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is there any Free software capable of exploiting the general computing power of modern video cards?

A quick Googling revealed the following:
- BrookGPU
- GPGPU

This might also be interesting: GPGPU /Arvid

They can't afford to launch a satellite only to discover there was a bug in the software and have it be worthless

If you look at Gravity Probe B's Site you will find that the software that they are referring to has nothing to do with the probe itself but rather there was insufficient time to confirm that the Delta II rocket had the correct wind profile loaded for the data from the final weather balloon.

They wanted to make sure that the rocket had the data from the last weather balloon and there wasn't enough time to make sure.

The Niagara processor and its successor, Rock, are based almost entirely on the Hydra processor that Professor Kunle Olukotun developed at Stanford University. He co-founded the company, Afara Websystems, that Sun Microsystems purchased. If you want to know how Niagara works, just check out the Hydra processor.

The reason that Sun Microsystems abandoned the UltraSPARC V and successors is that the design teams who developed the UltraSPARC processors after the UltraSPARC II were just horrible. Normally, when engineers develop the microarchitecture and eventually the Verilog model of the chip, a documentation engineer documents all aspects of the chip. In the case of Sun Microsystems, there was no documentation engineer. Ultimately, on the very day that Sun released its processor to the market, no documentation existed.

Even Sun's own engineers did not have the documentation to develop the boards that would accept an UltraSPARC processor. The whole experience is incredibly stupid but true. Most engineers on the processor teams are Indians or Taiwanese, and they just "do not do documentation". Various Linux gurus complained about the lack of documentation needed to port Linux to the latest version of the UltraSPARC. Sun would have loved to produce the documentation if it existed. Unfortunately, it just did not exist.

UltraSPARC V had the same problem. The whole design process for the UltraSPARC V was a mess, and canceling the project fixed the mess.

Sun does not have the engineers with the skills to build a fat-core processor. So, Sun moved to thin-core processors like Niagara. They are easier to build and to document. They simply matched Sun's skill set, which is derived mostly from foreigners.

Unfortunately, for Sun, what is easy for Sun to design and build is also very easy for IBM and HP to design and build. If you IBM and HP engineers are reading this article, you are in luck. Just check out the Hydra processor, and you will know the 80% of microarchitecture of the Niagara processor. Fortunately, for you guys, building a Hydra-based processor that executes the Power instruction set architecture (ISA) or the HP ISA is much easier than building a processor that executes the SPARC ISA. Those damned 128-register register windows diminish the number of cores that can be squeezed onto the die.

I would like nothing more than to see Sun's processor department setting by 2008. Sun should not be in the business of designing processors. The UltraSPARC-III fiasco should have been a big clue.

If Sun were purely a software house, we'd have a chance of making a profit.

Bioremediation has been around for quite a while - it is a good idea in many situations.

There are a couple of things that really come out in the article is this - "First, he treats the contaminated soil with chemicals that break the gold down into water-soluble particles. Then he introduces the crops"

Gold and mercury in the soil is a pretty nasty amalgam - and gold being otherwise so *noble* - so I'm wondering how he's mobilizing it -
The article says the plants had purple leaves - "The plants he harvested had purple leaves because they contained gold nanoparticles" - again not totally breaking news - but he must be using something that can break the gold down *that* small (when there is a lot of gold in mercury, you can literally strain the gold out essentially with a filter like a cheesecloth - that is the technique that is being used by most miners of this sort in the first place.
Then they literally *cook* the amalgam covered pice of gold in a frying pan (though it could be done with nitric acid - or other things to remove the mercury from the surface)
In the process, a lot of mercury ends up spilled - and the residue from the *cook* is dense and fuming - and ends up not far away (like in the soil, the streams, or the miner's brain before too long) - Gold too small to picked up in the straining - In fact any microscale gold has been the subject of pretty intense interest because it is much more abundant than the occasional nugget -

Cyanide leaching is a very common process in areas where there is a lot of sunlight, since the cyanide can break down in holding pools - I highly doubt he would be using any cyanide - even if it could be shown to break down - it would most likely do very poorly on the plant side. Some halide - Bromides? Let's hope not. AuCl ion? - That's the most likely - or probably the most hoped for. There really aren't that many things that can dissolve gold - But there are actually quite a few ways to do what is being suggested with plants - here's one using geraniums.

.... to develop educational software that could take a person from basic math (k-8 level) through algebra and on to calculus and beyond.

Most kids don't learn well from chalk-and-talk lectures that seem to begin at ever younger ages in our teach-to-the-test school system.

My ideal math system would be for anyone who needs a little bit more structure than simply reading a book by themselves can provide, whether they want to pursue a single topic or a general march through maths.

What I'm thinking of is a program that would do everything from assessing the starting level to suggesting further areas to explore in various applied topics. You would have to be very careful not to incorporate any kind of prorietary testing or content, but there are tons of older and classic math texts to mine that are already in the public domain.

This would solve some of the problems with math instruction by non-mathematicians. Think about kids in space. How did they learn math in children's science fiction of the early space age? Some kind of software that customized instruction for each learner.

What I envision is something like the best of Stanford's EPGY math courseware without the Math Races (or you could opt in for math drill if you like). One of the beauties of the EPGY math program is that it is multi-threaded. You can move ahead in areas that are strengths and catch up on other things that need more work.

I've been looking at commercial packages, especially those designed for homeschooling and I'm not finding anything as user friendly as what I have in mind. It would also provide multiple starting points and paths through the material. Say a kid (or adult) gets interested in trajectories as a result of hearing about potato launchers, or from reading Backyard Ballistics or another Ballistics website. A math newbie of whatever age would have to get through at least early algebra. Some people could start right in and play with simulations or be directed to local groups with launch-related activities. (Hmmm...hopefully not groups on some homeland security watch list...) Links in the system would bring them back to the goal topic of interest from time to time to see their progress, or would send them on to other areas.

Another feature of this program would be to incorporate the potential for multiple styles of learning. Also, once a concept was grasped, mindless repetition would not be needed in the form of worksheets and drill. Instead, you could move right along to the application of the concept.

Certain paths could follow the content outline for things like AP calculus, providing equivalent instruction to a good AP math course in a traditional classroom. Those craving external assessment (or trying to save money on college tuition) could then take a test and prove to the world that they had conquered AP Calculus.

I'm thinking that Python might be a useful starting place...any ideas?

My other idea is to have a city-wide or national or global math problem of the day, with the radio anchors yukking it up about possible solutions the same way they talk about the weekend's new movies. Problems could be on different levels, something to intrigue a different group each day.

Ummm, I'm guessing you are referring to Gravity Probe B?

Not only is it going to take 1-2 years to test the theory, it hasn't been launched yet. It's new\rescheduled launch date isn't till April 19, 2004.

So to answer your question of what happened to the results??

It's hard to give results on a project that hasn't been launched yet.

Read more about this project here.

Jos Claerbout, in teaching himself OOP, has written one of the more creative and instructive tutorials on OOP design hosted at Stanford. The work is admittably rough around the edges and may be too short (nothing a good publishing editor couldn't have polished up). But, it remains valuable for those who tend to be more right-brained thinkers, rather than left, and who wish to participate in software engineering. Sadly, the author has passed away at a young age, but he's left a useful legacy for the rest of us. I've come to appreciate his humor by reading his college entrance essays.

= 9J =

Jos Claerbout, in teaching himself OOP, has written one of the more creative and instructive tutorials on OOP design hosted at Stanford. The work is admittably rough around the edges and may be too short (nothing a good publishing editor couldn't have polished up). But, it remains valuable for those who tend to be more right-brained thinkers, rather than left, and who wish to participate in software engineering. Sadly, the author has passed away at a young age, but he's left a useful legacy for the rest of us. I've come to appreciate his humor by reading his college entrance essays.

= 9J =

Jos Claerbout, in teaching himself OOP, has written one of the more creative and instructive tutorials on OOP design hosted at Stanford. The work is admittably rough around the edges and may be too short (nothing a good publishing editor couldn't have polished up). But, it remains valuable for those who tend to be more right-brained thinkers, rather than left, and who wish to participate in software engineering. Sadly, the author has passed away at a young age, but he's left a useful legacy for the rest of us. I've come to appreciate his humor by reading his college entrance essays.

= 9J =

Hooray for not checking links. Corrected link to Folding@home

Sorry.

More importantly there are more useful distributed computing projects. Here is a pretty good index. For example there's Folding@Home which furthers our onderstanding of proteins, which are so important in so many life processes and diseases, and fightAIDS@home which has already found a promising new drug. Or how about SETI@home? Trying to crack encryption by brute force seems like such a waste in comparison to these.

Perhaps the encryption contests are so popular just because you can win money. It's like a lottery. Maybe the only thing that could be done would be to have a cash prize for significant findings in other projects, or if who did it can't be defined due to the nature of the algorithm, maybe even just an ordinary lottery?

Perhaps they came up with their own Model theory that isn't derived or influenced by other more established definitions of model theory. In any case, TBL needs to kick the RDF staff in the butt and produce an useful specification. A BS spec that isn't suitable for real applications is pretty useless to everyone outside of people trying to milk W3C for their own interests and pet projects.

oh, hmm , yeah, sure,

i think i'd rather do something with all this "confidential" data on folding.stanford.edu tho ... Now, lemme just get this solaris security compromise list i have somewhere ...

Hmmm... Sandia and several other US government labs seem to think different. Exactly *what* class of computations can a linux cluster not handle?

UC Irvine

University of Cyprus

Linux supercomputer for Los Alamos

AMD Tapped for Gov. Linux Clusters

Installing, Running and Maintaining Large Linux Clusters at CERN

And more....

I, personally, see the benefit in projects like Folding@Home, where we haved increased our understanding of proteins in demonstrable ways, and could lead to antiviral agents analagous to pencillin in the bacteria world. I would like to know those numbers as well, tho. It would be nice to write it off on a taxes.

Well, why dont you invest lots of money like SourceForge into servers and making it as good as it can be, I mean being over-loaded with people such as you who then complain that its starting to suck, well ofcourse it is and if its a problem you should help those good people out and donate resources to them.

The Great Win32 Computer Language Shootout

While Java is not "unacceptably slow" or "1000 times slower" as some claims, it is generally slower than C and much more resource intensive nevertheless.

Actually if one wants to write this kind of math intensive apps, pure Java is really not the best choice. Even pure C isn't. He should think about implementing some of the highly used routines in assembly (no joke). And since photon tracing can be done parallelly, one would find the SSE and 3DNow! families of instructions useful.

And finally, besides the CPU, you can also try to do the calculations in your GPU. You'll need a new-fangled PCI-X card in the future to do the calculations efficiently tho.

Take a look at this site BrookGPU

Well, for heaven's sake, talk to one of them, will you?

Wrong. This says otherwise.

No, it doesn't.

Do you know something scientists at Argonne National Labs don't?

No, but I know something that you don't, apparently the difference between the sentences "Distillation removes both ionic and nonionic organic contaminants" and "Distillation removes all ionic and nonionic organic contaminants." Distillation can remove a large amount of contamination, especially if done repeatedly using industrial equipment. But the fact is that the distilled water you buy at the grocery store has got nothin' on the deionized water used to clean silicon waffers.

I am also curious how you know Calder is a "scientist at Argonne National Labs" and not a high school geometry teacher: (from your link) "NEWTON is an electronic community for Science, Math, and Computer Science K-12 Educators." I just find this funny because you took issue with my citing the site for a furnishing industry earlier.

Now, because I am getting tired of carrying on this stupid debate, here is a bunch of those fancy internet links you love so much:

These people manufacture deionized water. Suppose they wouldn't know anything about it. . .

Microelectronics and Nanotechnology Research Laboratory

Myron L Company

Deionized water as a cleaner Question: Why not just use distilled if it has even less ion concentration? Why buy more expensive de-ionized water?

Lytron Fun quote: "Care must be exercised when using DI water. The very lack of ions also makes this coolant unusually corrosive. Called the "universal solvent," DI water is one of the most aggressive solvents known. In fact, to a varying degree, it will dissolve everything to which it is exposed. Therefore, all materials in the cooling loop must be corrosion-resistant."

Semiconductor Glossary

another random newsgroup

Office of water quality technical memorandum

Early Death Comes from Drinking Distilled Water Very interesting article.

Wikipedia entry Interesting quotes: Even distillation does not completely purify water, because of contaminants with similar boiling points and droplets of unvaporized liquid carried with the steam. However, 99.9% pure water can be obtained by distillation. Reverse osmosis is theoretically the most thorough method of large-scale water purification available, although perfect semi-permable membranes are difficult to create.

Why I say no to distilled water Another interesting article on the health side effects of drinking distilled water.

Why purified water is bad to consume

Note that there is a difference between household water purifiers (both distillers and deionizers) and industrial equipment. The later only run the process once, and the so the water has been distilled/deionized, but that doesn't mean it is deionized.

Now, I'm sure you can find a thousand more sites telling me how distilled water is actually so pure it will sometimes spontaneously develop sentience and how deionized water is not only good for you it can kill cancer and stop

WTF kind of name is Claria? Sounds like another company I did some contract work for a couple of years ago that got sued by Stanford Univ. because they used Stanford in their title (and had a red "S" logo that looked like Stanford's "S"... uhm, duh, just asking for it). They paid some firm to make up a name and research to make sure that no one already had it and switched to "Sirenza".

Heh, I did a google for Sirenza and Stanford to see if I could find further info on the name change and first found a link on Stanford.edu's site regarding alleged foul play in their IPO

Claria sounds like an STD if you ask me. Something you don't want, much like Santorum (if you don't know the reference, pull down a torrent on Unscrewed 04/07/2004, or just Google for it).

Comparisons between genetic engineering and selective breeding are just false. One is manipulating a natural process while the other is inserting foreign DNA into a plant. How can we be sure of the consequences of doing this when we don't even fully understand cellular processes? Contrary to popular Slashdot belief, there are very real reasons to be cautious as we develop genetically modified organisms. For more information about how GMO's work and why we should slow down, read through this paper and some of there references it uses.

For those that would like to be more informed about copyright law and what the DMCA is doing to the rest of us, check out Lawrence Lessig's latest book, Free Culture. You can download the pdf for the book free here.

Sorry it is not "Fair Use". Fair Use involves parody, criticism, and education. Personal copies are cover by the "Home recording act"
See Stanford's Copyright Page

I realize that being a virtual monopoly (Microsoft has a monopoly on Microsoft products and nothing else, but ok)

Microsoft is a monopoly on much more than just 'Microsoft products.' I was having fun with this odd, light-weight banter about innovations and monopolies until this glaringly obvious point of confusion arose.

...unless you're just making light of the real situation, too. I sincerely hope you are.

fs

I thought most renderman stuff was rendered, not raytraced?

I'm sure you've seen the raytracing OpenGL examples such as nVidia's

The OpenGL 1.0 pipeline is great for games, CAD, etc. The future of OpenGL is basically "here is a really powerful parallel processor (AKA pixel shader) and some memory (AKA textures), go use/abuse this in anyway you like."

There are a lot of people working on General Purpose ways to program the GPU/VPU such as BrookGPU. Moving forward graphics chips look less like old style OpenGL where the chip is hardwired to support up to 8 lights, gouraud shading, and a texture, and more like a giant processing farm that will be good at certain tasks (render farm) and worse at others (compile farm). I belive raytracing will be one of the tasks future GPU/VPUs are good at.

It seems that a better use of spare CPU cycles would be distributed.net's Optimal Golomb Ruler search, or Stanford University's Folding @ Home project.

Make an actual contribution to science - much more satisfying than looking for a very improbable E.T. or senselessly cracking encryption schemes.

She's a sweet girl and smart too! She's got a PhD.

I've got that picture on my cubicle wall.

Pictures of "The Original GOOGLE Computer Storage" from the basement of Gates.

More pictures of "The Original GOOGLE Computer Storage" from Stanford CS Department's Computer History Exhibits Photo Tour.

You can physically see this display in the basement of the Stanford Gates Building.

Matthew Szulik, President and CEO of RedHat also gave a talk at Stanford on March 3, 2004. This was part of the EE380 Colloquium Series.

Matthew Szulik, President and CEO of RedHat also gave a talk at Stanford on March 3, 2004. This was part of the EE380 Colloquium Series.

but why were the super-precise quartz balls made in Germany ?

I bet that Sergey Brin regrets ever putting this photo online.

For interested history buffs, the Duplo drive bay can be seen in a display case in the basement of Stanford's CS building.

In case you're having a hard time loading the images from the story, you can find some other images here.

they do

This connection makes it wonderfully poetic to see this invention coming from HP.

Donald Knuth wrote a lengthy letter (pdf) to the Journal of Algorithms elaborating on the excessive costs to libraries and universities of peer-reviewed journals. Peer reviewers volunteer their services, and authors do much of their own typesetting thanks to the magic of desktop publishing, so the only production costs are the printing, postage and shipping, some clerical support, and an editor-in-chief. Yet Journal of Algorithms, for example, costs a budget-busting $731 per year for libraries. Libraries must economize on journal subscriptions, limiting access to the latest research.

I'm not overly fond of the current subscription model, since it encourages a publish-or-perish mindset amidst academe's stately groves. A system where the organization funding the research also pays for its publication (instead of the reader paying to access it) might put the brakes on excessive publishing, both in the sciences and in the humanities, and greatly increase readership, and therefore the dissemination of knowledge.

This is more like the railroads back in the 1800's. Railroads are now required to carry others' cars, in fact they pay rent for the cars on their track.

At one time there were hundreds of small railroads, many of which owned only a single line from PointA to PointB. Their anticompetitive tactics often included predatory pricing, delay of competitors' shipments and outright refusal to carry a competitor's engines or cars. Companies with a monopoly on routes important to others sometimes charged 10X the going rate, "because they could". For another example, railroads commonly charged farmers exorbitant rates to store and carry their grain because they had a local monopoly on storage and transportation.

According to this, this problem was the impetus for the original Interstate Commerce Act of 1887 (ICA), and also the original Sherman Anti-Trust Act of 1890. The latter act is also the basis of the federal actions against Microsoft, BTW. Some other interesting links are available here. This article briefly shows how the development of the railroad system beginning in the early 1800's was a major factor in creating the entire US legal structure we now take for granted, including racial integration, worker protection, eminent domain, elimination of 'blue laws', liability/tort law and public/private partnerships.

The ICA established the Interstate Commerce Commission (ICC), which was responsible to set standard rates for railroad passage, and required every railroad to carry others' cars at a reasonable cost.

At present each railroad pays rent for each car that is recorded as being on its tracks to the car owner, but can use it to earn revenue from a shipper. Thus every railroad is motivated to get the car filled with something and send it off to another place, to either earn money with it or stop the rent accruing. Many cars are now owned by individuals or holding companies, who buy the car and send it out on the track in hopes of receiving rent.

helicopter coolness

By your reasoning, a bit can have a value that takes more than a bit to store.

I reject that notion. Depending on the application at hand you may need to differentiate between "right and left" or "red and blue" and so on, but those values get reduced to either "1" or "0".

If you want to start pointing to links, I have one for you.

No reasonable person is going to dispute Israel's right to exist. My problem lies in the fact that their behavior and our relationship with them paints a big bullseye on the US. I can't support that.

LK

Some of the load balancing concepts referred to in the patent were discussed in 1995 in Roland Schemers lbnamed work: http://www.stanford.edu/~riepel/lbnamed/

As for serving out specific http content based on domain - mod_rewrite's been around in Apache since 1.2b3 - off the top of my head, i can't recall if it was capable of all the stuff mentioned in the patent in 1.2, but Apache 1.3.0 released in 1998 certainly could be used for mass virtual hosting using mod_rewrite.

v

Far from being the backward place you believe it to be Manchester was one of the birthplaces of the Industrial Revolution; one end of one of the earliest Railway systems in the world (the Liverpool to Manchester for which speed trials were held where Stephenson's Rocket won); and the birthplace of digital stored program computers.

See where I'm going here?

Patents, when they make sense, protect non-obvious ideas that would not have been created by ordinary practitioners with skills in the particular arts. Jeff Ullman's article on this subject is, IMO, one of the most sensible one can read (but IANAL).

You have to stand on the shoulders of giants, but from your high purchase, you need to reach up higher yet than someone with "ordinary skill in the art". And hence the problem many software patents. Many of them would be generated by ordinary practitioners with the appropriate research, time, and maybe beer. Although things become obvious after the fact, its clear from the reactions of scores of programmers that they already did think (or would easily have thought) up many of the "innovations" being patented.

That's in direct contradiction to documented evidence. Do note that some wildly inflated figures have been circulating, for which there is absolutely no support. Note that it is very much in the interest of Ukraine to promote very high numbers of casualties in order to obtain increased compensation from Russia.

Some links include a summary of other published work, the report from the UN IAEA, and a summary from a nuclear power specialist.

Regarding this specific point: from the 'executive summary' report on a recent conference organised by the IAEA on Chernobyl,

16. The mortality of the clean-up workers and the inhabitants of the contaminated areas does not exceed average mortality in the three countries.

So, in closing. Downloading software is illegal. Fucking consumers is immoral.


Correction: Downloading illegally available software is illegal.

Case in point: I have a free, free-to-download test program available at my site (see sig) that checks if the PC you run it on is capable of running my retail program that is available for purchase there.

zerocool complains about high-priced (overpriced) software as is his/her right in the USA under the First Amendment to the Constitution Of America.

The reality: Software development costs MONEY and should be compensated for if desired by the creators of said software.

The facts....

The computer(s) the software is developed on costs money (unless said computer(s) were donated for free).

The electricity powering the computer costs money (unless it is being generated from a free and/or donated source).

The programmer(s) who programmed the software cost money (unless they are donating their time and skills for free).

The advertising for the software costs money (unless it is being done for free somehow).

The distribution expenses to distribute the software to the recipients cost money (unless it is being done for free somehow).

Companies and individuals have invested lots of time and money in the software they create and sell. They found needs/markets for certain kinds of software and wrote the software to fill those needs/markets. Big companies have to sell software for big bucks to recoup the expenses in creating, maintaining, and distributing said software. They also are entitled to profit from their software which should be reinvested back into the company--not wasted.

For example, look at the 'gross profit margin' on a retail CD copy of Windows: $179.00 or so for a round thin sandwich of plastics and metal that has an intrinsic value of maybe $1.00. That $179.00 Windows CD allowed everybody, from the end user/customer up to Microsoft itself, to profit and benefit from the manpower and technology invested in it to create it and to benefit from its power as a computer operating system.

Ok, let's cut to the chase....

Windows is a kludge, based on code dating back to the dawn of the PC era.

Microsoft is a monopoly.

Even in this environment, the customer STILL has alternatives such as Apple and Linux -- SCO problems with commercial Linux use aside (which can be resolved.

If you want to avoid paying for high-priced software, use cheaper/free software or buy/legally get for free the necessary software tools to write your own custom programmed software solutions.

To address the second part of zerocool's comment, I offer the the following as some of the societal results of 'people as consumers -- not customers'. This has created a desparate, adversarial environment in which commerce and 'consumers' meet in an inevitable clusterfsck....

Wal-Mart, their business practices and its consequenses.

Ad creep. Even on the Internet. a technique coined and first implemented in 1996.

Email spam.

I don't know if it appeared in the demo or not, but I do remember that he originally intended the workstations to use two mice (one for each hand), a keyboard, and a set of pedals (for the feet, control or shift functions) to control the system.

I guess this stuff is so old, it is "new" again...

Not at 95000 feet (the altitude the article claims). Assuming a standard atmosphere, the speed of sound is 315 m/s. So Mach 10 is 3150 m/s.

>>Should take about a week for /. readers across
>>Eastern Europe to scour the place for souvenirs.
>>
>>The only thing left for the archaeologists will
>>be the Soviet-era cement.
>
>you need a researcher's ID (what she calls
>the 'passport') to get in, so that's not likely
>to happen

Badges? We don' need no steenkin' Badges!

And even if we do, how hard could they be to counterfeit?

Without ID, I give it two weeks. With fake ID, they could probably load the reactor cap on a truck and hump it out.

The original creator of the mouse, Douglas Engelbart, always assumed you would use a one-handed "chord" keyboard with one hand, and use the mouse with the other hand. From what I have heard, if you invested the time to learn this, you could really rock.

http://sloan.stanford.edu/mousesite/1968Demo.html

steveha