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owners of SUVs have it both ways -- they get tax breaks because they are "over 6k" and hence are trucks

That's not all. Other J2SE apps that I personally use are...

• IsaViz is great for visualizing and validating RDF
• ArgoUML is a pretty decent UML editor
• FreeMind is a great Mind Mapping tool.
• Gantt Project beats MS-Project if all you need is Gantt charts.
• Protege is very impressive for editing OWL files.

I haven't heard of any great indian computer scientist. The good ones will always survive.

We all remember the problems with GIF just few years ago

No, what exactly are you referring to?

We solved them changing every single image on the Internet to JPEG.

No, "we" didn't.

We all have to admit that it was foolish. We're weak on logic, that's the trouble with us. We're like the guy in the story who was caught in a sudden shower and who ran to a grove of trees and got under one.

Who the heck do you mean by 'we'?

This is just pretentious nonsense. PhD you say? In what? From which University? What was the name of your thesis? Who was your supervisor?

And you'd think someone who links to to the Standford encyclopedia of philosophy would be able to correctly quote Satayana.

Ah, you do have a point. However, according to this primer from Stanford, the owner of the copyright can challenge you on the "fairness" of your use, no matter what. Something scary to be sure, because of how deep their litigious pockets can be.

JACK uses a callback based API much like Core Audio.

Basically every high-end (e.g. ardour, JAMin, Rosegarden, Hydrogen, etc.) uses it.

You can get really low latency using it if you have good sound hardware (e.g. RME Hammerfall for extremely low latency or even an M-Audio Delta 1010). Something like an SBLive! (what I have) will need a period size of 2048 bytes with two periods to avoid underrunning (I have a Dual AthlonMP 2800+ so I'm pretty sure it's the sound card...). Stuff like QJackCtl and Jack-Rack make controlling Jack easy.

Getting realtime mode working for a normal user can be tricky, but Debian makes it really easy. Just install the realtime-lsm package and build the realtime-lsm-source package for your kernel and all users in the audio group gain the ability to run applications realtime (at least with the default config). It could be made easier (mainly by prebuilding the realtime-lsm modules for the stock kernels) but GNU/Linux pro-audio is still mostly for hackers and adventurous people right now. Stuff like PlanetCCRMA and AGNULA are aiming to make everything work out of the box. I have yet to try either (I use Debian so PlanetCCRMA is useless for me) but it looks like DeMuDi has everything set up for recording out of the box.

I'm not arguing against distance learning per se, only against the type of people who so often seem to think it's a good idea, and the type of schools that seem to cater to them.

It is most certainly not the tuition that's sending people to USA. It's the hope that the student visa gets turned into a work visa which gets turned into a green card, which means that some day 17 years from the time of getting your student visa, you may be an American, provided you aren't murdered for being a no-good-foreigner-living-off-the-fat-o-the-land, and that your boss doesn't fire you when the going gets rough. There's that and the fact that in my country at least(India), it's exactly 15,000 times harder to get into a local college, considering the size of our population. The hardest b-school to get into in the entire world is IIM Ahmedabad. Compare that to the Admissions Page for Stanford. The same is true for engineering schools...We're leaving India for a lot of reasons, and one of them is the past few generations' high fornication (and fertility) rate. That's one of the reasons why there are so many non-resident aliens in yer schools

Studying people and their actions/opinions is way too difficult.

For those who have not heard of psychology yet (though, admittedly, the science is somehow stuck due to lack of funding).

But there seem to be counterexamples, e.g.: Where Stock Market Psychology and Pricing Intersect CC.

Knuth himself is a known fan of open source software and his letter shows a clear enthusiasm for the open content concept.

Knuth himself is a known fan of open source software and his letter shows a clear enthusiasm for the open content concept.

Hybrid engines have a solid fuel and a liquid oxidizer. The article says that the DaVinci rocket uses Nitrous Oxide (a liquid if kept under moderate pressure) as the oxidizer, and something other than rubber (I'm guessing candle wax) as the fuel.

Here is the article that describes the Stanford research. It's great work.

Thad

rsync -avz -e ssh winbox:/cygdrive/c/ /path/to/backup

Or one thing I use, to keep incremental backups, is rdiff-backup.

Take a look at rdiff-backup. I've been very impressed with it. From the website:

rdiff-backup backs up one directory to another, possibly over a network. The target directory ends up a copy of the source directory, but extra reverse diffs are stored in a special subdirectory of that target directory, so you can still recover files lost some time ago. The idea is to combine the best features of a mirror and an incremental backup. rdiff-backup also preserves subdirectories, hard links, dev files, permissions, uid/gid ownership, and modification times. Also, rdiff-backup can operate in a bandwidth efficient manner over a pipe, like rsync. Thus you can use rdiff-backup and ssh to securely back a hard drive up to a remote location, and only the differences will be transmitted. Finally, rdiff-backup is easy to use and settings have sensical defaults.


I found it to be very fast and reliable. And yes, it aparently does work under Windows.

Take a look at rdiff-backup. I've been very impressed with it. From the website:

rdiff-backup backs up one directory to another, possibly over a network. The target directory ends up a copy of the source directory, but extra reverse diffs are stored in a special subdirectory of that target directory, so you can still recover files lost some time ago. The idea is to combine the best features of a mirror and an incremental backup. rdiff-backup also preserves subdirectories, hard links, dev files, permissions, uid/gid ownership, and modification times. Also, rdiff-backup can operate in a bandwidth efficient manner over a pipe, like rsync. Thus you can use rdiff-backup and ssh to securely back a hard drive up to a remote location, and only the differences will be transmitted. Finally, rdiff-backup is easy to use and settings have sensical defaults.


I found it to be very fast and reliable. And yes, it aparently does work under Windows.

Well, they had the last laugh as it were. Soon after our sale, Alcatel came and bought DSC and shut the Austin site down.

And then there was the Alcatel stock scandal shortly after that, but that's a story for another day.

DT

First off, let me say that there is really no ambiguity about the structure of DNA anymore. Structures of DNA have been determined by x-ray crystallography, NMR, and to lower resolution, electron microscopic methods. The kinetics of the binding of DNA strands to one another has been studied in detail (and naturally the kinetics would be very sensitive to differences in the number of strands found in the structure).

Most of the x-ray structures which have been solved have used multiple heavy atom derivatives, which relieves the ambiguity of the Bessel function solutions that you referred to IIRC. Also, many of the structures which have been solved show DNA bound to the proteins which bind it in vivo. Since the structure is antiparallel double helical when bound to these proteins (and in general, the structures are consistent with large numbers of biochemical and genetic experiments on the proteins and DNA sequences in question), one has to assume that the Watson-Crick structure is generally correct.

I don't follow your thread-tying experiment, despite a degree in biochemistry. Eukaryotic DNA (which includes the DNA that Franklin, Wilkins, Watson & Crick worked on, I believe) is linear. Thus, you shouldn't be tying *any* of the threads together.

Bacterial DNA and some viral DNAs are circular, but the correct way to model them is to twist a black and white thread together, then tie them, black to black and white to white.

Anyway, you are raising the issue of topological transitions in DNA. This is a well understood and extensively studied issue. In fact, there is even a good mathematical formalism for it. For the math, see (sorry, no full text for these):

FB Fuller, The Writhing Number of a Space Curve, PNAS 68(4) 815-819, 1971
http://www.pnas.org/cgi/content/abstract/68/4/815

FHC Crick, Linking Numbers and Nucleosomes, PNAS 73(8) 2639-2643, 1976
http://www.pnas.org/cgi/content/abstract/73/8/2639

FB Fuller, Decomposition of the Linking Number of a Closed Ribbon: A Problem from Molecular Biology, PNAS 75(8) 3557-3561, 1978
http://www.pnas.org/cgi/content/abstract/75/8/3557

So, the need for de-linking enzymes has been appreciated for some time, and enzymes that catalyze that reaction have been identified and characterized. In fact, inhibitors of these enzymes (called topoisomerases) are used in treating cancer and bacterial infections. For more recent references and explanations, see:

http://www.maich.gr/natural/staff/sotirios/topo.ht ml
http://cmgm.stanford.edu/biochem201/Handouts/DNAto po.html
http://crab.nyu.edu/~alex/mypapers/MolBiolRev.pdf

Though I didn't RTFA, I can tell you there seem to be cooler laser-tweezer applications out there. For instance, right now my sister is working at the Stanford Block Lab, where they are manipulating and studying single molecules with laser traps.

It's really cool to watch, and manipulating things like RNA Polymerase on a single-molecular scale just seems like the way bio research should be done.

Give Iperf a try. I used it for benchmarking my home gigabit LAN. It's got multiple versions available for many platforms (as well as source code). It generates data and sends it, not requiring any hard drive access thereby taking drive speed out of the equasion. This blog site also has some more info.

Seems you're contradicting yourself with your own facts. Excel, and most of the 2-employee apps run only on Windows. Serious financial software like Oracle Financials, etc tend to run anywhere with perhaps Solaris being dominant on the server side, and Windows and Mac clients supported in places I've seen them.

A quote from that page: For Windows users, ensuring that your computer fulfills ITSS' Administrative Desktop recommendations will enable optimal use of the Oracle systems. Those with Macintoshes should be running Operating System 10.3 (OSX) or higher. Those still running OS 9.2.x should be sure to see Mac OS X Migration for Administrative Desktops ... Macintoshes must be running OS 10.3 and use Netscape 7.0.2 or above to access ReportMart and run Business Objects reports

The big apps are doing fine. It's the home-office space that Microsoft seems to have a lock on.

First off... FOLD http://www.stanford.edu/group/pandegroup/folding/! !! Now that Stanford project is more relevant than ever!! 1. If the structure of a prion can be determined it may be possible to bind them up with another protein until the immune system can remove it from the system 2. From the Halbaked http://www.halfbakery.com/idea/Prion_20Poison_20Pr evention#1062618359 site, enzymes might be able to remove them from the system as well, but it would destroy them in-place which may not be desirable

You should check out rdiff backup. It's really nice for server to server harddisk backups. Don't know if it works with windows though.

Yes indeedy, and it's all made easier by rdiff-backup, a set of python scripts which allows you to very simply backup and restore files. Then you can even put a web front end on it with my very own POS^H^H^HPHP script rdiff-backup-web!

If you'd like to contribute to work studying the mysterious nature of protein folding, consider donating your spare CPU cycles to the Folding @ Home distributed project - a worthy project made even more relevant in the light of these new discoveries. I don't pretend to understand much about the biology behind it all, but this stuff fascinates me, and it looks like the more focus this field receives, the more humanity on the whole will benefit.

and if they can't unfold to be read.. its basically dead weight

Close, but backwards... Proteins have many functions, and their folded shape is what helps determine their funtion. The way a protein folds creates areas that like water (hydrophilic) and don't like water(hydrophobic), etc. These regions help determine which chemical compounds are structurally compatible with the protein, and lead to all kinds of reactions...
Check out Folding@home http://www.stanford.edu/group/pandegroup/folding/s cience.html for more info

Bollocks. For the last 40 years, projected population estimates have been way over the actual numbers when the calender rolled around to the predicted dates.
Population growth rate has been steadily declining for decades as standards of living improve
1. Each extra year in school significantly decreases the total number of children a girl will bear in her lifetime (literacy is the most effective vector for birth control methods), and
2. It's damned expensive to rear children in a developed country, compared to a subsistence economy where they can go out in the fields at age three to scare birds off the crops..

I can't find the estimate at the moment, but IIRC, world population is estimated to peak sometime around 2050 at 12 billion people, and then start declining: I think I saw the exact figures (probably overestimates) somewhere in this book, but i'm too drunk at the moment to fish them out.
Human beings aren't rats, or bacteria, and don't breed like rats or bacteria...

Not really, how can you determine that the plain English or pseudo-code algorithm actually implements the things that are claimed? For anything but completely trivial stuff, you need to be able to run it to see if it actually does what is claimed. Check the words of Knuth: Beware of bugs in the above code; I have only proved it correct, not tried it. . Maybe a mandatory reference implementation in a publically available language should become a prerequisite?

An alternative view

Short story, by the time he "bleeds out", it will likely already be too late...

radio is too slow, what is it that the sun produces that travels way faster than light and goes through everything? if anyone is out there, thats what they are using...what ever happened with that experimental thing they buried 1/2 mile underground filled with water to catch those things the sun produces? my prediction? we will learn how to use that and will be connected to countless civs' (if they out there)

I think you're talking about neutrinos but they don't travel faster then the speed of light. They just travel very close to it. The only other thing we use underground detectors for (that I know of) is gravitational waves but they're still theoretical; we haven't seen any yet. But they don't travel faster then the speed of light either.

As far as I know, the only thing that can travel faster then light is information between quantum entangled particles. But we can't use that for SETI because you need to establish a communiation channel before trasmitting anything.

funnily enough, that was exactly the same story that came to my mind. You would have though they would have got more than $3000 though

over here in the UK the machines tended to be built into brick walls (hence the expression "i'm just getting some cash from the hole in the wall")

this has led to enterprising thieves using a JCB to steal the whole damn thing netting a cool $140,000.

just goes to show, that like so much in life, the real money isn't in making something, it's in stealing someone elses.

From Coming to America: The making of Final Fantasy VII and how Squaresoft conquered the RPG market (Section Title: Let's just kill Aeris... Drama is everything):

Still, players hoped for a "better" ending, and for quite a while a rumor circulated online that Aeris could be resurrected. It all started with a post on a newsgroup by an American player who played the Japanese game and completely misunderstood a scene at the end of the second disk to mean a failed resurrection of Aeris. Then somebody who went by the name of "Ben Lansing" saw the post and decided to post on the newsgroups claiming that he was a translator at Square USA during the production of the game, and had inside knowledge on how Aeris could be revived. He supported his claims with the supposed changes made to the US version of the game, such as the Underwater materia and the new FMV sequence which he said was that of Aeris' resurrection (it was actually for the Diamond Weapon monster). He also pointed to many places in the game where the relevance to the story was unclear (such as the sick man in Midgar) which he wove into his elaborate instructions for the revival process. The whole story was too complicated to describe in detail here, but the release of the American version finally revealed many of his claims to be false. Despite many inconsistencies in his claims, many people believed him, and there were even staunch supporters who claimed to have successfully revived Aeris using his instructions. Anyway, "Ben Lansing" eventually posted that the whole thing was just a hoax, and laughed at the general stupidity of American players.

Joke's on you, buddy.

Currently available projects are...

SETI@home
Predictor-Protein structure prediction

Coming soon....

climateprediction.net
Folding@home

Farther in the future (i.e. pending funding)...
Einstein@home -- a search for gravitational waves.

In the conceptual stage, since sometime last week...
neuralnet.net -- studies of the nature of intelligence using neural nets and genetic algorithms

LOCKSS-DOCS and even the US GPO Access have already been doing this. But I suppose that given how online government information can go poof or be altered, this project sounds like a good idea, albeit a partisan one.

I've heard that one of the big drivers for the development of more powerful computing hardware is games. Like it or not, with games constantly pushing the envelope of what users demand from machines we are left with rapidly accelerating development of powerful personal computing hardware. One beneficial side effect is that we have ridiculous computing power that is only beginning to be tapped by United Devices, Folding at Home, climate prediction not to mention SETI and all the other distributed projects out there.

So in its way, games forcing the development of PC hardware is contributing to the advancement of science. If fully realized, all that computing power could change the world.

You may want to take a look at this page:

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

From their site: "Planet CCRMA at Home is a collection of software packages that you can add to a computer running RedHat 7.3, 8.0, 9 or Fedora Core 1" (and 2, if not now then very soon) "to transform it into an audio/video oriented workstation. Here at CCRMA we use a consistent and well defined Linux environment for our daily work in audio and computer music and research. With the Planet CCRMA at Home package collection, you can easily install most of that environment on your own Linux system."

It's a apt-getable addon for Fedora/Redhat, which is easy enough for new converts. I haven't used it in a few months (since a switch to Debian), but they do a very good walkthrough of how to setup a Linux audio workstation, and everything works very well together.

There is a great deal of work that should be reviewed by anyone concidering Linux sound / video production and I am supprized that someone has not mentioned it yet.

Planet CCRMA is awesome! This is such a good start for everyone who says "I am not geeky enough to get {insert package here} working". I suspect that the FC2 iso's are close to coming out, the ones for FC1 are excelent. You basicly install FC and then there is a kernel iso and an app iso which installs most of the known linux sound apps. The mailing list is also quite active and the people very helpful.

Strong work from Fernando Lopez-Lezcano!!!

I think it's kinda odd that the article notes that the fruit fly is so close in structure to the human... Maybe they will be using bugs for further testing instead of the dogs - at least the animal protection groups won't get so upset about that.

Also, I'm not sure how exactly this genome assembly was conducted, but maybe the people doing the research could benefit from using Stanford University's Folding@Home program (or at least the distributed computing idea behind it) to do additional testing in this field. Recent article from /.

There's this one, it's probably what you want:

http://www.stanford.edu/group/pandegroup/folding/

But I'm quite selfish (and actually interested in primes abd or at least know more about them than I do about protiens), and there are entities offering big prize money for big primes, and if one of my machines finds one, I'll get big bucks:

http://mersenne.org

Charles Parnot of Stanford University is looking for your spare CPU cycles for his distributed XGrid@Stanford project.

The purpose of that computer is to solve complex scientific problems such as weather simulations, high-energy particle simulations, protine folding, etc. Many of these simulations involve iterated systems of equations that can take decades to solve on the fastest CPU's we have today.

The only way to get meaningful results in a meaningful amount of time is to break the problem apart into smaller problems and solve them in parallel.

Some projects, such as Folding@Home and Find-A-Drug go the distributed computing route -- use many disconnected systems to solve the problem.

The downside to that approach is that not all problems can be easily broken apart -- and some classes of problems can exist without tight coupling but they loose efficiency. The impressive thing about this particular super computer is that it has a single, unified memory image.

This is very useful for some classes of simulation problems when the entire simulation must be present for each iteration.

What the heck does orkut means? Is it an english word?

It's the name of the engineer, Orkut Buyukkokten (who's heritage is clearly that of a non-English speaking nation), who wrote it for one company and then illegally reused the same code for Google.

You do realize that MatLab runs in Linux if you're willing to licence it, which it seems you are under windows...

Anyway, a quick freshmeat search showed me that Nulab, Yorick, Scilab, FrAid and Lush are all possible replacements, depending on the application. Moreover, many of those refer to Octave which might be suitable, depending on your needs.

Likewise National Instruments makes LabVIEW for Linux, and freshmeat says to look at Flow Designer and TACO as potential free replacements.

If the two are used for related purposes, then consider RobotFlow which came as a result under both searches...

Just in case you decide to retry the system at a later date...

or, you could help fight some diseases, "such as Alzheimer's, Mad Cow (BSE), CJD, ALS, and Parkinson's disease."
Folding @home

One of the best thing about Stargate is that haven't had to resort to over sexual themes to achieve this success!

Whaddya mean, "sexual themes"? It's not like any other science fiction franchise has had to resort to coed back rubs, nubile aliens in skintight uniforms, lesbian kisses, sex with androids or women dressed in tinfoil to keep an audience....

Oh.. wait. Never mind...

Allow me to point you to Folding@Home. This is Stanford's distributed computing project. Their goal: to understand protein folding, protein aggregation, and related diseases.

I'm sure they've been mentioned before, but they seem to meet your four criteria nicely:

a) The second question in their FAQ is "Who owns the results"

c) A Linux Console version is listed on theirDownload Page along with Windows and Mac OS X versions.

b) In my experience, I've had to do nothing but install and let the software do its thing. It only takes up unused cycles and is completely non-intrusive. For Mac OS X users, I recommend checking out TeamMacOSX's website for some free software downloads that make it easy to maintain clients for multiple processors.

d) Science!

SharkJumper

Allow me to point you to Folding@Home. This is Stanford's distributed computing project. Their goal: to understand protein folding, protein aggregation, and related diseases.

I'm sure they've been mentioned before, but they seem to meet your four criteria nicely:

a) The second question in their FAQ is "Who owns the results"

c) A Linux Console version is listed on theirDownload Page along with Windows and Mac OS X versions.

b) In my experience, I've had to do nothing but install and let the software do its thing. It only takes up unused cycles and is completely non-intrusive. For Mac OS X users, I recommend checking out TeamMacOSX's website for some free software downloads that make it easy to maintain clients for multiple processors.

d) Science!

SharkJumper

Allow me to point you to Folding@Home. This is Stanford's distributed computing project. Their goal: to understand protein folding, protein aggregation, and related diseases.

I'm sure they've been mentioned before, but they seem to meet your four criteria nicely:

a) The second question in their FAQ is "Who owns the results"

c) A Linux Console version is listed on theirDownload Page along with Windows and Mac OS X versions.

b) In my experience, I've had to do nothing but install and let the software do its thing. It only takes up unused cycles and is completely non-intrusive. For Mac OS X users, I recommend checking out TeamMacOSX's website for some free software downloads that make it easy to maintain clients for multiple processors.

d) Science!

SharkJumper

Allow me to point you to Folding@Home. This is Stanford's distributed computing project. Their goal: to understand protein folding, protein aggregation, and related diseases.

I'm sure they've been mentioned before, but they seem to meet your four criteria nicely:

a) The second question in their FAQ is "Who owns the results"

c) A Linux Console version is listed on theirDownload Page along with Windows and Mac OS X versions.

b) In my experience, I've had to do nothing but install and let the software do its thing. It only takes up unused cycles and is completely non-intrusive. For Mac OS X users, I recommend checking out TeamMacOSX's website for some free software downloads that make it easy to maintain clients for multiple processors.

d) Science!

SharkJumper

Allow me to point you to Folding@Home. This is Stanford's distributed computing project. Their goal: to understand protein folding, protein aggregation, and related diseases.

I'm sure they've been mentioned before, but they seem to meet your four criteria nicely:

a) The second question in their FAQ is "Who owns the results"

c) A Linux Console version is listed on theirDownload Page along with Windows and Mac OS X versions.

b) In my experience, I've had to do nothing but install and let the software do its thing. It only takes up unused cycles and is completely non-intrusive. For Mac OS X users, I recommend checking out TeamMacOSX's website for some free software downloads that make it easy to maintain clients for multiple processors.

d) Science!

SharkJumper