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Usually, I educate myself with books like this one...

see the data in a graph form and firefox looks like it's increasing well

The following documents provide a nice insight in the man's work at Apple on the Mac project:
http://library.stanford.edu/mac/primary/docs/bom/i ndex.html/

especially the article on Design Considerations (M4.1) makes a nice read:

"If the computer must be opened for any reason other than repair (for which our prospective user must be assumed incompetent) even at the dealer's, then it does not meet our requirements. Seeing the guts is taboo. Things in sockets is taboo (unless to make servicing cheaper without imposing too large an initial cost). Billions of keys on the keyboard is taboo. Computerese is taboo. Large manuals, or many of them (large manuals are a sure sign of bad design) is taboo. Self- instructional programs are NOT taboo.

There must not be a plethora of configurations. It is better to offer a variety of case colors than to have variable amounts of memory. It is better to manufacture versions in Early American, Contemporary, and Louis XIV than to have any external wires beyond a power cord.

And you get ten points if you can eliminate the power cord."

Well, you're partly wrong. Apple, Microsoft and Xerox all borrowed ideas from somewhere else (that isn't necessarily bad, you know ... it's what makes progress possible.) The real crime is trying to lock up good ideas forever. But in any event, I would say the real GUI pioneer was a man named Doug Englebart, whose remarkable demonstration in 1968 at the Fall Joint Computer Conference in San Francisco really laid the groundwork for what we all think of as a modern computer. Behind that demo was six years of hard work by Englebart and seventeen others at the Standford Research Institute. It took a couple decades for those ideas to take off, but take off they did.

Just FYI, streaming video of the Englebart demo is available HERE if you can handle RealMedia.

I would rather use my CPU cycles for research on protein folding, a serious problem that can cause disease, than finding prime numbers.

It seems that the majority of the opponents of the MWI reject it because, for them, introducing a very large number of worlds that we do not see is an extreme violation of Ockham's principle: "Entities are not to be multiplied beyond necessity". However, in judging physical theories one could reasonably argue that one should not multiply physical laws beyond necessity either (such a verion of Ockham's Razor has been applied in the past), and in this respect the MWI is the most economical theory. Indeed, it has all the laws of the standard quantum theory, but without the collapse postulate, the most problematic of physical laws. The MWI is also more economic than Bohmian mechanics which has in addition the ontology of the particle trajectories and the laws which give their evolution. Tipler 1986 (p. 208) has presented an effective analogy with the criticism of Copernican theory on the grounds of Ockham's razor.

One might consider also a possible philosophical advantage of the plurality of worlds in the MWI, similar to that claimed by realists about possible worlds, such as Lewis 1986 (see the discussion of the analogy between the MWI and Lewis's theory by Skyrms 1976). However, the analogy is not complete: Lewis' theory considers all logically possible worlds, many more than all worlds incorporated in the quantum state of the Universe.

A common criticism of the MWI stems from the fact that the formalism of quantum theory allows infinitely many ways to decompose the quantum state of the Universe into a superposition of orthogonal states. The question arises: "Why choose the particular decomposition (2) and not any other?" Since other decompositions might lead to a very different picture, the whole construction seems to lack predictive power.

So before dismissing thousands of people, I'd entertain the idea that Apple's engineers simply stuffed up. It wouldn't be the first bug that slips through QA testing.

SRP would do this (although normally with SRP you don't want the host to ever have your password, for an initial contact this could work - then you change your password securely to something else that the host doesn't know). With SRP, if the host can validate your password, that validates the host as well. Since the real host doesn't get any information about the password when you authenticate, neither does a hostile system that hijacks the authentication.

Details on the conference are available at:

http://slata.stanford.edu/Conference05/

The conference is open to the public. Anyone interested in speaking on this conference (who is qualified, of course), please email me at sbtoeniskoetter ((AT)) usfca.edu . Thanks

... has solved this problem more than 6 years ago. And it does not require the password to be stored in clear-text by the server. (although, "with a little thought", according to the article, neither does this scheme. BAH! Proof is left as an excercise for the reader)

Stick with something that has been rigorously reviewed, and proven over a period of time. And something that can be explained simply, in terms of the actual technology, rather than resorting to pathetic analogies that do not explain anything!

SRP

Sounds like someone hasn't heard of the Betamax Decision or Fair Use law. [Legal Link]

Well, it's either that, or somone is bitter because BitTorrent is blocked through their corporate firewall

Gamma Rays from storms

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.

Let's see. A typical car uses about 15KW at around 50MPH (See for example, http://hypertextbook.com/facts/2001/JaeheeJoh.shtm l) , and the efficiency of solar generation of hydrogen via electrolysis is about 10% (See http://gcep.stanford.edu/pdfs/hydrogen_workshop/Ma cQueen.pdf).
Now on a good day, you can't expect more than 1KW of sunlight square meter. So with a 1 square meter solar cell, if you wanted to drive for a measely one hour, you would need your solar cell to be exposed to full sun-light for 15KW/(0.1 x 1KW) = 150 hours. Oops!

your opinion of Folding@Home appears to be directly contradicted by their faq. They claim to be completely non-profit and make all their results publicly availible. I can't vouch on their actually making good on these promises though. Do you have sources to back up your claims about their nefarious intentions?

I personally use folding@home, which has:
"1/14/2005 Folding@Home breaks 170,000 active CPUs"

Reasons for me to work for them are:
- Projects does the ground research, which helps other researchers.
- Projects might help to find cure for cancer and other things that danger our health.
- Results of the research are not owned by anyone, they are free.

Not to push this down, but isn't Folding@Home a little more important for humanity overall?

One small step for mathematics, one giant leap for global warming :)

Please come join Folding@home, we're actually doing something worth all that waste heat. :)

Try this out for size: http://solar-center.stanford.edu/sun-on-earth/vars un.html

Once someone can take that graph and explain how humans are responsible for it, I'll be first in line to demand changes to the way we do things.

For those of you interested in an multimedia distribution, I would recommend checking planet ccrmma (pronounced karma) http://www-ccrma.stanford.edu/planetccrma/software / It is RedHat/Fedora centric, but it made me shitch from Debian for the multimedia workstation. Works great with apt too!!

Unfortunately, World of Warcraft is not a game in the competitive sense. It's a persistent world. Monopoly is a game, albeit not a very good one.

That's the difference.

Admittedly anything can be turned into a game, like "how fast can you get to level 60" or "can you beat this mob," but really, I don't think those rules are any more defined than "no buying gold off ebay."

MMORPG gamers need to realize there is no "game" theory in persistent world simulations. It's entirely masturbatory.

It's sad when biographies matter more than the science

No, just stop there.

That's totally unfair. Someone said that quoting Crichton was out of line because he was an author of trashing airport novels. I simply responded by presenting his credentials in order to rebut the obvious ad-hominem attack.

As for the ad-hominem attacks on RealClimate.org:

"the egregious Crichton"
"Will-full ignorance" (refering to George Will, who I feel no love for, but it bothers me that a site claiming to be about science drags itself down to this level)

Just to cite two. They also tend to do things like explain what the current consensus in the scientific community is... which it turns out exactly maps to the views held by the site. This is quite the boost to their position, but I just thought I'd take a look at the data... sadly, their data is a report which didn't actually perform a survey of researchers so much as cherry-pick the literature that seemed to best support their point of view.

Seems they did not choose to include Mt Wilson's results even though they explain the current warming trend in terms of solar radiation... hmmm that's odd. So what's this "consensus" thing? Is it a vote? A survey? Or just a political football that is used to defend a theory which doesn't stand on its own merits?

Turing machines. FSM

see here. Everything below man and above the the trees is "animal," in that they lack both little r reason as in the enlightenment ideal, and big R Reason as in Emmerson's essay "Nature." That which is vegitable and mineral having no need for reason in either form, and that which is higher than man being beyond our comprehension anyway, thus it being hubris to attempt to rationalize it.

Passphrases are just long passwords with (usually) low entropy.

In fact, the entropy of passphrases might be so low (perhaps even 1 bit per character) that they can be inferred from keystroke timing analysis.

That's not true at all. The Copyright act makes no mention of whether commercial use is a factor in fair use. In fact, slasdhot reproduces exact text from other copyrighted sources all the time, and it's quite legal (and they make money off it).

You might want to read up on what fair use is before you jump to conclusions. Start here.

"In its most general sense, a fair use is any copying of copyrighted material done for a limited and "transformative" purpose such as to comment upon, criticize or parody a copyrighted work. Such uses can be done without permission from the copyright owner."

He's clearly commenting upon the information, adding his own comments, that falls in line with fair use. He is using a pretty large portion of the work, though, and it's possible that this would negate the fair use aspect, but that's largely a judgement call and I don't think anyone here is qualified to make that kind of legal judgement.

If you look at history, I think this would be topped only by Hitler.

If you look at history, you sound confused.

20th Century Civilians Killed:
Stalin=4x10^7
Mao=3.5x10^7
Hitler=1.2x10^7
Ot toman Empire(Armenian Genocide)=2x10^6
Pol Pot=1x10^6
Saddam=6x10^5
Hutu-Tutsi Rivalry=5x10^5

As you can see, Hitler's not even close to first, and Saddam is way down at the bottom. Educate yourself on history. It's the only antidote to propaganda.

Sources:
this article
khmer rouge
Saddam

plus, if you are ever attacked by mocking birds, you have the weapon you need right on hand.

I've seen entire IT departments wiped out by them all, ninjas, pirates and mockingbirds; you can never be prepared enough.

Don't get left with a string and clockwatch, move your IT department to the moon today!!

I think the more advanced degrees are the ones pertinent to her career at HP, AT&T and Lucent.

Well, considering her (non) stewardship of those companies, that's not exactly a ringing endorsement. Lessee here . . . HPQ is a mess after the acquisition, T is about to be purchased, and LU is a shadow of its former self. The latter's most recent claim to fame is that, under her watch, it paid the second largest securities fraud settlement in history.

We mere mortals who fuck up that badly get fired and blackballed from the industry, or in the case of lawyers, end up in the sports section. Not to worry, though: Fiorina will find another company willing to let her run it into the ground, that is, if HPQ doesn't keep her on as a "consultant" for the low, low price of, oh, twenty grand a month or so.

Personally, I think the only reason they hired her is because she's a chick and they wanted to appear "progressive" and "diverse." Well, she did what every woman does when she's depressed, she went shopping. What do the call it, "retail therapy"? Except that here, retail therapy is costing many thousands of people their livelihoods. Looks like William Hewlett was right in opposing the merger.

What we need is a better architecture which would allow for a better implementation of algorithms. Will we ever have an MMIX-like processor with 256 general-purpose 64-bit registers that each can hold either fixed-point or floating-point numbers? That is what I am waiting for, not more "power," whatever that means.

I find it very sad that people are willing to pay (or even contemplate paying) for bottled water, instead of municipal water. Don't you know that Sally Struthers could use that money to save a child?

Why do people pay close to five bucks for a Starbucks coffee? Don't they know that President Carter could use that money to build a Habitat for Humanity?

Why would someone drive a $30k car? Don't they know that just $10k could make the difference in a kid being able to go to college?

People make consumer choices all of the time. Why does this one bother you guys?

Don't you know that the ring-tone (!) market on cell phones is in the billions per year? This is a drop in the bucket.

This is entertainment. People pay to be entertained. All forms of entertainment are frivolous, and they can all be compared against the costs of saving lives.

Hell, why aren't you running Folding at Home on your computer right now? Honest to God, if you're not running Folding at Home right now, then who the hell are you to criticize?

The problem with using solar cells is in order to make enough power, you want the solar cell to be bigger in order to absorb the most light. You also want the solar cells to be small in order to increase the resolution. The research here is increasing efficiency like crazy.

The problem with Stanford's research is releasing and recapturing the chemicals needed for stimulus. And the chemical approach is behind the electrical approach. The electrical approach already has had success with patients.

If you want to try out stream processing now (without having to buy a supercomputer), check out BrookGPU.

So the CPU is just a normal POWER, right?

Sounds like it.

But, from the article: "Along side these is a 64-bit Power processor capable of running two threads." "Capable of running two threads"? Is this the same as hyperthreading in the intel processor? I did not know IBM was working on their own implementation of that, have multithreading POWER CPUs been used in a product yet?

Sounds like it is the same as HT. I don't know if they have any in production yet.

It says t*he vector unit is a "VMX", well, that's just the same thing as Velocity Engine / Altivec that Apple uses, it's just a different brandname, right? And that'll be just part of the POWER, like the Altivec unit would be on a PPC?

Altivec is a trademark owned by Mototolla, velocity engine is a trademark owned by Apple, and VMX is a trademark owned by IBM. They all refer to the same thing.

The SPEs/APUs/"stream processors" are in particular what's confusing me just a little. I can think of lots of circumstances for which these things would be useful. But what I don't get is why, if you have these things, you still need the VMX. For what purposes is the VMX more suited? Has it got better throughput for the applications to which it is suited? Does it work better with the main CPU than the SPEs? Or is the idea here just that you don't have to keep the SPEs busy doing stuff that a normal VMX could handle?

Stream processors tend to have a lot better processing throughput than vector units as they do all the manipulations on each data element before moving on to the next one. Vector units may zip through the same array several times, requireing multiple loads of the same data. Also, stream processors are optimized for situations where each set of data can be manipulated independently from the others, so you can use several of them at the same time.

Here's my big concern: on the Mac, the big problem with altivec has been keeping the altivec units fed. ... Will the SPEs have this same starvation problem?

Probably not. Each SPE has it's own registers (lost of them), and private memory (probably not readable by the other SPEs), and it's own instruction cache. They're designed to run a tight inner loop (called a kernel) over their chunks of data, performing all required operations before storing the result and moving on to the next chunk of data. See this overview of stream processing.

But, crucially, who loads the instructions for all of this?? If we've got a CPU that can be running two threads, and 8 little APU/SPEs that are each effectively running as their own processor, and all of this is sharing one memory bus... that's like effectively ten instruction streams to be reading at the same time. Is that going to be a problem? Do each of the 8 SPEs actually independently load their own instruction streams? Or is the idea that they partially use that 256k "local memory" as effectively an instruction cache?

Probably the CPU loads the kernel into the SPE instruction cache.

Stream processing was designed to compensate for the memory bandwidth issues associated with Vector Processing, and to take advantage of ALU Paralellism.

According to that overview:

There is a class of applications that lend themselves to being streamed processed. They have several defining characteristics. First, they provide an opportunity to exploit parallelism. Secondly, they have little or no data re-use, which makes using a conventional cache expensive. Finally, these applications have high computational intensity, which enables a high ratio of computation to data.

You're speaking in ignorance.

Solar output correlates better with global climate change than does CO2.

Do a little googling. One example: stanford.edu

Don't bother giving my what ever phony story you have. I've heard them all and I've seen the real data.

Translation: poster's belief is not scientific and fact-based, but ideological and faith-based, therefore additional facts will NOT be considered. Any data that disagrees with poster's preformulated conslusions will be denied as a Papist Plot ...er.... anti-Muslism heresy ...wait... Communist propaganda...got it! ... "right wing lies".

So, Anonymous Coward, if you've seen all the "real data", please give your cutting one sentence rebuttal of the Stanford reference above.

Well the processing power of Altivec or MMX/SSE/3DNow or whatever is nowhere near the power of you newest NVidia/ATI card you have surely bought for playing Doom III. Why not use it then? Get the brook compiler! Furthemore, I see they introduce classes like vec, etc. Such classes have been already designed successfuly for C++. Why not try porting Blitz to the Altivec and/or to the GPU?

I don't know how you define "pro audio apps", but Ardour is pretty "pro" IMO - and ecasound is as well (but not as user-friendly). And personally I record/make a lot of music on my Debian box with Jack, Jack-Rack, Ardour, Ecasound, Hydrogen and other stuff.

E.g. with Jack I can route the output from Hydrogen into a Jack-Rack and apply effects (in real time) and then output it to another Jack-Rack that just serves as a limiter and apply common effects to all output and outputs to Alsa. At the same time I can have a mic connected to a third Jack-Rack, apply effects, route the audio into the common Jack-Rack and output. And then I can some sort of synth (e.g. spiralsynthmodular) and route the sound through a fourth Jack-Rack, then through the common Jack-Rack and out. And I could go on like this forever...
And then finally, I could record it all (real time) with ecasound.
I can even interconnect the various Jack-aware apps (and ANY app is potentially Jack-aware) and do other crazy stuff...

Show me that flexibility and those possibilities on any other platform...

And with Planet CCRMA Linux is a pro audio studio. Heck, we even have a VST "clone" in LADSPA...

This brings up the amusing problem of character recognition by human and non-human intelligences. Douglas Hofstadter discusses this issue in on seeing A's and seeing As.

In the case of this exploit, a deep flaw in IDN and computer fonts means that character #1072 is rendered typographically as an "a". The irony is that this is one of the few cases in which a computer can readily tell the difference between "a" and #1072 and a person cannot. The only solution would be rules that prohibit isomorphic characters in typefaces or a in-browser warning system that analyses the potential for ambiguity and alerts the user.

RSA was broken. The attack was choosen plaintext, and used several observed weaknesses in the padding scheme and RSA. ELGammal, or, since this is about authentication SRP sould always be used instead.

The yacc approach teaches them to stay down at the level of the weeds, it does not teach building larger scale abstractions.

There's a fallacy in imagining a world where a particular person never completed a particular invention. In short, it skips the notion that someone else would have invented it instead.

Wheel and rest of your examples are valid. However, I think that there *are* certain things that wouldn't have been invented by someone else.

Consider Einstein. In 1905, he published his special relativity theory. Now, for this, all the pieces were pretty much there - somebody else would have come up with that sooner or later.

However, general relativity, in 1915, is something that probably would have not been realized even by today if it were not for Albert. Even if we had gravity probe B I think scientists would be pretty dumbfounded by results - there is not really any "reasonable" explanation. You need to think outside the box - and I think that even though Newton's "standing on the shoulder of giants" applies to lots of things, there were no shoulders to stand upon regarding general relativity.

Of course, this point is rather irrelevant because we are talking about developing an OS..

Stallman would undoubtedly participate in a conversation like that.

Don't know about Linus's thoughts on the matter.

I should imagine, however, that Knuth would never be caught dead uttering such a thing:

Things a Computer Scientist Rarely Talks About
3:16 Bible Texts Illuminated
PDF DOCUMENT: john316.pdf

Stallman would undoubtedly participate in a conversation like that.

Don't know about Linus's thoughts on the matter.

I should imagine, however, that Knuth would never be caught dead uttering such a thing:

Things a Computer Scientist Rarely Talks About
3:16 Bible Texts Illuminated
PDF DOCUMENT: john316.pdf

Stallman would undoubtedly participate in a conversation like that.

Don't know about Linus's thoughts on the matter.

I should imagine, however, that Knuth would never be caught dead uttering such a thing:

Things a Computer Scientist Rarely Talks About
3:16 Bible Texts Illuminated
PDF DOCUMENT: john316.pdf

Sorry Dude, I think its because of his other hobby, He says, "During our summer vacation in 2003, my wife and I amused ourselves by taking leisurely drives in Ohio and photographing every diamond-shaped highway sign that we saw along the roadsides."

I'd like to tell you about this one and I'm glad slow people have somewhere for their kids to go and play.

They sure have funny signs in Ohio

Sorry Dude, I think its because of his other hobby, He says, "During our summer vacation in 2003, my wife and I amused ourselves by taking leisurely drives in Ohio and photographing every diamond-shaped highway sign that we saw along the roadsides."

I'd like to tell you about this one and I'm glad slow people have somewhere for their kids to go and play.

They sure have funny signs in Ohio

Sorry Dude, I think its because of his other hobby, He says, "During our summer vacation in 2003, my wife and I amused ourselves by taking leisurely drives in Ohio and photographing every diamond-shaped highway sign that we saw along the roadsides."

I'd like to tell you about this one and I'm glad slow people have somewhere for their kids to go and play.

They sure have funny signs in Ohio

The point is to stop worshipping the man and reading into the text things that aren't there.

Such as? FYI Knuth have written his own exegesis of the Bible so there is no point in confusing his other books with it, isn't it?

Of course you were reading the whole thread, weren't you?

Yes I was, with -1 threshold. It was an exceptionally painful experience thanks to uninformed and infantile trolls such as yours.

I used to assume that Knuth simply acknowledged that CS had gotten too big to be summarized by a single introductory text. But it turns out that he's still working on it, even as the size of the project continues to grow. ("Volume 4" will actually be 4 volumes!) There's some weird obsession here, possibly characterized by Knuth's abandonment of email and certainly connected with his early retirement.

It's also strange that Knuth still insists providing code for a pseudo machine. I'm a CS flunkout, so my opinion isn't worth much, but this does seem to be a thoroughly obsolete idea. Especially when you consider how many effort Knuth expends redesigning the machine!

I used to assume that Knuth simply acknowledged that CS had gotten too big to be summarized by a single introductory text. But it turns out that he's still working on it, even as the size of the project continues to grow. ("Volume 4" will actually be 4 volumes!) There's some weird obsession here, possibly characterized by Knuth's abandonment of email and certainly connected with his early retirement.

It's also strange that Knuth still insists providing code for a pseudo machine. I'm a CS flunkout, so my opinion isn't worth much, but this does seem to be a thoroughly obsolete idea. Especially when you consider how many effort Knuth expends redesigning the machine!