Slashdot Mirror

In 1995, Electrical Engineering students of Delft University of Technology did this, with playing Tetris on their 100m high building.
Link: http://www.etv.tudelft.nl/vereeniging/archief/lust rum/90/english.html

In 2001, they used their building as a big SMS display.
Link: http://www.etv.tudelft.nl/vereeniging/archief/lust rum/95/english.php

In 2006, a huge 8x4x2m LED MatriXX was created.
Link: http://www.etv.tudelft.nl/vereeniging/commissies/e lco/matrixx/

In 1995, Electrical Engineering students of Delft University of Technology did this, with playing Tetris on their 100m high building.
Link: http://www.etv.tudelft.nl/vereeniging/archief/lust rum/90/english.html

In 2001, they used their building as a big SMS display.
Link: http://www.etv.tudelft.nl/vereeniging/archief/lust rum/95/english.php

In 2006, a huge 8x4x2m LED MatriXX was created.
Link: http://www.etv.tudelft.nl/vereeniging/commissies/e lco/matrixx/

In 1995, Electrical Engineering students of Delft University of Technology did this, with playing Tetris on their 100m high building.
Link: http://www.etv.tudelft.nl/vereeniging/archief/lust rum/90/english.html

In 2001, they used their building as a big SMS display.
Link: http://www.etv.tudelft.nl/vereeniging/archief/lust rum/95/english.php

In 2006, a huge 8x4x2m LED MatriXX was created.
Link: http://www.etv.tudelft.nl/vereeniging/commissies/e lco/matrixx/

Check out http://qt.tn.tudelft.nl/research/spinqubits/. They posted some timing numbers there. They talk about "Real-time detection" of a single electron tunneling with a speed of about 8us.

Try telling that to the Dutch!

An electron does not only have an electrical charge, but it also behaves like an ultrasmall magnet. This is caused by the spinning of the electron around its axis, also called 'spin'.

Electrons do not move about their axis, the spin is a measure of the magnetic angular momentum, if memory serves from quantum physics. Also, no, electrons do not only have two directions to spin, their spin can be in any direction, but only measured spin up or spin down with respect to a single axis at any time. This is based upon the fact that in the Schrödinger equation the operators don't commute for the eigan functions. Put simply, that means that if you measure the spin once in the z direction and obtain an answer, then in the y, and again in the z, you will end up with a different value.

I would also like to know how they are controlling the spin in every possible direction, and effectively measuring it. Because unless the laws of physics have changed, they can still only measure spin up or spin down.

This is not new - this is known as "susbtrate transfer process" and has been practiced for year. One company doing very advanced work in this is Philips:

First two paper hits I found in google:

http://retina.et.tudelft.nl/data/artwork/publicati on/hf/ectm013.pdf
http://retina.et.tudelft.nl/data/artwork/publicati on/hf/111568631.pdf

Many companies are also working on substrate transfer processes to build silicon wafers with selective crystal orientation. Among them IBM and Soitec.

This is not new - this is known as "susbtrate transfer process" and has been practiced for year. One company doing very advanced work in this is Philips:

First two paper hits I found in google:

http://retina.et.tudelft.nl/data/artwork/publicati on/hf/ectm013.pdf
http://retina.et.tudelft.nl/data/artwork/publicati on/hf/111568631.pdf

Many companies are also working on substrate transfer processes to build silicon wafers with selective crystal orientation. Among them IBM and Soitec.

Similar systems have been tested from at least 1996.
http://guernsey.et.tudelft.nl/group/project_loktev .html

I mean, if ther was no P2P, people wouldn't be able to conjure such outlandish theories!

I, however, blame bittorrent for the rise in gas prices. These two datasets are correlated. Therefore, correlation proves causation.
http://measure.das2.its.tudelft.nl/~pouwelse/Bitto rrent usage data
http://www.randomuseless.info/gasprice/gasprice.ht ml

while you are at it, use 3 projectors and a parabolic mirror. It gives a real sensation of depth.

I was in this beast while they were loading the new software. it was fixed stationary, still you couldn't believe you were not moving when the simulator screen showed a turn. Spooky.

It is even better when it moves, 6 degrees of freedom and really fast!

In fact, Windows has a vastly, almost prohibitively more elegant security infrastructure than "Linux": File rights of "Full Control, Modify, Read & Execute, Read, Write," file attributes of "Read-Only, Archive, System, Hidden," very finely-grained ACL-based system security "Policies", a global Kerberos-based directory authentication scheme in Active Directory, etc etc etc.

"Linux" has rwx-rwx-rwx. That's it.

IANAHBIAAS (i am not a hacker but i am a sailor). This quote gives me a strong feeling Linux is much safer than Windows. I know you can't compare a computer to a ship, but at sea, one thing's for sure: Safe systems are simple systems. Especially when you have to deal with a lot of people of which you don't know how educated they are (which is, of course, much more the case in computers than on board).

On the sailing ship which i am a captain of, we use exactly TWO KNOTS to control the ship. One for the sails, one for the vessel. For these knots, the crew has to abide THREE rules of thumb. Only three or four other knots are used in non-critical situations, only by the captain, mate, or a trained crewmember. That's safety: it's simple, it's easy to understand, and it is always the same. This does not imply the system as a whole is simple: controlling 6 or 7 sails (or two in heavy wheather) on shallow, tidal water is a very complex job. And mistakes can potentially take lives, not files. This complex job can be done safely. But if every rope needs its own, special knot, you're fried. A dangerous mistake will be unevadible in the long run.

I see no reason why in a computer system, it would be the other way around.

A teacher of mine Ruben van Wendel de Joode has recently got a Ph.D. on organizational aspects of Open Source Communities.

http://ta.twi.tudelft.nl/DV/Staff/Lemmens/

Photon noise: http://www.ph.tn.tudelft.nl/Courses/FIP/noframes/f ip-Photon.html

Note the last line though -- "For very bright signals, where T exceeds 105, the noise fluctuations due to photon statistics can be ignored if the sensor has a sufficiently high saturation level."

Consumer digicams aren't counting individual photons. They most certainly are dominated by electronic noise, as anyone who does astrophotography with them knows because the colder your sensor, the less noise you get. So when you make your pixels smaller you're amplifying a smaller signal that has a constant or increased noise level. Adding those signals back together after amplification is not the same as amplifying the higher SNR signal from the larger pixel.

They could have saved themselves several years of development by using opensource. A tool similar to morfik (MVC model, ajax development, some datamodelling) is for example this one: http://swerl.tudelft.nl/twiki/pub/Main/AvailableOp enProjects/backbase-eclipse.doc

There are probably a lot more (google on +eclipse +plugin +ajax gives 234.000 hits)

I noticed that the article didn't mention LUFS. This alone allows for tremenduous possibilities, not least of which is rapid development of filesystems. Do any other systems (besides GNU HURD) have userspace filesystems?

LUFS hasn't been maintained since 2003, and is therefore almost dead. FUSE (Filesystem in Userspace) is the most promising alternative that is getting merged into the 2.6.14 mainline Linux kernel. It works with several network filesystem protocols like:
SMB for FUSE
SSH Filesystem (SSHFS)
FuseDAV (WebDAV)

Linux-FUSE can also provide all applications on the system (even shell utilities) with access to network locations set up under KDE. There's a tutorial for how to do this, but last time I tried it did not compile :-(

These are much needed improvements to usability of the Linux desktop, because unprivileged (non-root) users shouldn't have to contact their sys. admins everytime they need to mount network locations. The KDE approach to providing network access is not complete without Linux-FUSE, because only KDE apps can open/save to network locations set up under KDE. Hopefully the KDE devs will create a GUI for mounting/unmounting FUSE shares so that all apps (GTK, Motif, even shell utilities) can access network files.

actually, you can do that. you may have seen algorithms like that at work in emulators like mame. See http://elektron.its.tudelft.nl/~dalikifa/ for info

Wrong: all vehicles were driving on the public road and had to have a road permit given to them by the Australian government. See photo's here http://www.tudelft.nl/live/pagina.jsp?id=37462cef- 27fe-4567-bc08-be19fde8e4c5&lang=nl for more info.

• Best grade solar cells: triple junction cells which are normally only used in satellites, efficiency around 25%. Probably only the top 3 cars can afford this.
• High efficiency electronics: maximum power point trackers and brushless motors, both with efficiencies over 95%. Most teams use this.
• Low weight (less than 200 kg): judging from the pictures the car is a load bearing carbon frame, which is much lighter than a tube frame with a shell as used by most other teams. Low weight obviously saves energy when going uphill and it is said to save a lot of flat tires.
• Aerodynamics: the design was heavily optimized and tested in a windtunnel. With side-wind, for example, the design works a little bit like a sailing boat. One of their advisors is world famous for his designs of glider wings.
• Lot of testing and preparation: they did first aid courses, skid courses, test drives on the local race track (the local formula 1 driver did some laps), they have been in Australia for more than a month before the race to test on the road, ....
• Good facilities/advisors: TUDelft is a technical university with (among others) faculties of aerospace, electrical and mechanical engineering. One of the advisors was former astronout Wubbo Ockels.
• A lot of money to pay the things above: they got a huge sponsorship deal with a big local electricity company. Budget per race is probably around 1MEuro. Part of the money comes from the university itself, which has paid back big time in PR value.
• Hard work: as I understood the whole team (~11 persons) took a one year brake from their studies.

You're probably right about the "too expensive", but Acorn never produced 16 bit systems: they jumped straight from the 6502-based 8 bit BBC series (Acorn Electron, BBC A/B/B+/Master) to the 32 bit ARM based machines (Archimedes and Risc PC), still available now as the Iyonix. While Acorn itself broke up, the ARM processor they designed for the first Archimedes is now a part of a ridiculous number of cellphone handsets, TV Set Top Boxes and other embedded applications. While the x86 architecture manages 300 million shipments per year, the ARM blows that away at around the one billion mark.

As an aside, that same ARM architecture is pretty popular for running Linux on as well: pretty good for a very compact, low power consumption Linux system like the LART.

When they raided last year in Operation Fastlink I saw some significant changes in traffic patterns. This time, I am not seeing anything.

When they raided last year in Operation Fastlink I saw some significant changes in traffic patterns. This time, I am not seeing anything.

I don't know if you are old enough to have used a manual typewriter for significant amounts of typing, but let me tell you that you really had to press down on those keys, particularly the Q and A since they were pinky keys. I believe that the relatively recent complaints of repetitive stress is the result of hand laziness and improper posture. You couldn't slouch your arms and wrists and type on a manual, or even an electric typewriter for that matter; you can on a computer. Several hundred years with thousands of people in typing pools who did more typing in a day than anyone does these days in a week, and suddenly some epidemic in the last 15 years is because of qwerty? Yeah, fine. By the way, for $50 bucks I have this life-changing Chinese herbal pill that will let you live longer, have better memory, and lose weight (come on, would I want to ingest something made by some pencil-necked chemist in a lab, or something that has been around for a thousand years!).

Is the dvorak keyboard shaped differenty than qwerty, or are the keys just rearranged? If there is no difference in shape, then I don't understand the ergonomic benefit when the arms and wrist are are the same position either way.

You can start here if you want, but I doubt it would carry any weight with you.

Carbon nanotubes are molecules, and are well known to work as transistors, even at room temperature. For instance, see these papers:

Room-temperature transistor based on a single carbon nanotube
S. J. Tans, A. R. M. Verschueren, and C. Dekker
Nature 393, pages 49-52 (1998)
http://www.mb.tn.tudelft.nl/publications/nat393_49 .pdf

Carbon nanotubes single-electron transistors at room temperature.
H.W.Ch. Postma, T.F. Teepen, Z. Yao, M. Grifoni, C. Dekker
In: Science 293 pages 76-79 (2001)
http://www.mb.tn.tudelft.nl/publications/science29 3_76.pdf

Disclaimer: I wrote that last paper, there are many more papers about nanotube transistors, but these are some of the most cited ones.

There are even single-atom transistors around, see

Coulomb blockade and the Kondo effect in single-atom transistors,
Jiwoong Park, Abhay N. Pasupathy, Jonas I. Goldsmith, Connie Chang, Yuval Yaish, Jason R. Petta, Marie Rinkoski, James P. Sethna, Hector D. Abruna, Paul L. McEuen & Daniel C. Ralph,
Nature 417, pages 722-725 (2002).
http://www.lassp.cornell.edu/lassp_data/mceuen/hom epage/Publications/Co-02pub.pdf

Carbon nanotubes are molecules, and are well known to work as transistors, even at room temperature. For instance, see these papers:

Room-temperature transistor based on a single carbon nanotube
S. J. Tans, A. R. M. Verschueren, and C. Dekker
Nature 393, pages 49-52 (1998)
http://www.mb.tn.tudelft.nl/publications/nat393_49 .pdf

Carbon nanotubes single-electron transistors at room temperature.
H.W.Ch. Postma, T.F. Teepen, Z. Yao, M. Grifoni, C. Dekker
In: Science 293 pages 76-79 (2001)
http://www.mb.tn.tudelft.nl/publications/science29 3_76.pdf

Disclaimer: I wrote that last paper, there are many more papers about nanotube transistors, but these are some of the most cited ones.

There are even single-atom transistors around, see

Coulomb blockade and the Kondo effect in single-atom transistors,
Jiwoong Park, Abhay N. Pasupathy, Jonas I. Goldsmith, Connie Chang, Yuval Yaish, Jason R. Petta, Marie Rinkoski, James P. Sethna, Hector D. Abruna, Paul L. McEuen & Daniel C. Ralph,
Nature 417, pages 722-725 (2002).
http://www.lassp.cornell.edu/lassp_data/mceuen/hom epage/Publications/Co-02pub.pdf

These appear to be the same type of quantum dots used to create artificial atoms.

Artificial atoms, as I understand it anyway, are exhibited when these wells/quantum dots are crafted to store electrons in certain configurations (modeling "orbital shells"/energy levels?). The quantum dot has then been shown to exhibit some properties of an element corresponding to that electron configuration.

Is there a connection somewhere here with the electron spin "flip" (whatever that means)? If you take an ordinary atom and add energy, the electrons jump/change to higher energy levels and when returning to a lower state emit the excess energy as a photon. This seems strangely coincidental.

I'm not a physicist and maybe I'm out of touch with current terminology/models of subatomics so don't be too harsh if my explanations seem naive.

On another note, I wonder if it's possible to model the unstable elements (112-118 and beyond) using this quantum dot approach. What fascinating properties might be exploited that would otherwise be impossible to tap due to their nearly instant decay.

• J.A. Pouwelse, P. Garbacki, D.H.J. Epema, and H.J. Sips. The bittorrent P2P file-sharing system: Measurements and analysis. In 4th International Workshop on Peer-to-Peer Systems (IPTPS). LNCS (to appear), feb 2005.
• M. Izal, Guillaume Urvoy-Keller, Ernst W. Biersack, Pascal Felber, Anwar Al Hamra, and L. Garcés-Erice. Dissecting bittorrent: Five months in a torrent's lifetime. In PAM, pages 1-11, 2004.
• Dongyu Qiu and R. Srikant. Modeling and performance analysis of bittorrent-like peer-to-peer networks, 2004.

a small yet powerful embedded computer : http://www.lart.tudelft.nl/

from google:

vrpsych...

but there is a mailing list:

vrpsych-l

And risking mailing list Etiquette (and I'm chicken sh!t for annon posting) there is perhaps a call for help in this field from the open source community (note the following has been edited and links are not made directly clickable):

How about some temporary mirrors of some of the stuff below (anti-slashdotting effect) out of respect for these VR medical researchers?

In a recent email regarding an award this person recently received

"Dear all,
thank you for your warm congratulations. I'm really happy for this Award because it shows that virtual reality in health care is not a toy, but a real therapeutic tool that may have a deep societal impact.

By chance, in the last issue of Nature neuroscience Review there is an interesting paper by Maria V. Sanchez-Vives entitled FROM PRESENCE TO CONSCIOUSNESS THROUGH VIRTUAL REALITY who underlines the critical role that VR may have in neuroscience and clinical practice :

www.nature.com/cgi-taf/DynaPage.taf?file=/nrn/jo ur nal/v6/n4/index.html
(subscription required)

It follows the review (for a list of the last papers and books related to this field, please have a Look at my web site: www.cybertherapy.info) published in the Journal of American Medical Association "JAMA" who underlines the same concept:

www.nida.nih.gov/pdf/toads/FakeWorlds.pdf

However, the effective impact of this field in the real world clinical practice is still limited: to use a virtual environment you have to buy it or to develop it...

And this, obviously, requires a lot of money. So, we need grants - that usually force you to a huge admnistrative work - and when they finish, the research ends with it.

This is really a WASTE of time and energy. Especially when you see that most resources are spent to develop four different supermarkets, five different rooms full of spiders, nine elevators, etc.

So, a suggestion I have for this community is to share, if possible, the tools developed.

On my side, you can download and use for free the different environments we have developed for the treatment of panic disorders with agoraphobia:

www.vrtherapy.net

You can download for free many books (they usually cost about 100 US$) related to virtual reality here:

www.emergingcommunication.com

Also, Prof. Stéphane Bouchard is giving for free the different environments he developed using game engines to treat spider phobia and acrophobia:

w3.uqah.uquebec.ca/cyberpsy/index-en.html

Finally, in Laval, Prof. José Gutiérrez-Maldonado allowed to share with this community his excellent body image scale. You can download it for free from this web site :

www.ub.es/personal/rv/ecic.htm

At this point, if you have resources and no commercial limitations please share them!!

I hope to meet most of you in June at the CyberTherapy conference in Basel:

www.e-therapy.info

Ciao

Giuseppe"

He might be ok with the gulf stream. It rarely ever goes faster than 1 metre per second, usually around 0.2-0.6m/s, and it's a surprisingly short band of water.

Still, I'm with you, I'd rather swim from America. Especially since then he wont have to worry about US immigration so much.

The word 'quantum' in 'quantum dot' is misleading. The dimensions of a quantum dot are typically between a few nanometeres (billionths of a meter) to a few microns. Smaller ones, down to a single electron, can be made, and at that size they would definitely be subject to the laws of quantum of physics-- but at the more typical sizes, they're too big to worry about wave functions, and behave more like the everyday materials with which we're familiar-- except for those properties such as hue and reflectivity that are tailored during fabrication.

For more information, check out this site.

Other groups working on optical interconnects: (incomplete list)

Heriot Watt

Cornell University

IBM Zurich

Delft

UIUC

Intel

Stanford

>Why is that everyone is so brainwashed today
>that they think you need a movie-quality flashy
>3D game to be sellable? Of all my favorite games,
>not a SINGLE ONE fits that profile.

Seconded. I play Diablo II these days for fun and a release. But the game play, and complexity of the objects points system, etc. is inferior to Castle Of the Winds, a primative old 'fighting icons' move-based game that ran in Windows 3.1.

(all the various monsters were actually Windows icons built into the binary, which could be 'farmed' out for your desktop, etc. Fun days those were.)

The answer, of course, is quantum dot technology

You could give Castle of the Winds a try. It's a turn based adventure game. The graphics are old (the game is from 1990 or so), but it's a really addictive game. You can move the character around with either the keyboard or mouse. Both parts are now available for free (the second part was once only available to those who registered). Here is a link to a place where you can get both parts:

http://vengeance.et.tudelft.nl/cow/

Not really sure how you'd go about hobbying around with one. We bought 3 devboards (DbAu1100) directly from AMD, and IIRC they were over $1000 each. But that was over a year ago. Might have changed by now.

It's a shame there's not something like the LART StrongArm board for the Alchemy yet. They're really great processors. I had one running an Xorg X server and the IFS screensaver (which takes the CPU to 100%) all day, and it was still cooler than a cup of coffee. Barely even warm, really.

Delft

Cornell

MIT

Come on, sincerely I think DirecX is something nice, at the end, it is only an API, and well it has a lot of features that can be used in other areas other than gaming.
Have there have been some use of VR for combating phobias here and it also could be used as a way of visualizing data (dont you remember that scene in The Matrix where some girls that control the doos of XX (whats the name of the Matrix city??) they had cool interfaces, and I think it could be used to do that.

I didn't find anybody relating to this link it might be helpfull to know why they went down.

http://www.isa.its.tudelft.nl/~pouwelse/Bittorrent _Measurements_6pages.pdf

I've lived in a 'cardboard' box for quite a while. Images here show the houses. Quite cheap, really cold in winter, and really hot in summer. In a couple of weeks these will be torn down, or actually, the screws taken out of them, put on the back of a lorry and driven out.

Nah, they'll just host it at the Delft university and let the taxpayer bleed for an extra gigbit pipe >:-)

Apropos old computers, I've had a recent fixation on the Olivetti Video Display Terminal, which I saw in a book of Mario Bellini's industrial designs. It's probably just as well it hasn't shown up on eBay lately 'cause I sure don't have the space.

MySQL - The best. Somehow I know of no company willing to deploy this at a mission critical level.

Strange, isn't it?

100% valid CSS and XHTML continues to crash IE.

Except that as others have posted, IE can be crashed on 100% valid XHTML (http://it.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=126192&cid =10563636)

This one is my favorite:

http://www.student.citg.tudelft.nl/c9864875/boempa ukeslag.html

The html there is so simple, no outrageous sizes, no nulls.

I agree that mozilla has a bug, but I don't think that IE is any better in the crashing on various input (now, if these are security threats.... that's another issue)

Yay! Crash on page load!

I would counter a few of your underlying assumptions with the following references - note that electron tunneling pathways affect protein folding dynamics and that quantum interference plays a critical role in photosynthesis. See also Zeilinger's biomolecule matter-wave interference experiments.

Of course, future computing architectures can incorporate these 'spooky' features.

In other words, this really tells you nothing useful about how long a space ship will take to get to Mars since you have two unknown velocities... or are you assuming something that I'm missing?

For rocketry, Delta-V does indeed determine flight time. The reason is that there are different ways of achieving an orbital transfer. Slower methods require a lower Delta-V, while faster methods require a greater Delta-V.

Here is a list of orbital transfers and Delta-V requirements.

The cheapest maneuver used to be the Hohmann Transfer, but it has recently been supplanted by an even more efficient (and slower) transfer called the Interplanetary Superhighway.

Forgot to include useful link