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Yes. For a more detailed analysis, see How The Internet Will Make The Record Labels Evaporate.

It's not to say that there's no recogniton of the value and difficulty of what's going on at Sandia and elswhere. It's just that cold fusion would have solved more problems than hot fusion.

If hot fusion is the Holy Grail, Cold Fusion would have been like the resurrection itself. It's just too bad that it doesn't seem to work. (not to say that some people aren't still trying).
`ø,,ø!

I am really hesitant to post anything about this since it will most likely be flamed to a crisp.

However, Mills stuff is just the tip of the iceberg. There has been quite a bit of active research in this whole, particularly in Japan and Europe.

The most interesting work has not been in the original electolysis using heavy water and palladium although SRI and to a lesser extent Los Alamos have been doing work in this area and have essentially confirmed the *original* observations of Pons and Fleischman. The major problem with this type of experiment is that you need to get close to a 1:1 (.9 as I recall) ratio of hydrogen atoms for each atom of the palladium crystal matrix before you get results. If you have cracks or other impurities you will NOT achieve that level of packing. If you use bulk materials the stuff gets explosive. One SRI researcher died from this. Also this whole area is *very* close to weapons research so Los Alamos has become very quite in the last couple of years while SRI is still plugging along. Here is a link to a page that has a nice summary of the issues.

The most interesting area, in my opinion, has been in the area of light water electrolysis where some people have seen signs of transmutation - which of course goes from 'fradulence' to 'outright witch craft' as far as conventional science goes.

Mills work is actually kind of on the sidelines from the 'mainstream' research in this area. He does have a lot of backing by reasonably conservative investors (2 mid size power utilities). He does have a comprehensive theory and has done numerous experiments to validate various aspects of his theory that have allegedly been confirmed by independent labratories.

Here is a link to a reprint of a recent Wall Street Journal article on BlackLight and its recent work.

Here are some other 'Cold Fusion' sites:

Cold Fusion Times
Infite Energy Online
BlackLight Power
Clean Energy Technologies a company that has done a lot with light water cold fusion and has recieved a number of patents in the area.
A Cold Fusion Bibliograph by Dieter Britz

I am really hesitant to post anything about this since it will most likely be flamed to a crisp.

However, Mills stuff is just the tip of the iceberg. There has been quite a bit of active research in this whole, particularly in Japan and Europe.

The most interesting work has not been in the original electolysis using heavy water and palladium although SRI and to a lesser extent Los Alamos have been doing work in this area and have essentially confirmed the *original* observations of Pons and Fleischman. The major problem with this type of experiment is that you need to get close to a 1:1 (.9 as I recall) ratio of hydrogen atoms for each atom of the palladium crystal matrix before you get results. If you have cracks or other impurities you will NOT achieve that level of packing. If you use bulk materials the stuff gets explosive. One SRI researcher died from this. Also this whole area is *very* close to weapons research so Los Alamos has become very quite in the last couple of years while SRI is still plugging along. Here is a link to a page that has a nice summary of the issues.

The most interesting area, in my opinion, has been in the area of light water electrolysis where some people have seen signs of transmutation - which of course goes from 'fradulence' to 'outright witch craft' as far as conventional science goes.

Mills work is actually kind of on the sidelines from the 'mainstream' research in this area. He does have a lot of backing by reasonably conservative investors (2 mid size power utilities). He does have a comprehensive theory and has done numerous experiments to validate various aspects of his theory that have allegedly been confirmed by independent labratories.

Here is a link to a reprint of a recent Wall Street Journal article on BlackLight and its recent work.

Here are some other 'Cold Fusion' sites:

Cold Fusion Times
Infite Energy Online
BlackLight Power
Clean Energy Technologies a company that has done a lot with light water cold fusion and has recieved a number of patents in the area.
A Cold Fusion Bibliograph by Dieter Britz

I use entirely random means of generating passwords. Computer programs generate most of my passwords; Diceware works well for passphrases, and a modified form can be used for simple passwords as well. During the time it takes for me to memorize the passwords, I place them in a PGP-encrypted file on a floppy; after they're safely locked away in my mind, I burn the disk, grind the ashes up, and throw them into running water. Although I'm not sure exactly how secure it is, Password Safe on Windows is good for managing low-security website logins.

But if I didn't use entirely random schemes, I wouldn't be telling anybody. Why are so many people here giving away their schemes?

Sure, I may be paranoid; if the scheme is good, describing it only reduces its efficacy, and not many crackers will take the time and energy to analyze a scheme of that sort to attack one person. But then again...

-- Rene

Anyone interested in a critique of libertarianism, check out this (and especially the FAQ).

The way the computer industry has developed has made it a breeding ground for libertarian ideas, perhaps because it is seen as an example of how libertarian principles presumably work in practice. But the computer industry is only a small part of the societal web and generalizations can be dangerous!

Libertarian theory, like unrestricted (laissez-faire-type) capitalism, is appealing because of its apparent simplicity. Alas, this simplicity hides away concerns about a number of issues, such as environmental protection or the (lack of) willingness on the part of many people to participate in a jungle society, whether they like it or not.

Hmmm, does this apparent simplicity ("user-friendliness") of libertarian theory, which however comes at the cost of ignoring important side-effects and their consequences, remind you of an operating system that we all love to hate? :)

In my opinion "The Matrix" was conceived as a trilogy from the beginning, and that means, that the authors created a longer story - and we have seen only the first part of it. Whatever rumors there might be about Wachowski brother thinking about this or that[4], methinks the story is already there, and what we saw in the first part will fit in the second

By the way: I am not a fanatic Matrix advocate - in my opinion, the basic message, the idea and so on have been already described hundreds of times, and in a much deeper way - stories by P.K.D. or Stanislaw Lem[5], for example. However, Matrix was a very good movie - the first one to touch this subject with so much expression, so much esthetics, and so deeply. IMO, of course.

Regards,

January

[1]The Matrix - screenplay

[2]The MATRIX FAQ

[3]Oracle Turing Machine

[4]Matrix 2 rumors

[5]A very good site on Lem

Because FORTRAN is (rather 'should be') dead.

Because FORTRAN is (rather 'should be') dead.

A more interesting survey would have included a trawl of the universities to find out what languages they're using. Although no one in business now seems to be using Fortran (apart from in legacy systems), many maths departments code almost exclusively in F77: everyone understands it, and it has none of those new-fangled pointer things to slow down your code. As it's fast and 'easily' parallelized, maybe we're about to see a rennaisance in Fortran coding for Beowolf and SMP? It's a shame the GNU project seems to be in limbo.

---

Optical lithology draws all the lines and circuits on wafer simultaneously. A line draw method such as this article is serial and may take forever to draw the billions of logical devices you can fit on a single silicon wafer these days.

The need for vast numbers of robot arms is why the literature spends so much time discussing self-replication, the only way to make the whole proposition economical. Until we have that, things like this will remain laboratory curiosities.

There are some ideas kicking around about exploiting the self-replicative abilities of cells, rather than waiting until humans are competent to design a real replicator. That's a hard engineering problem, and it might take a long time.

I think I'd rather help bring it around than just sit and hope.

An excellent area for contribution is design software. Currently there are a number of excellent free molecular modeling packages: MMTK, NAMD, Moldy, NWchem. There are also several excellent display programs: RasMol, VMD, Midas, and my own feeble effort, xyz2rgb. What is still lacking is:

• Software to generate structures painlessly. Two efforts in this area are CavityStuffer by Markus Krummenacker, DiamondCAD by Chris Phoenix and John Michelsen, and some tinkering of mine.
• Some kind of wrapper that makes all this stuff easy to use. There is a commercial package called HyperChem, and the DiamondCAD folks are working on an open-source version called OpenChem.

I think I'd rather help bring it around than just sit and hope.

An excellent area for contribution is design software. Currently there are a number of excellent free molecular modeling packages: MMTK, NAMD, Moldy, NWchem. There are also several excellent display programs: RasMol, VMD, Midas, and my own feeble effort, xyz2rgb. What is still lacking is:

• Software to generate structures painlessly. Two efforts in this area are CavityStuffer by Markus Krummenacker, DiamondCAD by Chris Phoenix and John Michelsen, and some tinkering of mine.
• Some kind of wrapper that makes all this stuff easy to use. There is a commercial package called HyperChem, and the DiamondCAD folks are working on an open-source version called OpenChem.

How it works

• Take a long tube, a gun barrel, around 100 or more meters long.
• put a rocket in the gun.
• Fire the rocket, and as it passes along the barrell detonate additional charges behind it keeping the pressure in the barrell approximately what it was when the main charges were fired.
• result: hypervelocity projectiles from a relatively low-tech gun
• Fast enough to get things into orbit for under $1 per pound, around 1/10000th of current launch prices.
• Successful prototypes were built, but never orbital ones.

• He designed large guns in Canada.
• They cut his funding and he went independent
• People didn't take his stuff seriously.
• He freelanced for unpopular nations (China, Iraq)
• He did some work on scud missiles and somebody, probably mossad, killed him.

What got built

• In tests, a 36m gun reached 1/3 of escape velocity
• The Iraqi "Supergun" was built by Bull and had a 1500 mile range if used for ground-to-ground, but only in one direction
• It was actually intended as a prototype of a satalite launch system.
• AARC most of the parts were made by companies who usually make oil well drilling equipment. It's low tech.

• Fuel-air or conventional propellents are much more efficient for vehicle launch than electicity, and don't let anybody tell you different without hard numbers to back them up.
• For a space station, 90% of the mass you need could be thrown up into orbit out of a cannon and nobody would care. The peaches might bruised but that's about it.
• It's not about manned space flight or astronomy, it's about engineering, so why would NASA care?

A link to that very interesting site was posted in July 1998, so this is not really new for those who have been on /. for more than a year.

Several interesting links were posted among the replies to that story. I will re-post a few of them here, so that you do not have to browse through the old messages:

• useit.com: Jakob Nielsen's Website.
• Usable Web: Guide to Web usability resources
• MacKiDo/Interface: What is user interface, and what is superior (and why).
• User Interface Engineering

Follow these links if you are interested in user interfaces (mostly for GUI). There is no lack of good advice on the net. This makes me wonder why we still see so many bad user interfaces in the latest programs (even in GNOME and KDE).

A really cool thing would be a piece of client software that knows how to talk to the UNC microscope over the web, and connect it to my force-feedback joystick, showing the image on my browser.

http://world.std.com/~dpj/elliptic.html

http://ds.dial.pipex.com/george.barwood/ec_faq.htm

It seems that there are patents, not on ECC itself, but on certain methods of implementing it.
--

N10 did exist (I was wrong about it never seeing the light of day - it was renamed the i860) and was the original NT platform (see here for a nostalgia-inducing account.

"New Technology" was retrofitted to the NT monicker by the marketing department.

As for the Dec/Compaq thing - maybe we just had good luck with Dec and (ongoing) bad luck with Compaq.

george

read Eric Drexler's "Engines of Creation" (full text online)

build a nanocomputer ... and you're no less prone to bugs and viruses

I might be wrong about that. I went to a talk on reversible computing, which you'd think would have relevance only at the lowest levels of abstraction. It ends up having ramifications all the way up, if you want to implement reversibility completely. (We can probably get almost all the benefit of reversibility with incomplete implementations.)

The amount of heat that they would have to dissapate otherwise is approx. ln(2)kT PER bit lost