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The Chinese firewall is actually only one part of the large information control that China has forced upon it's people. This project is called "Golden Shield". Most people in China find a way around the firewall.

However China's information control doesn't stop at just the Internet. During the SARS scare, China tried to keep information about it contained but was unable to do so because they did not consider the use of SMS messaging and similar technologies. This has only given them more determination to control all information through the Golden Shield Project.

It's an interesting video, well worth watching for the insight Colwell displayed.

DANSE has a great review of a lot of different options. Most are cross-platform and scriptable and many are open source. They are interested in building python-based tools for neutron scattering experiments, so there is that bias to the wiki. But they have good screenshots & good pros/cons that many other projects can relate to.

As others have suggested, Grace is fantastic for 2D. Hippodraw is the most under-rated/unheard of that is also quite amazing. I use them both. I also use Matplotlib with my python work.

If you do LaTeX & script your plots, Gri is a good bet.

I have sometimes used gnuplot & Scigraphica, but they are less useful to me. A lot of other people still use gnuplot, so it is always good to have in the toolkit. It also has decent 3D that is not present in my preferred 2D programs. But it is uglier and clumsier than alternatives. Scigraphica wants to be Microcal Origin, but it isn't there yet. It also dropped out of development for quite a while.

I like open source. But if you are agnostic (and have deep pockets), I always thought tecplot looked cool.

Graphite is used as a nuclear reaction moderator :

Moderator. This is material which slows down the neutrons released from fission so that they cause more fission. It may be water, heavy water, or graphite.

Whilst the graphite moderator caught fire and other Western designs use water instead, it wasn't a coolant.

http://cse.stanford.edu/class/sophomore-college/pr ojects-00/risc/risccisc/ this is probally what your refering to. also try http://www.osnews.com/story.php?news_id=3997

http://www-db.stanford.edu/pub/voy/museum/pictures /display/Sail-baumgart/a2-LesEarnest-LES.jpg

It's going to take a lot more than recycling, hybrids, and low power computing to avoid the disaster.

I've heard reports of a remarkable new fuel called 'coal' which should last for the next 300 years. If you want to consider the long term, breeder reactors, with current technology, should last for thousands of years. (The upper theoretical threshold is somewhere in the millions or billions of years!)

I think your prediction of a power crunch is a tad premature.

Sure, we will do more harm to the environment. Our money will continue to flow to unstable countries. But forecasting the end of civilization due to peak oil is similar to forecasting the end of civilization due to peak whale oil.

Simultaneous MPEG2 decoding, as shown here, is what computer architects call an embarrassingly-parallel problem. The easiest way to speed it up is just add more processors - with 8 processing units, the Cell is a great fit.

However, the really interesting problems are the ones that don't scale linearly in performance with the number of processors - these are the tasks for which the Cell processor will probably be running with 7 idle units and 1 active. These are also the tasks where we need actually new architectures; supercomputers like BlueGene will tear their way through extremely parallel problems.

One very cool approach to handling less parallel workloads (or even "sequential" workloads - like the majority of programs people usually run on PCs) is speculative threading - taking a sequential program, breaking it up into chunks, and running those chunks in parallel. Of course, when you do this, you have to make sure that the later work doesn't depend on the earlier operations, and check for violations of "sequential execution semantics" (programs expecting sequential execution semantics are ones that expect their instructions to execute in order - basically any program you'd write today). The Stanford Hydra project is an example that uses this technique; Wisconsin Multiscalar Group takes an approach that requires modified binaries to do something similar.

One thing people fail to mention when they talk about the supposedly-amazing performance of the Cell processor is its floating point precision: first, it only attains it's >200GFLOPS with single precision numbers (not accurate enough for many scientific applications), and second, it doesn't follow IEEE754 rounding requirements. The rounding policy in IEEE754 floats is specifically designed so that as you perform more and more calculations, the error doesn't grow rapidly. Cutting corners lets you calculate faster but even less accurate numbers. Basically, to get the high FLOPS ratings, Cell sacrifices precision in both the number of bits used, and the accuracy of the data in those bits.

I'm not real clear to me how any of that stuff is supposed to be bad for you - sounds pretty healthy to me.

But it's all lies. Comfortable, well-meaning lies, but also hurtful, destructive lies, too. I just couldn't stand it. Better to know the truth, even if it isn't what you want to hear, than to waste your life.

Can you prove that "it's all lies"? As an aside, a fellow named Kurt Gödel believed that he was in possession of a proof that they were not all lies. And plenty of other geeks, like Donald Knuth, and Fred Brooks, don't think they're lies. Who knows - maybe even John McCarthy, as well.

I'm glad I'm a scientifically-minded geek who can appreciate the numinous in this universe without having to also believe in a white-bearded old man who condemns every human being who doesn't follow his bizarre, evil rules to an eternity of torture and suffering.

Which of his rules are evil? There's a rather succinct summary of them here:

The Rules, Part I
The Rules, Part II
The Rules, Part III

I'm not real clear to me how any of that stuff is supposed to be bad for you - sounds pretty healthy to me.

But it's all lies. Comfortable, well-meaning lies, but also hurtful, destructive lies, too. I just couldn't stand it. Better to know the truth, even if it isn't what you want to hear, than to waste your life.

Can you prove that "it's all lies"? As an aside, a fellow named Kurt Gödel believed that he was in possession of a proof that they were not all lies. And plenty of other geeks, like Donald Knuth, and Fred Brooks, don't think they're lies. Who knows - maybe even John McCarthy, as well.

I'm glad I'm a scientifically-minded geek who can appreciate the numinous in this universe without having to also believe in a white-bearded old man who condemns every human being who doesn't follow his bizarre, evil rules to an eternity of torture and suffering.

Which of his rules are evil? There's a rather succinct summary of them here:

The Rules, Part I
The Rules, Part II
The Rules, Part III

OK, I found the details. The programmer's name is James Kent and the program was called GigAssembler. This program allowed the public consortium to complete their draft of the genome 3 days before Celera (which is of course debated by Celera, who said they finished their draft a day before that, but both groups announced jointly):

PDF article
Google HTMLized Version of the PDF
Old Slashdot article

OSes like Linux or MacOS don't do them on any architechtures.

Linux does support limited stack and library randomization. However, there are questions as to the effectiveness of these techniques.

Libel applies whereever you attribute something in writing to someone who does not hold that belief. It is always legally actionable.

RTFA, it's not about libel, but copyright infringment, so your precedents are irrelevant. There are legal precedents where use of copyright materials are allowed, such as those listen in section 2 here.

Some banks also block online banking sessions coming in via Marketscore's proxies.

This is the same spyware previously known as "netsetter". There's no question about this being spyware.

Here's Stanford's Information Security Office's statement on Marketscore.

• Security Alert: MarketScore Spyware
  11 Jan 2005

  MarketScore (also called NetSetter) is a spyware-like application that compromises the security of all data sent or received by your web browser, even on "secure" encrypted web sites. All external browser communications are re-routed through MarketScore's proxy servers, so they have access to any "secure" traffic/passwords/accounts that otherwise would be encrypted.

  If you have MarketScore installed on your computer and have used your browser for any services that require WebLogin, your password should be considered compromised. After you have removed MarketScore from your computer, we strongly recommend that you change your SUNet password. This advice also applies to any other secure web sites you may have visited with your browser.

  The Information Security Office is directly contacting owners of machines that appear to behave as if MarketScore is present.

  Technical Detail

  MarketScore reconfigures the browser to use a "proxy server" for all non-local connections, including HTTPS connections. A proxy server is a machine that acts as a middle-man, brokering web page requests intended for other sites. So if the browser on machine A wants to visit web sites C, D, and E it makes all those requests through the proxy server B. B then contacts C, D, and E and passes the results back to A. This is usually transparent to the user on machine A after the browser has been configured to use the proxy.

  Web proxies are typically used in a corporate environment where all web traffic must be controlled or inspected centrally, although in the case of secure HTTPS traffic there is ordinarily nothing the proxy can do except forward the connection or refuse it. In this case, the proxy servers belong to a company called ComScore where they collect and analyze the intercepted data.

  While ordinarily an HTTPS connection would simply pass through a proxy securely, in this case MarketScore also installs a new root certificate in your browser so that it can decrypt all intercepted SSL connections (a "man-in-the-middle" attack) without triggering a security warning from the browser. In normal operation, browsers would complain if a site certificate doesn't match the domain of the URL, but the new root certificate tells the browser to trust ComScore's site certificate for any URL.

This goes well beyond what Marketscore claims their program does.

That seems to settle the issue.

"The ALICE bot is in no real way associated with artificial intelligence. It is a simple if/then sequence using XML tables. Download the source for yourself."

It's not associated with artificial intelligence? Then why, if I go to the ALICE website, do I see a big banner declaring "ALICE Artificial Intelligence Foundation," and why do they call their language "Artificial Intelligence Markup Language"?

What do you think the ALICE bot really does? PATTERN RECOGNITION. It's a simple abstraction of taking a statement and attempting to provide a legible and coherent response.

"Pattern recognition" is vastly different from blind "pattern matching." Any computer program can easily do "pattern matching" -- that's how Alice works, as you yourself admitted when you mentioned that it's an if-then sequence based on preprogrammed responses. That's nothing much more advanced than regexes.

When a human is born, he or she knows nothing of the outside world, let alone of language or vision, yet can learn to speak and recognize things within a few years, just by the process we call "learning." And whether or not ALICE can "learn," it would not be easy to teach it a language from scratch. So "pattern recognition" is the term I used to refer to human-like intelligence. This has no preprogrammed responses to anything. Maybe ALICE is good at chit-chat, but I think we can also agree that such is the least intelligent form of human communication. Anything more substantial than that can't be based on prefabricated statement/response sequences.

Pattern recognition, in this sense, requires many abilities. It requires the basic ability to observe and store patterns, but most importantly, it requires those patterns to be invariant. (See Dileep George's neuroscience research for an example of what is meant by "invariance.") And of course, it requires the ability to perform inductive reasoning on those stored patterns and on new input in order to infer information. No "chatterbot" program has ever come close to any of these.

The idea is that a computer is intelligent if it can hold a conversation with a human such that it is indistinguishable from a conversation with a real human.

RIDICULOUS.

Have you ever actually tried talking to one of these bots (including ALICE)? It is very easy to know that you're not talking to a human. Exceptionally easy. The Loebner Prize judges consistently grant the bots handicaps, acting as if they're actually being fooled. Obviously they're not, and the AI community just wants people to think that it's more advanced than it really is. Unfortnately, some members of the public *are* fooled by that.

The problem is in the Turing Test itself. It assumes that the measure of intelligence is humanoid conversational ability. I strongly disagree with that. Conversation ability is no measure of intelligence. Just for an example, I am exceptionally intelligent (statistically), but I am a poor conversationalist. Casual small-talk has always bewildered me. If I entered myself into the Loebner contest, they might think I'm a bot. Hell, ALICE might accuse me of being a bot.

Anyone who's taken an IQ test will recall that every last question has something to do with pattern recognition. You'll also recall that you were not asked to respond to any conversational questions. That's because invariant pattern recognition abilities (in a loose sense -- this also includes memory/learning and inductive reasoning) are the true mark of intelligence, and this is nearly undisputed. If they really want to test how intelligent a program is, they need to test its patern recognition ability.

Take this program -- http://www.stanford.edu/~dil/invariance/ -- for example. It's gone largely unnoticed, yet it is concrete proof of a huge breakthrough in computer intelligence. This is a little Matlab demo of a very abstract multi-layer intelligence algorithm. In this particular implementation, it is taught a set of small images. Then you can play "Pictionary" with it, drawing shapes and have it recognize them. You may say that this is unremarkable, that shape-recognition is a trivial algorithmic matter unrelated to intelligence. But the author noticed that he could draw shapes "incorrectly" -- like, the little duck picture, except with its head missing, or alphabetical symbols rotated or flipped -- and the program still recognized them. (It failed a few times, but in situations where the shape is so mangled that I would have probably failed too. How's that for a Turing test?) And this program's genius lies in not what it does, but how it does it. All of its functionality is completely abstract. It is a pattern recognizer, not a bitmap-tracer, and there are no hard-coded routines for checking if the image is flipped, rotated, etc.

This is what Palm/Handspring founder Jeff Hawkins (also the founder of new neuroscience startup Numenta, http://www.numenta.com/) calls "Real Intelligence," to distinguish it from the failed Artificial Intelligence effort. He feels that the right way to make computers intelligent is not to have them outwardly imitate human behavior, but to internally function the way the mind really works. Anyone interested should check out his book, On Intelligence http://www.onintelligence.org/. You'll wonder why you ever believed the AI hype.

Artificial Intelligence is a sham, by its very nature. Real Intelligence will be the way of the future.

Everything you can sense is based on faith, science at it's root's is not a religion but it is broadly based on the philosophy of Plato. Like you infer, philosophical beliefs are somewhat easier to change than religious beliefs, but I still have faith that the Sun will come up tommorow regardless of wether I survive to appreciate it. I don't have any trouble with faith in science or religion but as another post pointed out most people confuse faith with dogma.

Nucular has alot of potential but that won't last more than 30 years, the supply of fuel is limited, though lower grade fuels are available at higher cost.

Do you have a source for this information? It is far below any other estimate of nuclear viability I've seen, as they never fall below a few hundred years. In particular, this page suggests that if other sources of energy run short (perhaps in a few centuries), it will become economically reasonable to extract uranium from seawater or granite, and those supplies are virtually limitless.

Nuclear fission is not an unlimited resource.

Wrong.

For all practical purposes it is an unlimited resource.

With breeder reactors and the ability to extract uranium from the sea we are looking at billions of years before we run out.

http://www-formal.stanford.edu/jmc/progress/cohen. html

http://www.nuclearfaq.ca/cnf_sectionG.htm#uranium_ supply

For many reasons, institutional libraries should pay the page charges for their institutional users rather than pay proprietary publishers for a license to read a paper.

1. Once a library ends a non-open-access electronic subscription, it no longer can access articles published while it paid for access. Same if the publisher goes out of business. With a paper subscription, the library at least has printed copies from when it subscribed.

2. The page charge is a one-time cost whereas the license fee is paid by every library on the planet that subscribes to the journal. With digital rights management (DRM), it might be paid each time a user reads an article. Economists tell us that goods should, in a free market, sell for marginal cost. The marginal cost to allow someone to download a PDF file is nearly zero. Here is an estimate. A T1 line, in the US, costs perhaps US$1000/month and offers about 0.2MB/s of bandwidth (megabytes not megabits), figures I got from http://computer.howstuffworks.com/question372.htm. A month has roughly 20 million seconds, so the cost per megabyte is given by:

   ($1000 / month) x (1 month/20 million sec) x (1 sec / 0.2MB) x (100 cents / 1$)

   That comes out to (1/40) cents/MB. Being conservative, say that the full T1 bandwidth is only 25% used and that website administration adds another factor of 2 to the cost, so multiply the above cost by 8. The result is still only 0.2 cents/MB. For a typical 0.1MB pdf article, it is 0.02 cents per download. Even if an article is downloaded 10000 times (most authors would love to be so frequently read!), the total cost is $2. It is a tiny cost compared to reviewing articles, convering them to a decent publication format (e.g. converting to TeX/LaTeX or dealing with absurd figure formats).

   Along the lines of charging marginal cost, the open-access page charges are probably the publisher's marginal cost (or only a bit higher than it). Fine! Scientists would like helpful service providers, such as open-access publishers, to stay in business for a long time, and should be willing to support them.

3. Which brings up a third reason for open-access publication: archiving. All publishers (except perhaps the Royal Society in London, which has published for over 300 years) will go out of business. What happens to their archive of pdf (or whatever format) articles? With open-access publishing, other repositories can mirror all the articles (thereby also redistributing the already tiny bandwidth costs). Replication is the best way to preserve data. Similarly, if the files need to be converted to a new format (PDF version 25, SVG, or whatever), anyone can do so with open-access articles.

4. A fourth reason, related to archiving, is search indexing. If articles are freely available, auto-indexes such as http://scholar.google.com/ will pick it up. If the article is guarded by subscription passwords, it will not be indexed unless the publisher submits the articles to the index. And they may be too busy, or they may be out of business (see reason three above).

As an example of how proprietary publishers can act, Gordon and Breach (GandB), since bought by Taylor and Francis, sued the American Institute of Physics (AIP) in the US, Germany, France, Switzerland because the AIP published a price comparison, and Gordon and Breach's journals came at or near the bottom of the table (i.e. most expensive). GandB claimed that the table was false advertising under the Lanham Act. http://barschall.stanford.edu/ has trial judgements and transcript, as well as the original articles and pricing tables in dispute.

The AIP won the case almost completely, but it cost them millions of dollars. And that cost has affected the thinking of research librarians

Above AC should not be marked troll. The statement is precisely true. The code is not the most important thing. Academic publications are about ideas and methods, and specifically is CS, algorithms.

I'm a CS masters student. I'm taking a class in Computational Geometry. How much code has been presented to me in the class? None. Does this mean that I'm not getting a quality education? Hardly. The combination of pseudocode, description, theorems and proofs are far more useful for understanding a problem in whole than some single implementation would be. Implementations usually include details that are of little interest and would clutter the issue, obscuring the important bits.

Often, code created for research is not really production quality anyways, it is written specifically for a single problem. When code is high quality and sufficiently general purpose that it would actually be useful to others it often is released. In my field of computer graphics, code like this has been released which was used in writing several papers I have read and used.

I've been involved with an undergraduate journal at California State University, Monterey Bay for the past couple of years. Just this year we opted to go with an open source journal management system developed and supported by the Public Knowledge Project Open Journal Systems at the University of British Columbia. We're quite happy with it, both from a technical standpoint and the mission of the project. ePrints is another project working on similar issues.

Hopefully we will see more open access (without requiring payment from authors OR readers!) as libraries and other institutions start to use these great open source tools. It makes management and online publication/archiving really painless. There's even a distributed backup system in place and a group running archiving standards.

As a member of the American Anthropological Association I understand that the journals they publish are supported through subscriber costs which far outweigh the cost of publication. The remaining profit goes to funding the annual conference, administration costs for the association, etc. They have recently made all of the American Anthropologist journals available to members online, a pretty massive project I'm sure.

...but here it's an expectation? Well, I guess this is what you get for giving these places the "rich man's loophole" by making it a nice large (and possibly price fixed) admission fee that's conditionally waived for the undeserving. Now when some Ohio State (or even better, Wright State) students would return the favor for the Wright Flyer stunt at MIT, that'd be news, not some high-tax state that caters to the same crowd as MIT's nearby neighbors, also home to Caltech's evil neighbors.

Projects like Folding@Home already have generated usable results. Their FAQ answers the question "Who "owns" the results? What will happen to them?":

Unlike other distributed computing projects, Folding@home is run by an academic institution (specifically the Pande Group, at Stanford University's Chemistry Department), which is a nonprofit institution dedicated to science research and education. 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.

Projects like Folding@Home already have generated usable results. Their FAQ answers the question "Who "owns" the results? What will happen to them?":

Unlike other distributed computing projects, Folding@home is run by an academic institution (specifically the Pande Group, at Stanford University's Chemistry Department), which is a nonprofit institution dedicated to science research and education. 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.

Projects like Folding@Home already have generated usable results. Their FAQ answers the question "Who "owns" the results? What will happen to them?":

Unlike other distributed computing projects, Folding@home is run by an academic institution (specifically the Pande Group, at Stanford University's Chemistry Department), which is a nonprofit institution dedicated to science research and education. 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.

that should have read "The F@h client can be set to use N% of available CPU time (where N is between 0 and 100%).
It's available here

Sounds like you got some serious, serious horsepower, so I can't resist asking! ;-)

Every undergraduate CS program should integrate some secure coding standards. Something like this:

link

Why should everything in the whole world be dumbed down for the lowest common denominator? These people have to take responsibility for their online actions just like in real life

Read this, then get back to me about the lowest common denominator. (BTW, I agree with you, but that isn't what some schools are teaching). http://www-hoover.stanford.edu/publications/books/ fulltext/schoolreform/132.pdf

That's far too computationally intensive. You know the Folding@Home project? That just handles protein folding. That's the very first step of turning DNA into cells. There's a a gazillion and one steps involved in putting together a human being, and even the very first one, translating DNA into proteins, eludes us.

What you said would be valid if quantum mechanics corresponded to general relativity, but it hasn't been proven explicitly. Their formalisms simply don't cooperate (string theory get's around this, but has no physical evidence to suggest it is true). And neither has a very well understood interpretation.

Two popular contrary arguments.
1. Ehrenfest's Theory, which doesn't show true correspondance.
2. letting h->0, which produces indeterminate forms, and is imo useless.

Also, there is evidence of black holes,

Tipler cylinders (as mentioned), Gödel rotating spaceetimes, Taub-NUT spacetimes, etc. are all common examples of spacetimes with CTCs.

See also this article.

one, I hardly consider wikipedia to be an authority on a subject. there is a Liberal party in canada, and other places, though not in the US. and would you call those who promote speech codes on campuses "liberals"? the constitution is more than abortion and gay marriage. what about property rights. what about gun control. what that really is is not liberalism, but libertarianism. an idea i find somewhat attarctive.

i don't "preceive" liberalism as change. if you'd bother to read what i wrote, you;d understand that the liberal view, historically, has been one of change. for instance, liberalism meant more democratic governments, whereas conservativism meant monarchies. however, compare the US revolution with the french civil war (no, it wasn't a revolution). the big difference was the french experieince was wholly secular and more about retribution (modern day marxists, which oddly enough look alot like the french revo civil war), ours was far more faith based, or traditional. thus ours survived 230+ years, their became a terrorist state then dictatorship in a decade. we had a far more rightist outlook on people, more aristotelian, not the leftist platonic view.

i simplified to keep the post within reason. however, the "left vs. right" debate is not only valid, but a wholly substantive one, the notion of determinism in history. it's what's marxism based on. also fascism. but then again, you'd have to do more than quote wikipedia to know that. be concerned, fine. be more concerned that most high school history teachers don't have a clue about history.

ACM talk
Schmidt
Hölzle

A quick search on KeyKOS makes one wonder: Does it have anything in common with GNU's microkernel efforts? Anyone cares to post a brief overview of KeyKOS, possibly in connection and/or comparison to Mach/HURD?

Short answer: yes it does, and it is actually one of the main reasons why I look forward to use Debian GNU/Hurd in the future. Let me quote my old post from January with some background and interesting links to more informations about KeyKOS:

Still, you can't block every hole in security. Sometimes you just have to hope, right?

Yes, you can. No you don't. Software is just an applied form of discrete mathematics. "Beware of bugs in the above code; I have only proved it correct, not tried it," as Donald Knuth once said. It is possible to present a formal proof of correctness for any algorithm. It is nearly impossible and certainly impractical when you have a big mess of spaghetti code like with most of software that is utter crap, but it is possible nonetheless when you know what are you doing and design appropriately, with very clean, small and isolated parts of your system responsible for enforcing its security policies. Take a look at such operating systems as KeyKOS and EROS. E.g. read Verifying Operating System Security paper by J. S. Shapiro and S. Weber: "This paper presents a proof of correctness of the EROS operating system architecture with respect to confinement." Read some essays by Norman Hardy, especially those on Capability Theory. This is hardly a new idea, see GNOSIS: A Prototype Operating System for the 1990s paper by Bill Frantz, Norm Hardy, Jay Jonekait and Charlie Landau, written more than 25 years ago. The bottom line is: it is certainly possible to have a 100% secure system, but developers don't bother because users don't care.

And here is a newer post of mine asking exactly your question about KeyKOS capabilities in connection to the recent development of The Hurd, in the First Program Executed on L4 Port of GNU/HURD discussion two months ago:

When the first programs run, it is just a matter of time before there is a functional L4 port of Debian GNU/Hurd (or just Debian GNU?). I really like the design of the Hurd, but what I'd like to see the most are not the "POSIX capabilities" but the real capabilities as described in the 1975 paper by Jerome Saltzer and Michael Schroeder, The Protection of Information in Computer Systems. (For those who don't know what am I talking about, I recommend starting from the excellent essay What is a Capability, Anyway? by Jonathan Shapiro, and then reading the capability theory essays by Norman Hardy. As a sidenone I might add that I find it amusing that people who say that there are other advantages than only Digital Restrictions Management of using TCPA/Palladium-like platforms usually quote security fe

Depends on the problem and the memory performance as much as it does on the GPU. There's no good answer to that question. For kicks though, this paper has some measurements for matrix multiply using ATLAS. It's comparing a Pentium 4 to an NV40 GPU. The P4 wins at about 7 GFlops, and the NV40 loses due to horrible memory performance. That's pretty ironic considering that the NV40 has quite a few more FPU's, and that they're in parallel. It's a good example of why you can't ever say for sure how a processor's going to perform until you test it on a real workload.

Not to sound like an ingrate, because this is really cool, but I'd love to see a video tour of this. Growing up in the 80's I have fond memories of randomly catching Mr. Roger's Neighborhood and watching him tour some factory. I'd like to see that in the factories today.

Check this site out. I think it has what you are looking for.

You can choose to run something like SETI@Home, or if you'd actually like to make a difference, Folding@Home.

...on second thought, maybe not.

It doesn't sound like something that I would expect to show up at Folding@Home anytime soon.

Other groups working on optical interconnects: (incomplete list)

Heriot Watt

Cornell University

IBM Zurich

Delft

UIUC

Intel

Stanford

I'm not sure she'll ever successfully shake her image as an ultra-liberal from upper New York

Of course the funny thing is this is only an image he possesses among conservatives. Why? Because if "liberal" means anything other than "pro-choice" or "person Bill O'Reily hates", then Ms. Clinton isn't particularly one.

I could say something here about Hillary Clinton's tendency to be viewed among actual Democrats-- you know, people who actually self-identify as agreeing in some fashion with left-wing or democrat ideals-- as a shady opportunist at best and a Republican at worst. But instead I'm just going to say this:

If you seriously think Hillary Clinton has ever been anything other than a social conservative, or that her social conservatism is in any way linked to the 2005 elections, well, frankly, you've been spending the last 13 years listening to too much of people like Bill O'Reily and too little of everyone else. She's always been like this.

A related, but much more useful, system has already been proposed by Knuth.

Amen to that.

And to think, all those CPUs could actually be doing something useful instead. If it's just about taxing your processor once a week (or maybe more frequently; I've never had the dubious pleasure of a Gentoo install) then surely Folding@Home or SETI@home can provide more than enough exercise for even the most voracious CPU/geek combo.

But, no, of course, that's not l33t enough. I half wonder that if SETI and/or Folding had their clients scroll dummy compile messages across the screen whilst they run, all these die hards might run them instead.

(Though I suppose not a few of them are specifying -O8 just so that they can run SETI at supposedly "breakneck" pace...)

iqu :P

A controller that vibrates isn't exactly a logical thing.

Sure it is.

It's pretty much a degnerate case of a force feedback controller, which is something that has been in development for ages. It's an idea that's obvious to anyone even remotely clueful in this area.


The patent is completely valid and numerous manufacturers have licensed it for their use.

You know this how?
Besides being an obvious idea, and therefore non-patentable there are tons of other reasons this patent could be ruled invaild.

Here's a link showing prior art in 1985.

Sony should be able to fill the courtroom with examples of force feedback/vibration prior to the filing date of this patent. It should be easy to show that vibrating controllers came about from a simple evolution of designs that were already out there, showing no real "invention" just the packing of pre-existing technology in an obvious package.

It sounds like yet another reinventing of Literate Programming and The CWEB System of Structured Documentation by Donald E. Knuth. See also: www.literateprogramming.com. Some quotes:

"I believe that the time is ripe for significantly better documentation of programs, and that we can best achieve this by considering programs to be works of literature. Hence, my title: "Literate Programming."

"Let us change our traditional attitude to the construction of programs: Instead of imagining that our main task is to instruct a computer what to do, let us concentrate rather on explaining to human beings what we want a computer to do.

"The practitioner of literate programming can be regarded as an essayist, whose main concern is with exposition and excellence of style. Such an author, with thesaurus in hand, chooses the names of variables carefully and explains what each variable means. He or she strives for a program that is comprehensible because its concepts have been introduced in an order that is best for human understanding, using a mixture of formal and informal methods that reinforce each other." -- Donald Knuth. "Literate Programming (1984)" in Literate Programming. CSLI, 1992, pg. 99.

More quotes:

"The philosophy behind CWEB is that an experienced system programmer, who wants to provide the best possible documentation of his or her software products, needs two things simultaneously: a language like TeX for formatting, and a language like C for programming. Neither type of language can provide the best documentation by itself; but when both are appropriately combined, we obtain a system that is much more useful than either language separately.

"The structure of a software program may be thought of as a "WEB" that is made up of many interconnected pieces. To document such a program we want to explain each individual part of the web and how it relates to its neighbors. The typographic tools provided by TeX give us an opportunity to explain the local structure of each part by making that structure visible, and the programming tools provided by languages like C make it possible for us to specify the algorithms formally and unambiguously. By combining the two, we can develop a style of programming that maximizes our ability to perceive the structure of a complex piece of software, and at the same time the documented programs can be mechanically translated into a working software system that matches the documentation.

"Besides providing a documentation tool, CWEB enhances the C language by providing the ability to permute pieces of the program text, so that a large system can be understood entirely in terms of small sections and their local interrelationships. The CTANGLE program is so named because it takes a given web and moves the sections from their web structure into the order required by C; the advantage of programming in CWEB is that the algorithms can be expressed in "untangled" form, with each section explained separately. The CWEAVE program is so named because it takes a given web and intertwines the TeX and C portions contained in each section, then it knits the whole fabric into a structured document." -- Donald Knuth. The CWEB System of Structure Documentation. Addison-Wesley. 1994. pg. 1.

In other words, paraphrasing Henry Spencer, "Those who do not understand the ideas of Donald Knuth are condemned to reinvent them, poorly."

It sounds like yet another reinventing of Literate Programming and The CWEB System of Structured Documentation by Donald E. Knuth. See also: www.literateprogramming.com. Some quotes:

"I believe that the time is ripe for significantly better documentation of programs, and that we can best achieve this by considering programs to be works of literature. Hence, my title: "Literate Programming."

"Let us change our traditional attitude to the construction of programs: Instead of imagining that our main task is to instruct a computer what to do, let us concentrate rather on explaining to human beings what we want a computer to do.

"The practitioner of literate programming can be regarded as an essayist, whose main concern is with exposition and excellence of style. Such an author, with thesaurus in hand, chooses the names of variables carefully and explains what each variable means. He or she strives for a program that is comprehensible because its concepts have been introduced in an order that is best for human understanding, using a mixture of formal and informal methods that reinforce each other." -- Donald Knuth. "Literate Programming (1984)" in Literate Programming. CSLI, 1992, pg. 99.

More quotes:

"The philosophy behind CWEB is that an experienced system programmer, who wants to provide the best possible documentation of his or her software products, needs two things simultaneously: a language like TeX for formatting, and a language like C for programming. Neither type of language can provide the best documentation by itself; but when both are appropriately combined, we obtain a system that is much more useful than either language separately.

"The structure of a software program may be thought of as a "WEB" that is made up of many interconnected pieces. To document such a program we want to explain each individual part of the web and how it relates to its neighbors. The typographic tools provided by TeX give us an opportunity to explain the local structure of each part by making that structure visible, and the programming tools provided by languages like C make it possible for us to specify the algorithms formally and unambiguously. By combining the two, we can develop a style of programming that maximizes our ability to perceive the structure of a complex piece of software, and at the same time the documented programs can be mechanically translated into a working software system that matches the documentation.

"Besides providing a documentation tool, CWEB enhances the C language by providing the ability to permute pieces of the program text, so that a large system can be understood entirely in terms of small sections and their local interrelationships. The CTANGLE program is so named because it takes a given web and moves the sections from their web structure into the order required by C; the advantage of programming in CWEB is that the algorithms can be expressed in "untangled" form, with each section explained separately. The CWEAVE program is so named because it takes a given web and intertwines the TeX and C portions contained in each section, then it knits the whole fabric into a structured document." -- Donald Knuth. The CWEB System of Structure Documentation. Addison-Wesley. 1994. pg. 1.

In other words, paraphrasing Henry Spencer, "Those who do not understand the ideas of Donald Knuth are condemned to reinvent them, poorly."

It sounds like yet another reinventing of Literate Programming and The CWEB System of Structured Documentation by Donald E. Knuth. See also: www.literateprogramming.com. Some quotes:

"I believe that the time is ripe for significantly better documentation of programs, and that we can best achieve this by considering programs to be works of literature. Hence, my title: "Literate Programming."

"Let us change our traditional attitude to the construction of programs: Instead of imagining that our main task is to instruct a computer what to do, let us concentrate rather on explaining to human beings what we want a computer to do.

"The practitioner of literate programming can be regarded as an essayist, whose main concern is with exposition and excellence of style. Such an author, with thesaurus in hand, chooses the names of variables carefully and explains what each variable means. He or she strives for a program that is comprehensible because its concepts have been introduced in an order that is best for human understanding, using a mixture of formal and informal methods that reinforce each other." -- Donald Knuth. "Literate Programming (1984)" in Literate Programming. CSLI, 1992, pg. 99.

More quotes:

"The philosophy behind CWEB is that an experienced system programmer, who wants to provide the best possible documentation of his or her software products, needs two things simultaneously: a language like TeX for formatting, and a language like C for programming. Neither type of language can provide the best documentation by itself; but when both are appropriately combined, we obtain a system that is much more useful than either language separately.

"The structure of a software program may be thought of as a "WEB" that is made up of many interconnected pieces. To document such a program we want to explain each individual part of the web and how it relates to its neighbors. The typographic tools provided by TeX give us an opportunity to explain the local structure of each part by making that structure visible, and the programming tools provided by languages like C make it possible for us to specify the algorithms formally and unambiguously. By combining the two, we can develop a style of programming that maximizes our ability to perceive the structure of a complex piece of software, and at the same time the documented programs can be mechanically translated into a working software system that matches the documentation.

"Besides providing a documentation tool, CWEB enhances the C language by providing the ability to permute pieces of the program text, so that a large system can be understood entirely in terms of small sections and their local interrelationships. The CTANGLE program is so named because it takes a given web and moves the sections from their web structure into the order required by C; the advantage of programming in CWEB is that the algorithms can be expressed in "untangled" form, with each section explained separately. The CWEAVE program is so named because it takes a given web and intertwines the TeX and C portions contained in each section, then it knits the whole fabric into a structured document." -- Donald Knuth. The CWEB System of Structure Documentation. Addison-Wesley. 1994. pg. 1.

In other words, paraphrasing Henry Spencer, "Those who do not understand the ideas of Donald Knuth are condemned to reinvent them, poorly."

I have built my own DAW recently using Planet CCRMA at home. I'm sure with your kit you can do some cool things, however everything I have read on the subject would indicate that a single commodity 24-bit soundcard isn't really going to cut it for professional work. Dunno. You tell me. Fortunately, in my case I obtained an RME HDSP 9652 for virtually nothing (many thanks to DLS!)...

However, I don't know how to use the software and I don't know much about this killer DSP card either so basically I am not getting anything done with this kit! Fear not though, it will not go to waste. I will learn, because I want to. I have the ProTools manual (which is indicated as a helpful reference for Ardour). I have the DSP manual. The digital recording process interests me so I will learn how to do it...

However, some artists do NOT want to be recording engineers (which is an artform of its own in every respect).

Some people don't want to learn how to master a disc.

They may be world-class musicians but not have an ounce of geek in them. In their case they need someone to handle that side of the equation for them, and that isn't cheap...

I guess I should have said, "not everyone has a DAW in their house--or even wants one for that matter."

This is karmic payback for the DUMBEST OPENING THEME SONG IN THE HISTORY OF TV.

regards,

I agree, it was hard to get in the mood for Star Trek after the opening song. The music makes one think they are about to watch homosexuals in space.

It makes me think of this:

http://graphics.stanford.edu/~pkeyani/links/aliens /spock_naked.jpg

or, this:

http://images.google.com/images?q=tbn:mrQWaxAGFxEJ :www.tekwh0re.net/wp/wp-content/Anki-Spock-shirtle ss.jpg