America really vote?", they compare the indications of the raw exit-poll data to other available polling data. Throughout, Freeman and Bleifuss do an excellent job of presenting arguments based on statistical analysis in a clear, concise way." Read the rest of doom's review Was the 2004 Presidential Election Stolen? author Steve Freeman & Joel Bleifuss pages 265 publisher Seven Stories Press rating 9 reviewer doom ISBN 1583226877 summary Exit Polls, Election Fraud, and the Official Count

The heart of the book in my opinion, is Chapter 5, "The inauguration eve exit-poll report": The Edison and Mitofsky firms that conducted the NEP exit polls later released a report trying to explain how they could have gotten it so far wrong. Freeman and Bleifuss, of course, take issue with the presumption that the discrepancies must be "errors", and argue in a different direction. This section makes an exciting read (in a nerdy sort of way) it's an impressive piece of statistical judo: Freeman and Bleifuss take on Edison/Mitofsky with their own data, and totally shred their conclusions. The authors show: That the exit-poll discrepancies had a statistically significant correlation with the use of electronic voting machines, with races in battleground states, and in almost all cases favored the Republicans. The "Reluctant Bush Respondant" theory looks extremely unlikely: response rates actually look slightly better in Bush strongholds than in Kerry strongholds; and while media skepticism remains strong among conservatives, it has been on the rise among Democrats, and yet the data shows no shift in relative avoidance of pollsters. They also deal with the various other excuses that were floated shortly after the election: The discrepancies can't be shrugged off with an "exit polls are not reliable" — theory shows that they should be better than any other survey data, and history shows that they always have been pretty reliable. There was no upswing of support for Bush throughout election day — that impression was entirely an artifact of the media "correcting" the exit-poll figures to match the official results. One of the book's authors, Steven Freeman, was one of the first to examine the exit-poll discrepancies, and as a professor at University of Pennsylvania with a background in survey design, he was well equipped to begin delving into the peculiarities he had noticed.

Overall, this is an excellent book for people interested in evaluating the data; with lots of graphs that make it easy to do informal estimates of the strength of their conclusions (just eye-balling the scatter, the correlations they point to look real, albeit a little loose, as you might expect). There's also an appendix with a very clear exposition of the the concept of statistical significance, and how it applies to this polling data. There are of course, limits to what one can conclude just from the exit-poll discrepancies: "We reiterate that this does not prove the official vote count was fraudulent. What it does say is that the discrepancy between the official count and the exit polls can't be just a statistical fluke, but commands some kind of systematic explanation: Either the exit poll was deeply flawed or else the vote count was corrupted. "

This is a remarkably restrained book: unlike many authors addressing this controversial subject, Freeman and Bleifuss have resisted the temptation to rant or speculate or even to editorialize very much. Freeman claims that he is not a political person (and adds "I despise the Democrats"); possibly this has helped him to maintain his neutrality and focus on the facts of the case.

Personally, I found this book to be something of a revelation: in the confusion immediately after the 2004 election, I had the impression that the people who wanted to believe that it was legitimate at least had some wiggle room. There was some disagreement about the meaning of the exit polls: there was that study at Berkeley that found significant problems, but then the MIT study chimed in saying there wasn't, so who do you believe? The thing is, the MIT guys later admitted that they got it wrong: they used the "corrected" data, not the originally reported exit poll results. The media never covered that development, and I missed it myself...

On the subject of electronic voting machines, They include a chapter discussing electronic voting in general which covers ground that is by now familiar with most readers here: the strange case of Wally O'Dell and Diebold; and also the lesser known problems with ES&S. Have you heard this one? "In 1992, Hagel, then an investment banker and president of the holding company McCarthy & Co., became chairman of American Information Systems, which was to become ES&S in 1999. [...] In the 1996 elections, Hagel launched his political career with two stunning upsets. He won a primary victory in Nebraska [...] despite the fact that he was not well known. Then, in the general election, Hagel was elected to the Senate in what Business Week described as 'an unexpected 1996 landslide victory over Ben Nelson, Nebraska's popular Democratic governor.'"

My experience is that a lot of people need to hear this point: "The voting machine company Datamark, which became American Information Systems and is now known as ES&S, was founded in 1980 by two brothers, Bob and Todd Urosevich. Today, Todd is a vice president at ES&S and Bob is CEO of Diebold Election Systems."

It's impossible to see how you can come away from this situation without seeing that we badly need reform of the electoral system: even if you don't believe the 2004 election was "stolen", how do you know the next one isn't going to be? A paper trail that can actually be recounted would be a nice start, eh? But only a start. As the author's point out: "We devoted a chapter to the ills of electronic voting, but a critical lesson of the 2004 election is that not only DREs, but all kinds of voting machine systems are suspect. Edison/Mitofsky data showed that while hand counted ballots accurately reflected exit-poll survey results, counts from all the major categories of voting machines did not."

In one short passage, the authors list a few "grounds for hope", but following up on these points is not encouraging: The Diebold-injunction law suit in California brought by VoterAction has since been denied and one attempt at a paper trail amendment, HR 550 has stalled out.

If you're looking for an answer to the question posed by the book's title, the authors conclude: "So how did America really vote? Every independent measure points to a Kerry victory of about 5 percentage points in the popular vote nationwide, a swing of 8 to 10 million votes from the official count."

Of the many and various potentially depressing books out there about the state of the United States, I recommend this one highly: it addresses a critical set of issues that everything else depends on.

You can purchase Was the 2004 Presidential Election Stolen? from bn.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.

An anonymous reader writes "Some coders modified Introversion's DEFCON, the game of nuclear war, by replacing the audio and visual components and some code to make a Christmas mod where you deliver presents instead of nukes to children (Bombers become sleighs, Fighters become reindeer, SAMs become Snowmen, etc). Their site explains the x86 assembly hackery and artistic components of their holiday hack."

Roland Piquepaille writes "Organic — or carbon-based — transistors are not new and can be used to design flexible computer displays, RFID tags and sensors. However, these organic single crystals could not be mass-produced because they needed to be individually handpicked. But now, researchers at Stanford University and the University of California-Los Angeles (UCLA) have developed a new method for building flexible organic transistor arrays. Even if the researchers have reached a density of 13 million crystals per square inch (or 2 million per square centimeter), there are still several issues to solve before this method can be used for commercial applications of these fast transistors."

evanwired writes "Revolution is a word that's often thrown around with little thought in high tech circles, but this one looks real. Wired News has a comprehensive report on computer scientists' efforts to adapt graphics processors for high performance computing. The goal for these NVidia and ATI chips is to tackle non-graphics related number crunching for complex scientific calculations. NVIDIA announced this week along with its new wicked fast GeForce 8800 release the first C-compiler environment for the GPU; Wired reports that ATI is planning to release at least some of its proprietary code to the public domain to spur non-graphics related development of its technology. Meanwhile lab results are showing some amazing comparisons between CPU and GPU performance. Stanford's distributed computing project Folding@Home launched a GPU beta last month that is now publishing data putting donated GPU performance at 20-40 times the efficiency of donated CPU performance."

prostoalex writes "Is it a good idea to go into Computer Science? Yes, there are certainly pending labor shortages as Indian companies outsource to the United States, but speakers of Stanford Computer Forum generally agree that it's a good career choice. From the article: 'To ensure job security, students must learn business, communication and interpersonal skills, Vardi recommended. The personal touch will become as important as technological expertise, he said. "There are jobs galore," agreed Suzanne Bigas, assistant director of the Stanford Computer Forum.'"

Max Romantschuk writes "Nvidia is apparently working on an x86 CPU with integrated graphics. The target market seems to be OEMs, but what other prospects could a solution like this have? Given recent development with projects like Folding@Home's GPU client you can't help but wonder about the possibilities of a CPU with an integrated GPU. Things like video encoding and decoding, audio processing and other applications could benefit a lot from a low latency CPU+GPU combo. What if you could put multiple chips like these in one machine? With AMD+ATI and Intel's own integrated graphics, will basic GPU functionality be integrated in all CPU's eventually? Will dedicated graphics cards become a niche product for enthusiasts and pros, like audio cards already largely have?" The article is from the Inquirer, so a dash of salt might make this more palatable.

ludd1t3 writes, "The Folding@Home project has put forth some impressive performance numbers with the GPU client that's designed to work with the ATI X1900. According to the client statistics, there are 448 registered GPUs that produce 29 TFLOPS. Those 448 GPUs outperform the combined 25,050 CPUs registered by the Linux and Mac OS clients. Ouch! Are ASICs really that much better than general-purpose circuits? If so, does that mean that IBM was right all along with their AS/400, iSeries product which makes heavy use of ASICs?"

SB_SamuraiSam writes, "Today the Folding@Home Group at Stanford University released a client (download here) that allows participants to fold on their ATI 19xx series R580-core graphics cards. AnandTech reports, 'With help from ATI, the Folding@Home team has created a version of their client that can utilize ATI's X19xx GPUs with very impressive results. While we do not have the client in our hands quite yet, as it will not be released until Monday, the Folding@Home team is saying that the GPU-accelerated client is 20 to 40 times faster than their clients just using the CPU.'"

SB_SamuraiSam writes, "Today the Folding@Home Group at Stanford University released a client (download here) that allows participants to fold on their ATI 19xx series R580-core graphics cards. AnandTech reports, 'With help from ATI, the Folding@Home team has created a version of their client that can utilize ATI's X19xx GPUs with very impressive results. While we do not have the client in our hands quite yet, as it will not be released until Monday, the Folding@Home team is saying that the GPU-accelerated client is 20 to 40 times faster than their clients just using the CPU.'"

eliot1785 writes "Stanford's Folding@Home project is reporting that Sony debuted a Folding@Home client for the PlayStation 3 today in Germany. Researchers hope to use the power of the PS3's Cell processor to greatly expand the number of FLOPS of which their network is capable. F@H also announced today that they will release a client capable of running on ATI graphics processors. With these two new developments, F@H hopes to raise the 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." Reader TommyBear points out a collection of papers showing scientific advances made by the F@H researchers.

eliot1785 writes "Stanford's Folding@Home project is reporting that Sony debuted a Folding@Home client for the PlayStation 3 today in Germany. Researchers hope to use the power of the PS3's Cell processor to greatly expand the number of FLOPS of which their network is capable. F@H also announced today that they will release a client capable of running on ATI graphics processors. With these two new developments, F@H hopes to raise the 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." Reader TommyBear points out a collection of papers showing scientific advances made by the F@H researchers.

eliot1785 writes "Stanford's Folding@Home project is reporting that Sony debuted a Folding@Home client for the PlayStation 3 today in Germany. Researchers hope to use the power of the PS3's Cell processor to greatly expand the number of FLOPS of which their network is capable. F@H also announced today that they will release a client capable of running on ATI graphics processors. With these two new developments, F@H hopes to raise the 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." Reader TommyBear points out a collection of papers showing scientific advances made by the F@H researchers.

Yesterday's post about a Wall Street Journal article critiquing the current allocation of distributed number-crunching projects drew a huge range of comments, some favoring the proposition that seemingly quixotic distributed-computing endeavors (specifically, the alien-hunting SETI@home project) were diverting resources better spent on closer-to-home, pragmatic research, such as cancer or climate prediction, or perhaps best never converted to electricity in the first place. Read on for the Backslash summary of the conversation.

SETI@home is probably the best-known distributed computing project in the world. Several readers questioned not just the efficiency of spending computer cycles sifting for alien communications with SETI@home, but whether this search is based on a sensible idea in the first place. Reader TheSync, pointing to a Princeton research paper, offered an interesting case for another approach to seeking alien intelligence:

"Radio SETI is really a waste of time. Optical SETI is the logical choice because

1. Visible light-emitting devices are smaller and lighter than microwave or radio-emitting devices.
2. Visible light-emitting devices produce higher bandwidths and can consequently send information much faster.
3. Interference from natural sources of microwaves is more common than from visible sources.
4. Naturally occurring nanosecond pulses of light are mostly likely nonexistent, although there are all kinds of radio signals that could be similar to intentional SETI transmissions. Thus Optical SETI does not require grid computing to find signals.
5. Exact frequencies of light are not required, as nanosecond unfiltered light pulses would still outshine the planet's star by over 30 times.

Optical SETI detection out to 100 light-years is doable today, with a bit more work optical SETI out to 1,000 light-years is possible."

More generally, reader theCat says he gave up on SETI@home "at the exact moment when I recognized that radio broadcast, even assuming other life forms discover it, is just a quick stepping stone toward more efficient/direct means of distribution, like wires or fiber. Or drums. Or pheremones. Or telepathy. ... SETI has always barked up the wrong tree. Not because there are no intelligent races out there — and I really do suspect there are — but because if they are intelligent in a way that we would even recognize then they've moved on to other forms of communication, or settled into a fine state of just dealing with every day as it comes and not worring about events in their version of Iraq."

Whether or not their approaches are optimal, reader exp(pi*sqrt(163)) defended the more esoteric distributed computing projects like SETI on a pessimistic ground, writing that after two years in computational chemistry for what is now GlaxoSmithKline, "I became strongly convinced that computers do not find cures for diseases - or even give you much understanding of illnesses. Molecular modeling is so far from being able to model in vivo molecules that it's practically worthless. ... [W]e already know that trials at this stage are poorly correlated with actual drug usefulness, simulations are just as much a waste of resources as SETI. ... It seems to me that molecular modeling is actually one of those hard 'macho' (but ultimately pointless) projects that gets funding because to criticize it makes you seem anti-drug, anti-therapy and anti-human-progress. (I'm not saying people shouldn't try to model molecules. This is a great blue-sky goal. But people who are trying to find drugs or therapies shouldn't be wasting their time with such techniques.)"

A persistent suggestion that SETI@home and similar projects were wasteful for failing to deliver enough tangible benefits to present-day society provoked several readers to defend the importance of voluntary participation; Chrisq compared the cycles spent on distributed science to donations to charities, writing "I don't like the way that some animal charities get more money than children's charities. Obviously the people making donations disagree. The point is the donor decides — if someone is giving something away, then they decide."

One reader suggested sarcastically "You know what's a waste of time? Gardening. You spend all this time and energy just to raise a few tomatoes that could have been bought at the store for cheap. ... People should stop gardening and focus their time and energy on solving global warming, but I don't presume to tell anyone what they should be doing with their time."

Another offered a tongue-in-cheek response providing a few facetious parallels: "It's a waste that people use their cars to go see a movie when they could be delivering food to the homeless shelter. It's a waste that people are storing ice cream in the fridge when they could be storing donated blood plasma."

Many readers, though, provided examples of projects that they consider worthy their computing efforts, either instead of or in addition to SETI.

"Personally, I always felt SETI was not very philanthropic — more like an amusing experiment in grid computing," says tedgyz, and suggests that grid.org to users who would like to spend some cycles on medical research. "They provide great features for managing all your computers that run the grid projects. You can even choose which research to participate in. And, to satiate a geek's lust for power, they have rankings for your aggregate compute time."

Perhaps the WSJ article draws a false dichotomy, however: one reader asked "Does Carl realize that it's possible to crunch more than one project at a time with BOINC? Right now I'm attached SETI, Einstein, Rosetta & LHC. It works on one for a bit and then will switch to another for a bit. And so what if SETI@home will never find anything, it's a cool looking screen saver!"

(Another reader reported dissatisfaction with BOINC: "I upgraded from the old SETI@Home client to BOINC when it became available - but the BOINC client required too much effort on my part and was getting in my way. ... I'm donating my CPU cycles to some altruistic cause, I don't want to have to RTFM. I just want to install and forget. For this reason I miss the old SETI client, and have, as a result, now stopped contributing.")

Eventual benefits aside, some readers doubt that the medical research projects' goals parallel their own: one reader writes "... I won't do the ones for the drug companies. My grandfather was denied a chance at surviving cancer in the 60's, but the big drug companies went to the FDA against the doctor who had a good success rate for curing colon/stomach cancer because one of the chemicals used was not FDA approved. The big drug companies are not looking for cures, they are looking for drugs to sell."

In response to fears that medical-research undertakings would exploit their volunteers' contributions to the data crunching, Lars Westergren several times pointed out that the Stanford-based Folding@home protein-folding project, at least, has committed itself to sharing the data generated by its volunteers, citing the project's promise (found in its FAQ) that

"We will not sell the data or make any money off of it. ... Moreover, we will make the data available for others to use. In particular, the results from Folding@home will be made available on several levels. Most importantly, analysis of the simulations will be submitted to scientific journals for publication, and these journal articles will be posted on the web page after publication. Next, after publication of these scientific articles which analyze the data, the raw data of the folding runs will be available for everyone, including other researchers, here on this web site."

In another comment, Westergren argued that "[e]ven if this worst-case scenario did happen [of donated cycles being turned into secret-formula drugs], the cycles donated would not be wasted. You would have helped advance human scientific research, and the medicines created would still be saving peoples' lives."

Along similar lines, as reader lhbtubajon puts it, "[i]f a company starts manufacturing a product so expensive that they cannot make a profit on it, they will soon cease to exist, as will the beneficial product they hoped to give to the world."

Whatever the ends to which the data is eventually put, many readers raised another objection: power consumption. Shisha outlines the inherent uncertainty of whether cycle-donation makes sense:

"All those free computer cycles are not that free. Modern CPUs consume more electricity to do more work and someone has to pay the electricity bills. Busy CPUs need more cooling and fans that run at full throttle for a year do wear out and fail (and you risk burning some important component, even if the PC is designed to shut down when it detects overheating). That's simply because desktop PCs are desktop PCs and not workstations and the assumption is that the fans will have to run at full throttle for maybe half an hour at a time. The real costs are not easy to work out, but it might, just might be more efficient to donate the money to charity."

(This analysis, according to another reader, "[underestimates] the quality of a desktop PC. I ran SETI and climateprediction.net for about 4 years straight on a dual G4 PowerMac. Ran like a champ. 100% CPU for months straight. Never had a problem. They can take abuse.")

Placing the WSJ article into context, FlynnMP3 pointed out that author Gomes isn't trying to force anyone to change their computing behavior, and suggested an argument that SETI@home might specifically hold greater worth than can be divined from its success rate so far:

This is merely an opinion piece. It's easy to take the pragmatic road and donate personal computing cycles to cancer research or something as equally earth based, citing return-of-results arguments.

I postulate that the returns for finding out if there is intelligent life in outer space has greater implications for the world's population. Not immediate concerns mind you (unless something extraordinary happens), but the practical usage will eventually seep out of the acedemic and scientific circles and benefit the population in ways that we cannot possibly imagine."

More succintly, another reader's understatement may explain just why so many people are happy to donate a few watts in the quest for E.T. life: "Odd, I can think of few things that would change life on earth more than a verifiable intelligent signal from outer space. This story reminds me to go download SETI@home again."

Thanks to the readers whose comments helped inform this discussion, especially those quoted above:

• exp(pi*sqrt(163))
• theCat
• tedgyz
• FlynnMP3
• BadAnalogyGuy
• flafish
• LarsWestergren
• FiveDollarYoBet
• gzur
• Shisha
• York the Mysterious
• Hythlodaeus

Alien54 writes "Who wants to pay for Stanford's Crypto Course, when University of Washington has made the whole Cryptography Course available online for free. Yes, all the presentations, videos (mp3, WMV), homework, quizzes etc. are available online. The material seems pretty decent, and is intended for an advanced audience." Found on linkfilter.

An anonymous reader writes "An article by James Boyle in the FT argues that we are (slowly) moving towards a 'cultural environmentalism' that tries to protect the public domain in the way that the environmental movement tries to protect the natural ecology. Apparently there will be a (free) conference at Stanford on the subject soon, organized by Larry Lessig's Center there."

inexion writes "PhyOrg is reporting that SLAC (Stanford Linear Accelerator Center) scientists have found a way to test the revolutionary theory, which posits that there are 10 or 11 dimensions in our universe. This past December, Joanne Hewett, Thomas Rizzo, and student Ben Lillie published an article in Physical Review Letters which shows theoretically how to measure the number of dimensions that comprise the universe. By determining how many dimensions exist, Hewett and Rizzo hope to either confirm or repudiate string theory under specific conditions which would consist of creating and examining 'micro-black holes', which could be formed by smashing two high energy protons together. Using the predicted decay properties of the emitted neutrinos, Hewett and Rizzo solved equations to find that our universe may have more than 10 or 11 dimensions -- too many dimensions to be explained by string theory."

sciencenews writes to tell us that a physicist at Stanford has just recently published a peer review website for several physics lectures focusing on a single underlying idea that "time is not a single dimension of spacetime but rather a local geometric distinction in spacetime." The science is presented quite clearly and originally uses GPS systems as a point of focus. From the article: "Not too long ago, people thought the Earth was flat, which meant they thought that gravity pointed in the same direction everywhere. Today, we think of that as a silly idea, but at the same time, most people today (including most scientists) still think of spacetime as if it were a big box with 3 space dimensions and 1 time dimension. So, like gravity for a flat Earth, the single time dimension for the 'big box universe' points in one direction, from the Big-Bang into the future. A lot of lip service is given to the idea of "curved spacetime", but the simplistic 3+1 'box' remains the dominant concept of what cosmic spacetime is like."

John David Funge writes "In Dr David Ellerman's book Intellectual Trespassing as a Way of Life there are a number of interesting essays. But there is one particular essay, entitled "The Semantics Differentiation of Minds and Machines," that caught my attention and which should be of interest to Slashdot readers. In that essay Dr Ellerman claims that "after several decades of debate, a definitive differentiation between minds and machines seems to be emerging into view." In particular, Dr Ellerman argues that the distinction between minds and machines is that while machines (i.e., computers) make excellent symbol manipulation devices, only minds have the additional capacity to ascribe semantics to symbols." Read the rest of John's review. Intellectual Trespassing as a Way of Life author David P. Ellerman pages 290 pages publisher Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc. rating 7 reviewer John David Funge ISBN 0847679322 summary Dramatic changes or revolutions in a field of science are often made by outsiders or "trespassers".

However, Dr Ellerman's argument appears circular. In particular, Dr Ellerman seems to have decided that, by definition, the only possible semantic interpretation for any collection of wires, capacitors, transistors, etc. that we would commonly refer to as a "computer" is as nothing more than a symbol manipulation device. While a computer is indeed (at the very least) a symbol manipulation device, what is there to prevent another mind ascribing additional semantic interpretations to the collection of wires, capacitors, transistors, etc. that we commonly refer to as a "computer"? In particular, what if my mind were willing to make the semantic interpretation that a computer is a device that can both manipulate symbols and can also ascribe semantics to symbols.

Moreover, what if I one day met a collection of blood vessels, skin, bones, etc. called Dr Ellerman? What would prevent me from ascribing to him the semantic interpretation that he is nothing more than a symbolic manipulation device? After all, Dr Ellerman concedes that their may be no way of distinguishing minds from machines purely on the basis of behavior. That is he specifically acknowledges that computers may one day pass the Turing test. So why would my mind not then be able to legitimately ascribe any semantic interpretation (that fits the observed behavior) I see fit to either humans or machines?

It seems that Dr Ellerman's essay considers two different types of physical devices that are potentially indistinguishable on the basis of behavior. Then arbitrarily defines one type of device (computers) to correspond to nothing more than symbolic manipulation and the other (human brains) to have the additional ability to ascribe semantics. Upon adopting these two axioms, he is then (somewhat unsurprisingly) able to conclude there is a distinction! But the distinction simply arises from the fact that he has arbitrarily defined a distinction in the first place.

In another essay in the collection, entitled "Trespassing against the Happy Consciousness of Orthodox Economics," Dr Ellerman argues that modern Western societies are not as free from slavery as orthodox economics would have us believe. In particular, he concludes that work in non-democratic firms is nothing less than a form of "temporary voluntary slavery". It would be ironic therefore if his essay on minds and machines were one day used to justify the slavery of (non-human) machines. Indeed, Dr Ellerman's characterization of the supposed intrinsic differences between humans and machines is sadly reminiscent of the despicable and unscientific arguments about intrinsic racial differences that were once used to justify human slavery."
You can purchase Intellectual Trespassing as a Way of Life from bn.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.

Omkar writes "According to Kotaku, the Xbox 360's price has been cut to a mere $150 by several Japanese retailers. Apparently they can't send unsold inventory back to Microsoft, so they're desperate to free up space." Indeed, Next Generation reports that something like 60% of all Japanese stock goes unsold. However, 1up has found that the price cuts aren't the whole story. The price cuts aren't because of consumer interest, but a result of specially priced bundles. From that article: "... this is simple another example of Japan's hardware bundling practices. So, although the 360 isn't selling as quickly as it did in North America (about 28% of the units shipped have been sold so far, according to a Bloomberg report), the photo doesn't indicate that prices were slashed after launch day as some sort of desperate measure - it means that Japan has bundled offers that are just as annoying as the ones we have in North America."

chrizbot writes "A friend of mine studying journalism at Google's alma mater interviewed Steve Wozniak of Apple Computer fame. He chimes in on open source, DRM, record companies and how software from big companies suck so bad (including Apple's!). The part my friend doesn't include is how he guessed a trick was performed and won a necklace from him!" From the article: "Sometimes the engineers are true artists and really care what they're doing, doing a really great job. Although, I don't know how much I can even say that because the big companies, Microsoft, Apple and AOL, they tend to turn out the crappiest products, you know, software-wise. The ones that have the most bugs, the most items that are supposedly in there but don't work. The most things that are left out because they aren't finished. The most things that are inconsistent with the way they did their last program. I get the worst, worst software almost always from Apple."

virgil_disgr4ce writes "Wired is reporting that a Stanford student using about 90,000 microlenses has developed a plenoptic camera whose images can be refocused, via software, after they are exposed." From the article: "'We just think it'll lead to better cameras that make it easier to take pictures that are in focus and look good,' said Ng's adviser, Stanford computer science professor Pat Hanrahan."

Slashback tonight brings updates and continuations of recent Slashdot stories including a continuation of the Massachusetts document format debate, a response from the US State Department on RFID passports, a unique celebration of Firefox's 100 millionth download, and more.

Politics still muddying the water of the MA OpenDocument debate. The Commonwealth's Secretary of State William Galvin says he has "grave concerns" about the switch and told secretary of administration and finance Thomas Trimarco that "we will not be participating." Galvin is considered one of the strong candidates to run as a rival candidate for next year's gubernatorial race against incumbent Mitt Romney who supports the switch.

RFID passports still the best option. The US State Department released a final ruling on the issue of RFID technology to be included in all US passports after October 2006 which also contained some of the reasoning behind their move. Other technologies were apparently looked at and discarded due to the difficulty of implementation and several security measures have apparently been taken to try and placate the opposition.

Firefox fans at Oregon State celebrate 100 million downloads. CNet has a pictorial about a local OSU LUG that had a few interesting ways to celebrate the recent big numbers on the Firefox downloads page. Happy to show their support students both painted a giant Firefox logo and launched a weather balloon, I can't think of any better way to say congratulations.

DrDOS didn't really break, it just reverted. The FreeDOS folks have an update on their webpage stating that DrDOS 8.1 no longer exists and all links on the DrDOS webpage apparently point to DrDOS 7.03. There were some negative reactions to the release or 8.1 stating that it included software that it shouldn't have so for now the "band-aid" fix appears to be in place.

Flexbeta takes a look at Flock. Noting the roots of Flock in Mozilla's Firefox browser, the folks over at Flexbeta take a quick look at the additional functionality offered by this newcomer. This comes with the recent news that Flock has also decided to open source their browser. Looks like this Firefox offspring is fighting hard for some recognition of its own.

iTunes continues to take over the world. With the recent release of iTunes Australia and Apple's continued growth in the industry a recent announcement brings us "Standford on iTunes". This new service will give alumni and the general public access to a wide range of Stanford-specific digital audio content.

leonbrooks writes "First a Stanford Medicine Magazine article speaks about RNA 'produced by plants that turn genes on and off', and now a Science Magazine issue says 'For a long time, RNA has lived in the shadow of its more famous chemical cousin DNA and of the proteins that supposedly took over RNA's functions in the transition from the 'RNA world' to the modern one. The shadow cast has been so deep that a whole universe [of RNA] has remained hidden from view, until recently' and speaks of 'an order of magnitude more transcripts than genes', suggesting that more actual coding is done through RNA than DNA. Is everything we know about genetics off-base? (no pun intended)"