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This is cooler, and we've been doing it for years.

While this seems to be a blatant troll, I will respond AC.

First point: IE usage is not at 95% as the following stats show (Not allowing for spoofed headers):

83.6% - http://www.cen.uiuc.edu/bstats/latest.html
85% - http://www.w3schools.com/browsers/browsers_stats.a sp
69% - http://www.iexp.com/hitman/reports/agent.html

These sites chosen randomly from the following Google search:
http://www.google.com/search?q=Browser+Usage+Stati stics&hl=en&lr=&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&start=30&sa= N

Second point: Market share determines standards
Quite possibly so. dictionary.com defines a standard as follows:
http://www.dictionary.com/search?q=standard
This definition would, generally, make IE a standard.
However, since the W3C Standards also meet the same definition, they comprise a competing standard. In the free market structure you imply, both are equally valid, though acknowledged in differing contexts. Many of us developers (while not all) acknowledge and use the W3C standard because of it's excellence. IE, however, is a standard through Market Share.

Avoiding the obvious ad-hominem attack, referring to an opponent's argument as 'horseshit' hardly makes the oppositional argument any more valid.

<RANT>
I personally am tired of the mud slinging, name calling arguments from BOTH sides, and would prefer to see more intelligent, well thought out points on the merits of both.
</RANT>

The inventor of Tetris is alive and well. In fact, I just saw him give a talk while visitng UIUC at their Reflections and Projections conference.

A regulated commons can be just as efficient as a regulated market, if not more so. It's only unregulated markets and commons that promote inefficiency.

In both cases, regulation is necessary to keep the selfish, the greedy and the ruthless from dominating. You will find that most who argue for free, unregulated markets fall into one of those categories unless they fall into the category of "pawn."

Here is a 256-CPU IA-64 Linux cluster, #53 on the top 500 list. And here is CPlant, #50. You can find more Linux boxes on the top 500 list

"Cray Chairman and CEO Jim Rottsolk said Red Storm reflects Cray's strategy to deliver high-efficiency, high bandwidth supercomputer systems. "Red Storm embodies the same design philosophy as our new Cray X1(TM) vector-based product in a highly cost-effective superscalar architecture and will be a key initiative for Cray."

Quoted from the Cray Press Release.

Ah, I remember my days on the venerable Cray Y-MP, optimizing my programs for vector processing. I am unsure how Cray has managed to make a combined parallel-vector machine like the Y-MP out of PC chips provided by AMD, but I do not envy the programmers who must now begin the task of vector-optimizing their code to take advantage of this beast.

I had hoped that this idea died with Cray. Apparently not.

I've seen the stamement that there're more positions in chess than atoms in the universe many times. It's false.

Some estimates of number of atoms in the (visible) universe courtesy of Google:

• 4e78 - 6e79
• 1e78 - 1e81
• 3e78

• An upper bound of the number of chess positions: assume each square can have 15 states (white pawn, black pawn, white rook, black rook, ..., empty). Number of board states: 15^64, or about 1.96e71.

  The vast majority of those states are invalid. I've seen estimates of as little as 1e40 valid boards.

Well you aren't exactly going to Find the DCL on the map, but U of I is on there as Illinois State Industrial University. Right hand center on the map. The only building on campus at that point is where Beckman is now, at the corner of Wright and University.

So what is up here? Since when do black holes occupy so much space (I thought they were points)?

This would seem to imply that, in theory, a very large black hole could have rather low density inside the event horizon. It seems to me that a black hole could spontaneously form around a particularly dense cluster of stars if it was large enough and they all happened to clump together.

But my head starts to hurt thinking about what happens to physics when a region of normal space suddenly finds itself inside a black hole like that. I am definitely not a physicist, so I can't explain what goes on inside a black hole, or if my globular cluster black hole is even possible.

Crispin
----
Crispin Cowan, Ph.D.
Chief Scientist, WireX Communications, Inc.
Immunix: Security Hardened Linux Distribution
Available for purchase

Lockheed Martin's "Silent Sentry" system has been trackin airplanes this way for several years, but instead of using relatively weak and short-range cellphone signals, they use the immensely stronger broadcast television and radio signals. A simple demonstration of this technology can be done with any old TV attached to an antenna -- when an airplane flies over, you often get a distortion or echoes in the TV image. As you might imagine, if you explicitly start looking for these distortions, you can detect and track the airplanes remarkably well.

Lockheed's first installation had used regular Radio-Shack TV antennas, but they were replaced pretty quickly by simple T-shaped antennas, along the wall of their building near Baltimore-Washington International airport. They claimed to be able to track targets more than 100 miles away. One spectacular advantage of this kind of 'radar' is that it has no emissions of its own, so the pilots have no inkling that their plane is being tracked. Apparently these systems required substantial computing horsepower, but of course the price of that has plummeted recently. I'm sure that one could build one of these systems now for a shockingly small amount of money.

Given the work that has been done using the long-wavelength TV signals, I'm sure that it will not be long at all before the equivalent cell tower based system can be deployed. It will be interesting to see what it is used for. Theoretically, these systems could have tremendous positive value; for example, things like smart cruise-control that knows where all the cars around you might be. Still, at least in the beginning, you can be sure that it will be exploited by the military and police forces first.

thad

Here are some links I found: DARPA research, Canadian project (they're pretty tight -lipped about this), and German work is ongoing too.

It seems to have been used in astonomy for counting meteors & observing auroras.

You mean like this?

:)

grnbrg

Here at the UIUC a group called Physics Van always puts a chunk of dry ice in a 2-liter bottle with a little water. Then then put that in a big plastic trash can. When the CO2 causes the 2-litre bottle to pop, the trash can lid goes flying in the air. Always a croud pleaser!

Here at the UIUC a group called Physics Van always puts a chunk of dry ice in a 2-liter bottle with a little water. Then then put that in a big plastic trash can. When the CO2 causes the 2-litre bottle to pop, the trash can lid goes flying in the air. Always a croud pleaser!

Might be a little bit of speculation, but they could do a bit of comparative studies. They could potentially know the size of infants (from nearly hatched egg fossils) and adults. Depending iftyou consider them warm or cold blooded you can roughly estimate their growth rate based on contemporary animals (say gators, birds and mammals) and extrapolate from there.

Also, some bones and teeth exhibit growth rings, like those of trees. Maybe this type of dino had bone growth rings that are clearly visible.

Your particular definition of scratch involves compiling the C source code.
Some might say scratch could also be:
- Writing it in assembly
- Writing it in x86 machine language
- Flipping the bits on the hard drive
- Re-inventing the C source code

All of the methods require additional tools:
- A tool to take the Hard Disk and provide a file structure, write a boot sector and loader
- A tool with some commands to copy the compiler there
- A tool to take the C source code and generate the machine language binary code

You might find it similar to how mammals develop. As far as I know, most mammals require parents to feed, care, and raise their young. I can't think of any fertilized egg, fetus, or newborn that can survive without the parent to hand down their knowledge (I even heard that the reason we are able to live past 30 is to provide knowledge as grandparents or family/clan elders).

I have thought of one way to completely write the OS with only one machine. A long time ago, the old IBM PCs (and Apple computers) had a key sequence which would break into debug mode. After this mode starts, you would be able to type in the machine code to get a rudimentary system going. Another way would be to get an old ethernet card with a rom chip and burn a startup rom. Then you type in the boot loader.
For example: a bootable ``Hello World!'' program, consisting of just over 100 lines of assembler code.

While 100 lines of code is easy to hand type, imagine typing in the 10,000-100,000 characters for an extremely simple operating system. Then imagine hand typing in the machine code for a C compiler (yikes!), unless you want to hand type in the millions to 100's of millions of bytes of machine code to write a Linux system. There would be another way speed it up if you take apart a keyboard, wire it to a device capable of playing back keystrokes. I started to work on this but have postponed it until better times. I did start out by building Linux from Scratch and it took me 30-40 hours of very patient, slow progress. The complexity of even a minimal Linux is boggling when you jump in, compile, link, and see how much text scrolls by your screen when compiling it.

The advantage to Linux from Scratch is you have the greatest control over the OS. Without your direct control over every detail it won't run, as it depends on your Linux knowledge or following the tutorial to install.

Other links:
From-PowerUp-To-Bash-Prompt-HOWTO
How to Write an Operating System

If you want an extremely minimalist Linux distro, there's a list at :http://www.linux.org/dist/index.html
Select Category-minimalist, Platform-Intel compatible and click go.
Search for gateway on the page.

I've tried the following ones because they have the basic OS requirements for a user, they load from a floppy, and move resources to RAM:
Alphalinux
muLinux

The fat geek who dies told you - they're Connection Machines CM5s. Also seen in a few other movies (I wanted to say wargames, but I don't think it was - it played the part of some other pentagon/norad computer anyway).

The LEDs are the state for all the processor boards - CM5s used a whole heap of massively parallel microprocessors. Here's a pic of a 512-node one. According to this the processors are Sparcs. I vaguely remember an article in Omni (a long time ago) that said they were with 6502s or Z80s - maybe that was a previous model, or a strange dream.

As I don't have an Apple, the usual "I'm a stupid guy who uses Windows and Linux"-disclaimer applies. But I may have something interesting for you:
VNC-OSX

Don't know, if it works, if it's ready for prime time, etc. You know, I'm a stupid guy with a stupid disclaimer ...

Bye egghat.

Well, XML is bloated and binary formats suck because they aren't human parseable. Why not use HDF5 (Hierarchical Data Format version 5). It can even gzip files on the fly to save even more on storage. Perhaps it might be a bit overkill for a tiny little configuration file, but it does have everything you want. :-)

NCSA's Beginner's Guide to HTML

NCSA's Beginner's Guide to HTML

This would have happened years earlier were it not for "surfing the web". Complex real time rendering systems (browsers) required much more power than the office productivity apps and this is what drove the last round of upgrades.

IMHO two things are out there which could drive the next round:

a) Java becoming popular. If most binary apps are running inside of virtual machines this could do it.

b) We move to 3D desktop environments. Everything is always available but the things you are thinking about are "more there" then the ones you aren't a 3D finder Apple and SGI have led the way here.

• The Sedition Act of 1798
• The Espionage Act of 1917
• Executive Order 9066

It looks to me that Jupiter9 is interested to the second Laura. :)

(Btw, that nationalgeographic.com page has black text on black background - looks like optimized for some "other" browser).

There are electric motorgliders that do what you suggest...but they don't have a sufficient payload to replace a typical general aviation aircraft.

You're right, going conventional just because it's conventional is dumb. But, reinventing the wheel (or choosing a bad starting point for your task, like Helios for this application) are equally costly, both in performance and in design time.

So, yes, innovative aircraft design is a good idea, but one is wise to evaluate all possible solutions. These engineers have done so, and they're a lot farther along than I would have guessed. I'm not going to be rushing right out to buy one of these things (I think electric power is way overrated) but it's a neat exercise.

For what it's worth, aircraft design is what I will be doing for the next year. I'm working on one team to do a conceptual design of a mach 25 air-breathing SSTO spaceplane, and I'm a member of another team that will design and build a large r/c airplane for the AIAA Design-Build-Fly competition. For the SSTO, I'm trying to use J58 engines from the SR-71 for the "low speed" flight regime (up to Mach 3.5), because they're proven reliable technology. No sense re-inventing the thing. The airframe's going to look a lot like the failed NASP X-30, because that's really the only shape that makes a lot of sense at these speeds.

So, aircraft design has ALWAYS been about reimplementing good ideas in new designs. It's not an artifact of sloppy or un-creative thinking, but rather a decision to leverage pre-existing technology. Much like code re-use.

Klystron, like they use at Fermilab to accelerate protons?

160 is nowhere near enough for OSX you shouldn't even be trying it. For most things ram makes much more difference than processing power.

Anyway OSX is a 3D desktop, and essentially runs in 3D mode. Because the mac crowd is conservative Apple isn't taking full advantage of this fact graphically but you wouldn't have the same question if your desktop looked like screen shot of 3D OSX finder replacement

I imagine in the next few years Apple will start taking advantage of the tracks they've laid down so far.

Have you ever heard of Carnot Efficiency?

Get educated.

Actually, you can earn a (non-thesis) master's degree in CS at UIUC (which is rated as one of the top 5-6 CS schools in the country) without ever setting foot on campus.

http://www.cs.uiuc.edu/education/i2cs/index.html

I agree. This seems more to be an attempt at "acting cool" than any serious science fiction writing.

He's taken standard ideas from the geek community and has jumbled them up in a story. Disney's in league with the **AAs, let them be one of the evil badasses. Sun One + Java gives us JavaOne. And ofcourse, the Big Brother is a badass, so there you go. Plus some 3l337 h4x0r speak, cryptographic terms and ideas of an Orvellian nightmare thrown in. Everything you'd think the average cs-geek would like?

Wrong!

Some aspects of the story are nice, like trust (not only in computing, in life too) and the way companies of tomorrow may try to control the way media dissemination AND their employees work, the burnout of coders and how the safest havens of tomorrow might be the living hells of today. But otherwise, it mostly sounded like lame speak to me.

Good science fiction (the guy can't even say it's sci-fi, he calls it just fiction at b0ing-b0ing) would just inherently impress the readers without trying to go on great lengths to explain some lame ass terms or go into longwinded exaggeration of how somethings are today (whether vapourware will work out?).

Take Arthur C Clarke's The Star or EM Forsters The machine stops , or David Zindell's Shanidar. You don't need to put in any effort for it to strike you as good work. You can just feel it.

This is poor writing, bad content and an attempt at /l4m3r h4x0r attitude - LART!/ If this guy is one of the best of tomorrow's sci-fi, God save sci-fi.

He does not even come close.

There is a bit of information out there about some things that started on PLATO that are now pretty much familiar to everyone. IMB/Lotus credit PLATO's "notes" as being an inspiration for Notes/Domino. There is a nice summary of innovations on the system including personal notes (email), multiplayer games, and most importantly "online community," by David Wooley. Brian Dear is also writing a book on PLATO people that also has some good history.

Learning about PLATO makes a nice history lesson for both online gaming fans as well as people working in online education.

It is not often I can sign a note as chris/mfl and an Orion Captain

Any one searching for some of Voevodsky's work should look for his name in the UIUC K-theory preprint archive. This paper is a good introduction to his homotopy theory, and if you have access to a research library, you may find a book he recently wrote with Suslin and Friedlander, "Cycles, Transfers, and Motivic Homology."

Any one searching for some of Voevodsky's work should look for his name in the UIUC K-theory preprint archive. This paper is a good introduction to his homotopy theory, and if you have access to a research library, you may find a book he recently wrote with Suslin and Friedlander, "Cycles, Transfers, and Motivic Homology."

U of I CS, Comp E, and EE students get ms Development software (MSDN, XP Pro, Vis Studio, SQL Server, ect) for free... that's quite a discount (Though we still can't get a PC without buying windows with it, so the free XP part is pointless [assuming I even WANT XP] )

I didn't post the original comment but, for the sake of learning ;-), I googled on "Dewey theory education". Here are a couple of choice links ...

http://lrs.ed.uiuc.edu/students/janicke/Dewey.html

http://home.capecod.net/~tpanitz/discussions/dewey .htm

Of particular interest is the following quote from Dewey's 1916 Democracy and Education ...

"While books and conversation can do much, these agencies are usually relied upon too exclusively. Schools require for their full efficiency more opportunity for conjoint activities in which those instructed take part, so they may acquire a social sense of their own powers and the materials and appliances used."

I think it pretty clearly states Dewey's advocacy of learning by doing rather than learning by rote as was originally asserted.

Our ray intersection algorithm implemented on the GPU (an "old" Radeon 8500) was able to intersect 114M rays per second. This was loads faster than the best CPU implementation, which could handle between 20 and 40 intersections.

But when we tried to implement a ray tracer based on this, and an efficient one that didn't intersect every ray with every triangle, the readback rate killed us. Our execution times slowed down to the low end of the fastest CPU implementations.

And the readback delay seems to be completely due to the drivers, which apparently still use the old PCI-bus code. If the drivers could use the full potential of the AGP bus, our ray tracer could approach twice the speed of the best CPU ray tracers.

One such place is the Mathematics, Science and Techonology Office at the University of Illinois. Web sites like these are where you can find both static and interactive material that could be used for K-12 home schooling.

I teach and my suggestion is to use other course material/curricula as a guide. Every good, qualified teacher develops their own material to suit their style of teaching. If you rely to heavily on what some else has developed you can lose effectiveness. Judiciously use it as a guide and a base for developing your own stuff for your kid.

With that said I would like to add the other side of my $0.02 coin. We are pretty much mirror images of our parents and many of us spend a great deal of time and sometimes money trying to deprogram ourselves in order to function well as adults. Home schooling will have a tendancy make your child think like you do. Is this really what you want ?

Try not to apply an ego preservation heuristic to this where you accept only what challenges your belief system the least.

Basically, the explanation is that rasterization takes a time proportional to the number of polygons to render a frame, while raytracing takes time proportional to the log of the number of polygons. That might make you think raytracing should be always faster, which it clearly isn't -- the reason it isn't is that the constant factor in each is very different. So you have a*N vs b*log(N), where b is much bigger than a. As N gets bigger (apparently in the neighborhood of 10 million polygons), the difference between a and b becomes less important than the difference between N and log(N).

The main benefits of raytracing over rasterizing is that it is very easy to get things like reflections, shadows, refraction, and other important effects with raytracing, but with rasterizing, you need to do a lot of complicate and CPU-intensive hacks to get the same effect. Another benefit is that raytracing is parallelizable while rasterization generally isn't. That means that if you have a raytracing accelerator card in your PC, you can nearly double the frame rate or resolution by adding a second raytracing card.

Of course, it's all a chicken-and-egg sort of thing, nobody's going to buy a raytracing card until it's a cheap way to do the rendering they want, and it won't be available unless there is a market. Fortunately, there is research into using the next generation of rasterizing graphics cards to greatly speed up raytracing. This will help bridge the gap, by making raytraced games possible using soon-to-be-existing hardware.

NCSA has been making good progress on developing this. The million bucks of SGI hardware has of course been replaced by a rack of Linux PC's. Instructions are actually on line. It's not trivial to build, though. And using LCD projecters does have real downsides. If you buy a dozen identical projectors, they won't have the same brightness and color saturation. Actually, they aren't even consistent from edge to edge. So your display isn't perfect, and you can definitly see the tile edges. Not to mention the fun of building a usable support structure which lets you get all the alignments right. If you don't need it to take up an entire wall, I think the IBM T221 display is a cheaper way to get super high-res output. But of course your high-res Quake won't be lifesize either. :-)

Way to go IBM! Now let's see you put it to a good use... say...

CAVE Quake!!

: )

Now if only my .edu would build this excellent... um, tool!

Idea borrowed, no doubt, from the Cray waterfalls, available on several machines and cooling towers, including the Cray 2.

To the naysayers: I didn't mean fully immersive 3D like SysQuake; I meant only as 3D as it needs to be. One example is the Dock's auto-magnify feature. The concept is that everything's there; whatever has focus will just be more there.

Same with the drop shadowing on all windows: they only use two levels, foreground and background, but the foreground item (never more than one) has twice as much shadow as everything else. Everything not at the front layer has less shadow, making it further away from the user, and some transparency to it's title bar, implying, to me anyway, distance blurring.

I've been wondering what ancestral role (if any) the multi-column view will have in any forthcoming 2.5D/3D GUI. Any ideas, or is it just a cool NeXT holdover wiht no future in the 21st century?

There's a full 3D file browser called 3DOSX that give at least some idea of what's possible. If nothing else, it'll make you realize that cubes and large, flat surfaces (with their need for more axes of control) aren't the only concievable 3D workspace.

... well, not yet, but sooner rather than later we hope to have self-replicating nano. And we don't have to wait for machine stuff either; look into some of the advances in biotech in recent years, and what with that with the new soft lithography able to align them so perfectly, at dirt cheap costs... how much would you pay for an organically grown CPU?

At this point we no so litle about gravity that it is difficult to make any conclusions about it.

We know quite a bit about gravity - this NASA page lists a bunch of tests of General Relativity, and doesn't even include the atomic clock measurements of gravitational redshift (The GPS satellite system works only because the approximately 40 microsecond/per day relativistic time dilation is well characterized.

Now like electromagnetism, gravity is one of the four fundamental forces.

Is it? Generations of theorists, starting with Albert Einstein himself, have attempted to draw the connection between the two, unsuccessfully to date (although String Theory research is big business these days, I know, and may eventually pay off).

It seems that gravity is actually is very different from the other forces. Those forces act on other particles & masses and subsequently cause reactive movement, but that movement is within spacetime, where gravity is due to the alteration of the spacetime
fabric itself.

You have to remember that gravity's effects go beyond just being an atractive force. The curvature of spacetime can be measured, most accurately in the time dimension; an atomic clock runs slower at sea level than it does on top
of the rockies, and way slower than one in orbit. None of the other forces come close to producing that kind of effect.

Check out this project, where you can have a light saber fight with a cheap plastic toy and a webcam. It was on Slashdot two years ago.

Having a hack for the iPod would be an excellent solution to last-minute tracks (for those of us that produce) and more convenient than CD's. I often play in venues where there are no DJ-oriented CD units; just Technics 1200's. I love my vinyl, but this would be excellent for extending my repertoire at live events.

What a pointless "technology".
"Pointless" would be to argue with you about the meaning of higher education.

Let's think what the article actually says: IBM has employed a technique which lets them estimate the original distribution of data by adding a certain amount of random data with know distribution. That surely should be useful in other areas as well?!
A Google seachr on Random Perturbation gives quite a long list with applications in wheather simulation, computer graphics, chaotic dynamical systems, etc.
Still pointless? What about a search in the then NEC Research Index? Wowwww... Pointless, eh...?

People

Richard Stallman -
Eric S. Raymond -
Larry Wall

Linux Programming

Unix

Programming Methodologies

C Programming

C++ Programming

Perl Programming

Network Programming

Open Source

The University of Illinois uses something similar: Bluestem. It supports inter-realm authentication, too.

Some of our composers have sample works online.

As for the "racks of punch cards fed into mainframes," check out these photos.