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And, of course, the Milky Way is on a collision course with the Andromeda Galaxy. And both galaxies are hurtling towards the Great Attractor in the Virgo cluster.

So, no matter how you look at it, progress has been made towards some sort of calamity.

My feeling is that we must look to Japan when examining the Earliest History of the Digital Still Video Camera. I had recalled the Canon Ion from the late '80s.

"History and background of digital cameras
1. The first step was to improve the transmission from moon to earth antenna, researchers at NASA developed the methods that convert analog signals into digital information.
2. The second step was when Sony first demonstrated an electronic still camera using CCD in 1984. The name of the first digital still camera was 'Mavica.' This small toy uses 1.4 MB floppy diskette, and one-diskette stores twenty-five pictures."

FIRST INTERNET MENTION OF ELECTRONIC CAMERAS - 1984.
"In July, 1984, Canon conducted a trial of the RC-701 and an analog transmitter at the Los Angeles Olympics.
The Copal CV-1 electronic camera prototype - 1984.
HITACHI STILL VIDEO CAMERA PROTOTYPE - 1984.
PANASONIC PROTOTYPE ELECTRONIC CAMERA - 1984.
FUJI ES-1 - 1985. STill video camera.
KONICA SVC-20 - 1985. Prototype still video camera.
CANON RC-701 STILL VIDEO CAMERA - 1986. Canon was the first to market a still video camera, the professional model RC-701.
Canon's "RC-701" was the world's first commercial magnetic recording still camera."

SV Cameras Accessible to the General User
"In order to provide an affordable SV camera for general users, Canon set the price target that would not exceed 100,000 yen. The target was met by the release of the "RC-250 (Q-PIC)" in September 1989, whose price was 99,800 yen. The "RC-250 (Q-PIC)" had a built-in playback function. Connecting the camera to a television set with a video terminal, the user could easily view the pictures that had been taken. The camera with both "shooting" and "viewing" functions received much attention widely. The "RC-250" was a particular hit on the European market under the name of "ION."

JETS is now WYSE, from what I understand. Worldwide Youth in Science and Engineering.

People always called it the "JETS Team" but we competed in WYSE, so I think they were just slaves to routine.

I work as a support technician in the residence halls of a major university, and whenever I go to a room to try to repair a machine, I always scan for malware, and I NEVER find machines that are free of the scourge. Half the time, it's the cause of whatever problem they had in the first place.

Dude. Next time before you go through all that work do a google search.

Check out encap.

or just get Mosaic

Water doesn't always freeze when you cool it. It will not freeze if you supercool it. Any other 'stupid' questions you want to ask?

Why have a central authority at all? With wireless mesh technology, it would seem simple enough to set up a community internet without any central government or corporate provider at all.

That'll always be the advantage that wireline systems hold over wireless ones -- when you run out of capacity, you can just put in more wires. Both wireless and wireline systems have their place; one is not a replacement for the other.

A widely-cited paper by Gupta and Kumar discussing theoretical limits on wireless network capacity came out a few years ago that makes for dense but interesting reading. You can get a copy here if you're interested.

Why have a central authority at all? With wireless mesh technology, it would seem simple enough to set up a community internet without any central government or corporate provider at all.

That'll always be the advantage that wireline systems hold over wireless ones -- when you run out of capacity, you can just put in more wires. Both wireless and wireline systems have their place; one is not a replacement for the other.

A widely-cited paper by Gupta and Kumar discussing theoretical limits on wireless network capacity came out a few years ago that makes for dense but interesting reading. You can get a copy here if you're interested.

Currently my research involves text adventures. My advisor and I believe that text adventure games could serve as an excellent testbed for research in intelligent agent behaviour cause they model a number of real-world challenges, like partially observable world states, incompletely specified goals, and the need for common-sense reasoning and belief revision. Here is his paper on the subject.

I'm currently working on doing Logical Filtering in an adventure game, which is a way to maintain a sort of belief about the current state of your world depending on your prior knowledge and observations. Somewhat like filtering in a Hidden Markov model.

Some people at Saarland University, Germany, are also doing great work on description logics in adventure games. A description logic is like a language where you express concepts and the relations between them so that inferring properties is very easy.

It would be great to get some feedback and suggestions from the IF community about what they think about this. Is there any really cool idea you've had about what more could be done with adventure games? I mean many games have some standard stuff like inventories, containers etc. Is there something fundamentally different you've ever thought of doing. Something which involves creative and complex relationships between entities in an adventure games is what we're looking for. Thanks.

Currently my research involves text adventures. My advisor and I believe that text adventure games could serve as an excellent testbed for research in intelligent agent behaviour cause they model a number of real-world challenges, like partially observable world states, incompletely specified goals, and the need for common-sense reasoning and belief revision. Here is his paper on the subject.

I'm currently working on doing Logical Filtering in an adventure game, which is a way to maintain a sort of belief about the current state of your world depending on your prior knowledge and observations. Somewhat like filtering in a Hidden Markov model.

Some people at Saarland University, Germany, are also doing great work on description logics in adventure games. A description logic is like a language where you express concepts and the relations between them so that inferring properties is very easy.

It would be great to get some feedback and suggestions from the IF community about what they think about this. Is there any really cool idea you've had about what more could be done with adventure games? I mean many games have some standard stuff like inventories, containers etc. Is there something fundamentally different you've ever thought of doing. Something which involves creative and complex relationships between entities in an adventure games is what we're looking for. Thanks.

Currently my research involves text adventures. My advisor and I believe that text adventure games could serve as an excellent testbed for research in intelligent agent behaviour cause they model a number of real-world challenges, like partially observable world states, incompletely specified goals, and the need for common-sense reasoning and belief revision. Here is his paper on the subject.

I'm currently working on doing Logical Filtering in an adventure game, which is a way to maintain a sort of belief about the current state of your world depending on your prior knowledge and observations. Somewhat like filtering in a Hidden Markov model.

Some people at Saarland University, Germany, are also doing great work on description logics in adventure games. A description logic is like a language where you express concepts and the relations between them so that inferring properties is very easy.

It would be great to get some feedback and suggestions from the IF community about what they think about this. Is there any really cool idea you've had about what more could be done with adventure games? I mean many games have some standard stuff like inventories, containers etc. Is there something fundamentally different you've ever thought of doing. Something which involves creative and complex relationships between entities in an adventure games is what we're looking for. Thanks.

It actually works surprisingly well:

uiuc acm sigarch project

good site with lots of info, may be related to the original poster...

UIUC acm SIGarch project

Not true, they already had a buffer overflow protection that compilers could use a long time ago: the BOUND instruction. I don't think any mainstream compilers used it (at least not by default). This new fix is to allow an updated OS to protect against old apps that buffer overflow and minimize the damage. Besides, I think compilers already flag code and data segments within most executable file formats, but the OSs just ignore it for now because there's no hardware mechanism to enforce this distinction.

You're right on-- the change in firing rate relative to the baseline firing rate is very important. Also, there is some reason to think (logically and biologically) that some ensembles of neurons fire synchronously with each other and asynchronously from other ensembles of neurons. By using synchrony of firing, they gain computational power and allow for variable binding, thus allowing more formally logical computations to happen than just autocorrelation our boolean operations.

If I have four neurons, and one represents "red," one represents "green," one represents "square" and one represents "circle," then it is very difficult to tell (based on the sustained activity of the neurons alone) whether they are responding to a red circle and a green square or a red square and a green circle. This is called "the binding problem" and, at least in neural networks, can be solved by distributing the firing patterns of the neurons over time. So, "red" and "circle" fire in synch, then rest while "green" and "square" fire in synch and then rest while "red" and "circle"... etc. Notice that you could even have "red" bound with both "circle" and "square" by being active over two epochs, thus allowing for dynamic binding of variables, etc.

Anyway, the point of all of this is that if we can figure out how some of this temporal synchrony dimension is exploited in the brain, then we should be able to harness that computational power through silicon transistors like the one described in this article and build modules that could replace damaged regions of the brain.

Both systems were more powerful than PlayStation 2.

This guy better watch out, his initials spell out People's Republic of Kumar!

Ever heard of the CAVE?

The same theory applies, but these are 9'x9' semi-transparent screens each with it's own projecter. The hardware is extremely impressive, and, when I was a student at the University of Illinois, although I never got to write anything for it, I did get to play a port of Quake II that someone had (unoficially) done for it.

From the article -- "The primary computer, named Cassatt ... is a twelve-processor Silicon Graphics Onyx 2 Reality Monster."

There's one in a research lab in Tokyo that has 5 sides (4 walls and the floor). This one has only 4 sides (3 walls and the floor). A fully-immersive (6 sides) environment was in the works at the above-mentioned Japanese lab, but I haven't been looking into it much since about 2000.

PETS {photosynthetic electron transport system} is driven by two photochemical reactions that take place in membrane-bound photosystem I (PSI) and PSII Chl-protein complexes. Under natural conditions, Chl concentration in photosynthetic membranes is high enough to result in near total absorption of all incident photosynthetically active photons between 400 and 700 nm. Under normal weather conditions, these photons represent about 44.5 % of the total incident radiation. If PSI and PSII operate at the maximal quantum efficiency of 1, the maximum possible overall photosynthetic energy conversion efficiency would amount to about 12% (Lien and San Pietro, 1975)). Yet the average net photosynthetic productivity in conventional agriculture is in the range of 2-8 tons of dry organic matter per acre per year. This corresponds to a photosynthetic conversion efficiency of about 0.1-0.4% of the total incident radiation. Therefore the discrepancy between the maximal theoretical efficiency of 12% and observed efficiencies, range from 3000-12000%. This discrepancy is due to rate limiting extrinsic factors, and to intrinsic limitations of PETS.

On point 3, you can replace the GUI for OS X fairly easily. For a while, I had replaced the original finder with 3DOSX And by replace I mean I moved the finder app out of the system library and replaced it with 3DOSX so that was all that ran. There are also plenty of sites that can tell you how to run KDE or Gnome or any number of other GUIs by default in OS X

Mmmmm. I'm not upset or anything, but my math assumed no such thing. However YOUR math assumes that that 8% efficiency gets translated into biomass, which it most certainly DOES NOT do. If you read the link I sited you will see that actual energy to biomass conversion is utter CRAP at less than 1/2% (yes, 0.5), on average. Which means that maybe sugar cane gets 0.8% or something. You still aren't going to get any significant amount of energy per day out of any plant.

If anyone really wants to figure out how viable 'growing your own energy' is, go figure out how many trees you need to plant, and when, to supply your own firewood in, say, northern Washington.

And you need to get a good grasp on the fundamentals of solar power before you start doing math on it seacane. 700W/m^2 is over 70% efficient solar to final energy conversion, which is obviously not possible with a plant that is only EIGHT percent efficient to start with. _AND_ you also completely neglected the fact that the plants are only 8% (or, as I said, 12%) efficient at converting the frequencies of light that are of use in photosynthesis ( 400 to 700 nm). Of course as I said that 8-12% is an ideal conversion rate.

Growing plants with the intent to use them as fuel is NOT economically viable. Not a chance in hell. Growing plants that have tones of wastematter (Corn, cane, tobacco, trees (fruit, nut, paper), etc etc) is done already. And currently we have a bitch of a time getting rid of said material. Read up on Staley's plants in Lafayette IN if you want to hear some fun complaints about the waste products of sugar (corn based) production.

We will use ethanol, all over the place. But Nuke, and gods willing one day maybe even real (Earth based) fusion will be where the real power comes from. Although I wouldn't be suprised if we had beamed power from space before fusion: each are about as unlikely.

How much corn does it take to generate 335 kilo-joules of energy? How long does it take for that corn to grow? I'm willing to bet that miles of traditional solar panels will still produce more power over the same amount of time. But who wants to give up hundreds of thousands of acres of land for solar power generation?

Kill the mars program and fix the Hubble. We will go more places this way.

Are you kidding? First of all, science is about a diversity of observations. Space based optical wavelength, small telescope astronomy is nice, however it provides only a tiny portion of the measurements needed to understand the universe. The observations that we are making on Mars could seal the case that life is probable to exist elsewhere in the universe, perhaps even nearby! The Hubble, currently, can do little in the way of the search for life or habitable planets. Secondly, the hubble is an ancient piece of technology. The money used to run the program is better spent on new, much more powerful types of observatories, for instance Gossamer Telescopes, next generation x-ray observatories, or the Terrestrial Planet Finder. For exploring the furthest reaches of the universe, you must use infrared telescopes like the James Webb Telescope due to the massive redshift. Also it is important to set up a method of making groundbreaking observations of gravitional waves using something like LISA is essential to furthering our understanding of general relativity and cosmology. Also planetary exploration helps us develop propulsion systems that will eventually be used to launch interstellar probes.

There's so much to explore, and we're never going to make progress by continuously dumping money into a dying technology... Hubble's service record has been amazing, especially considering its flaws, however it is time to move on, to discover new and different things that Hubble cannot see.

Eliminating planetary science in order to take more pretty pictures, IMHO, is unacceptable. I'm glad to see that NASA agrees with this.

Disclaimer: I work on the Mars Exploration Rovers mission, so I'm a little biased :)

Cheers,
Justin Wick

CGI Stands for Common Gateway Interface. It has nothing to do with what language its written in.

'Scripting' and 'Programming' are semantic terms anyway, there is virtually no difference though most people I know define the difference in terms of complexity. I.E. if I use Perl to write an Email client is it programming or scripting?

Its been my experience that the web 'programmers' are the ones that know Dreamweaver, Flash, a bit of Javascript and some PHP and think they rule the world with the cool flashy thing. And web programmers are the ones that are writing web-based applications. What these applications are written in is really of no consequence.

Some animal behaviour comes with the distribution in ROM and is documented.

It's not Illinois-Chicago (UIC), it's just Illinois. That's the main campus in Urbana-Champaign. (UIUC) http://www.uiuc.edu

erm, do you mean either Mosaic or Netscape , by any chance? Mozilla didn't become the name of a browser until some time around 1998, by which time I'm pretty sure there were plenty of HTTP servers around...

Sigops How to Write an Operating System. This is a series that will walk you trough writing your own os. You'll have your own Hello World OS after you read the first chapter and you'll be multitasking by chapter five.

http://bugscope.itg.uiuc.edu/

Of course, you might be thinking a little smaller than a million-dollar microscope (estimated cost, since it didn't come out of my pocket).

Indeed, having facts just might help a little. Mosiac wasn't the first browser; it came onto the scene a good two years after the first website, and Tim Berners-Lee invented HTTP and HTML while working at CERN, in Switzerland.

According to NCSA's own page, Mosaic started development in June of 1993. The first webserver, info.cern.ch, went online in 1991.

• Grab a copy of the worm from your mailbox. I don't know what to do if you think there's a conspiracy about how that copy got to your mailbox, but if you have hundreds sitting there, I believe at least the first version released all had the same MD5sum, so check with your neighbors or whatever. At some point conclude you have an "in the wild" version of the virus.
• Get the zip from the email and uncompress it. Sometimes it's called text.exe, sometimes others, but let's just call it text.exe.
• Download UPX. Run "upx -d text.exe" (the worm was upx-compressed to save some additional space, as you can tell by running strings on the original version and seeing "upx" show up at the front)
• In unix, run "strings text.exe | perl -ple 'y/A-Za-z/N-ZA-Mn-za-m/' | less"
• What do you see? This:
  • 
    GET / HTTP/1.1
    Host: www.sco.com
    www.sco.com

I think it's clear that there's SOME funny business targetting sco there. Look at the disassembly so far, there's code attached to it to that does SOMETHING. Who knows, the code might never be called or whatever (which would be pretty odd for a 32k worm that's been compressed multiple times), but even at this point, it's still reasonable to conclude that SCO is threatened, regardless of what the PR department says.

Welcome to Slashdot.
First lesson: Always post in "Plain Old Text" (which, despite its name, does still let you use HTML tags) unless you are posting code or ASCII art, in which case you want to use "Code" mode. HTML mode just messes things up. For example, if you want to put a blank line in your comment,

like that one, to delineate paragraphs, Text mode lets you do that easily. With HTML mode it runs it all together unless you manually insert <p> tags.

As far as links, just use the standard <a href="URL">link text</a> which yields a link like this.

Besides, ever worked on labs that _really_ need to do serious number crunching (hint, hint)? They swear by IBM. PC clusters are a joke, Macs even more so.

What? Do you think that NCSA doesn't do "serious number crinching" with THIS ? Guess what? They're Dells, powered by Intel Silicon.

How about Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory it's running a linux cluster with 1,116 nodes.

One of his core business models for furthering the bio-informatics idea was to contact IBM and get them to design CPUs that would optimize the algorithms for certain vector and matrix operations. And he had enough information from IBM contacts who confirmed that if the idea proved viable, they would do so.

Next are you going to tell us that this guy works in the "Double '0'" section of the British Secret Service?

IBM has made some revolutionary discoveries in microprocessor design. IBM is still one of the most innovative companies out there. IBM still produces some serious Big Iron, but let's not over state it.

LK

Ooh, I wonder where you heard that. At http://banyan.cs.uiuc.edu/~ambarish/acads/IIT-Madr as/cs650/ EllipticCurveCryptography/comparison.html maybe?

Look down at your fingertips. That UI hasn't changed in years .

Sure, there are other options, but have you ever seen one?

In the final analysis, people hate change, even if it's good for them.

grnbrg.

I suspect we push our systems harder, but I'm not positive so I won't push the case... At any rate, our Suns are essentially rock solid.
Why not Quadros instead of GeForces? Price, the GeForces have always seemed quicker to market with new features to me, and the knowledge that it's the drivers that seem to have caused us most of our problems so far, not the cards themselves. We don't have the budget to buy the quantities of SB2000s w/XVR1000s that we'd like; we just have to de-rack old cluster machines most of the time. Still, even the Linux boxes offer us weeks of uptime if we don't push the graphics. They're stable systems. I wouldn't settle for anything less.
And as for OpenGL drivers with Sun, I will admit that part of my biases come from the fact that we've got Sun engineers more than happy to help us fix any problems we come across rapidly. At the same time, our developers have been literally begging nVidia and other companies to fix OpenGL and driver bugs for years, only to be rebuffed with "we don't have the manpower" constantly. I've seen what they go through...
And oh yes, stereo. Can't forget stereo. Linux doesn't do it, Suns do...and we need it, at least some of the time. Yes, it's a matter of the cards, but still...

See for example, GAP, or Macaulay2.

For commutative algebra, for example, there's Macaulay2.

gee, I wonder if this guy, who runs this whiny site, is involved. Same guy, same department.

What this means is that someone has taken the same materials which emit light as part of a single-junction device (a diode) and have also made them do so as part of a bi-junction device. While this looks like it might be a good way to integrate light emission with the control circuitry, it's not going to do anything to make them easier to integrate into large devices (silicon works for this because its oxide, SiO2, is a pretty good insulator while gallium doesn't do anything so convenient).

I will admit that it's clever, and someone may find some unobvious way of turning it into a useful device (massively parallel optical interconnects?), but there's just no way that this is going to be slapped onto the next Intel or AMD die. It especially will not replace aluminum or copper interconnects between parts of one processor.

Get your your bittorrent files here:
Maestro for Windows & Mars Dataset #1

Maestro for Linux & Mars Dataset #1
(tar -xzvf dataset immediately above your "JPL" directory)

Maestro for Solaris & Mars Dataset #1
(tar -xzvf dataset immediately above your "JPL" directory)

Maestro for Mac & Mars Dataset #1
(Requires Java3D)

Maestro User's Guide (pdf)
BitTorrent stats

Provide feedback to these folks: maestro [at] telascience [dot] org

1. Rolled out IE-SPY AD through the user's netlogon scripts.
2. Slowly adding the worst of the offending sites to the blacklist on our isa servers

Windows XP,2000
Linux

sorry, haven't seen torrents for the MacOS X or Solaris versions posted anywhere.

Linux torrent (since the mirror seems to be bogus) here.

Apparently? It returned pictures, but was only apparently successful?

Are we suggesting that the Stardust mission was faked, like the moon landing?

Shocking. Will the lies never stop? Even more damning evidence found here.

Well I'm willing to admit a mistake if you can point it out. Let's go through my math a little more carefully and see if we can find the problem...

Given:
-1 Bushel of corn (shelled) = 56 pounds (Now sure how corn would be measured in gallons...) (source)
-High-oil corn yeilds 7.25% oil by weight. (source)
-Corn oil has a specific gravity of 0.92 (source
-Water weighs 8.33 pounds per gallon (accepted value)
-An acre of corn can yeild 150 bushels (source)

56 pounds times 7.25% is 4.2 pounds of oil.

The oil weights 7.66 pounds per gallon. (8.33 * 0.92)

Therefore, one bushel of corn yields (4.2/7.66) = 0.55 gallons of oil.

At 150 bushels of corn per acre, that amounts to 82 gallons of oil.

-----
Hmm. Wonder how I messed THAT up! :P Seems I multiplied by density instead of divided... *scratches head*
=Smidge=

I'm having a hard time understanding the difficulty. Libraries around the country can do it, why can't yours?

Why not just use something like LLVM and/or extend it instead of re-inventing the wheel?

LLVM is already made to be low-level (like assembly language) but with high-level types (struct, int, array) like high-level languages. Sounds like just what they would want.

2) The thermal cycle of daily heating/cooling is less extreme

I doubt that :-) Venus has a very LOOOoooooonnng day. About 243 days :-) That means 121 days "night" and 122 days "sunshine".{

With Venus having a night temperature of ... hu hom, I estimate .. 100 degrees centigrade, we have a emperature difference on Venus of 300 degrees. Whereas on Mars the temperature difference is less than 110 degrees.

Remember that Venus has a thick atmosphere that holds heat. Googling, I find that Probing beneath the clouds, researchers are also studying surface emissions at other microwave frequencies. The results indicate that the surface temperature stays the same, night and day.

Sure, perhaps at the top of Venus's cloud layer, there's a different between day and night temperatures. At the bottom of the thick atmosphere, there is probably little, if any temperature change.

OTOH, its hot enough to melt lead. Venus is hell.