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You might be interested in Doom as an Interface for Process Management :)
Want to kill a process? Just frag it.

Sounds like it's just a subset of this.

How Doom as a Sys admin tool?

Actually I believe it _is_ flammable and _I_ build race cars out of it. (http://me.unm.edu/~fsae/teams/2005/). However, my mind blanked and I forgot how high the temperature has to be before it will oxidize.

It'll oxidize at a very high temperature, but I think the oxidation stops as soon as the heat source is removed so you won't get a sustainable burn (but I Am Not a Materials Scientist). This may be another reason why it's useful in race cars along with strength and weight. Carbon brake pads don't readily ignite either, right?

At any rate, if anything in a laptop shell gets hot enough to oxidize carbon fiber, you probably have other things to worry about!

Nice cars by the way, those things must have a scary power to weight ratio. And I'm drooling over that Ford GT.

Actually I believe it _is_ flammable and _I_ build race cars out of it. (http://me.unm.edu/~fsae/teams/2005/). However, my mind blanked and I forgot how high the temperature has to be before it will oxidize.

Dunno about server, but I was wondering about a new desktop...
http://www.orionmulti.com/products/specs_ds96
- Performance 230 GFlop peak, 110 GFlop sustained (Linpack) -

What else ??? ah, yes, an ugly as hell server I wouldn't mind this winter : http://www.iwill.net/product_2.asp?p_id=90
Dunno if many people are into rack server modding, but you cannot make it more ugly than it is on the outside....

The inside can host 16 Opteron 800 cores and 128Gig of Ram, which make it pretty hot - both senses.....

For the Network War room, what about a nice visual representation of network attacks/activity, using "The Spinning Cube of Imminent Doom" which is both impressive and easy to explain...:
http://www.nersc.gov/nusers/security/TheSpinningCu be.php
(maintenance of servers going on, use the cache, luke...

Personnaly I like people that forego LCDs and such and directly use a nice and silencious video projector for general informations (say a Sanyo Z3).
Even more if you show your skills at system management using "Doom, the Aftermath"http://www.cs.unm.edu/~dlchao/flake/doom /after.html

Yeah, follow my words, I can garantee your customers will be impressed 8)

• Why Plan 9 is not dead yet And What we can learn from it by Ron Minnich from the Advanced Computing Lab, Los Alamos National Lab.
  
• The Ubiquitous File Server in Plan 9 by Dr. C. H. Forsyth of Vitanuova
  

Well compare your typical programming textbook that you'd have to buy in a CS program with a book from O'Reilly.

I had an O'Reilly book for a college course (Fall 1999 -- David Ackley is the best professor I've ever had).

Well compare your typical programming textbook that you'd have to buy in a CS program with a book from O'Reilly.

I had an O'Reilly book for a college course (Fall 1999 -- David Ackley is the best professor I've ever had).

King Moulay Ismail the Bloodthirsty, a medieval despot of Morocco, sired over 800 children by the women in his harem, and the first emperor of China, around 3000 years ago, was reputed to have sired even more through his much larger harem (Betzig, 1986). By contrast, the world record for a woman is 69 children, many of which were triplets (Daly & Wilson, 1983). Even under relatively egalitarian tribal conditions, some men can father several dozen children by several different women, whereas no woman bears more than 10 or so children (Chagnon, 1983).

Thus, a man's reproductive success generally increases with his number of sexual partners (in the absence of contraception), whereas a woman reaches her reproductive limit rather quickly as her number of sexual partners increases. This is because males can opt out of parental investment in a way that women cannot -- nature can't enforce child support laws any better than modern governments. Of course, women under ancestral conditions probably used abortion and infanticide to avoid maternal investment during difficult times (see Hausfater & Hrdy, 1984), but they could not induce another woman to bear a child for them. Maternal investment was obligatory in hominids; paternal investment was not.


http://www.unm.edu/~psych/faculty/mate_choice.htm

This "new" approach of achieving fusion using strong electric fields is of much greater significance than just academic interest in fusion research. It may well lead directly to EM-pulse-based clean-fusion bombs that don't need a fallout-producing plutonium atomic-bomb trigger. There are a LOT of ways to produce REALLY strong electromagnetic fields for a fraction of a second and let's face it, many of these can be done in your basement. So...are homemade nukes closer as a result of this discovery?

If you want to know more about detecting kernel rootkits and cryptograhpically signed kernel modules, check out this paper by Dino Dai Zovi.

Is Microsoft following OpenSource now? Linux has had a Doom sysadmin interface for some time now...

do you mean PSDoom?

True and this is what various package managers do (like Pkglink). Without the package manager approach, the next problem is keeping track of what to symlink.

You can have the best of both worlds with symbolic links. A tool like Pkglink can do most of the heavy lifting and also give you the ability to have multiple versions of the software installed.

You can emulate both approaches with symbolic links (or even hard links). See Pkglink.

The New Mexico National Labs (Los Alamos, Sandia, the universities (NMSU, UNM, etc) and others came together in a rather awesome program about 13 years ago. The Adventures in Supercomputing Challenge Program gives high school students access to modern supercomputers to do scientific programming projects. They are given mentoring and instruction by volunteers as well as volunteered CPU time and access. Schools lacking net access are provided it by the participants, etc. After all their work, there is a competition based on how much was learned, presentations, science done, and final reports. It is a lot of fun. It's really hard.

I was originally a student in it waaaay back when it was getting underway (1990 & 1991) and then acted as a mentor for the next 5 years. I had a first place team and a third place team in those five years. I worked with kids that were often C students because they were bored as h*ll in class and often after seeing what they could do would go on to work harder to improve their grades to get into some very good universities.

Kids often rose to the challenge far and above what I would have thought they'd do. If the kids needed to learn the necessary math for the scienc they wanted to do we'd crash course it. I had kids that had been doing second year algebra doing partial differential equations by the end of the six months of work and able to understand it, frex. They always learned the science and programming that was required as well. This was their work, not mine. I could give guidance and knowledge, but couldn't do the work for them. Some of the science done was thermodynamics, astrophysics, environmental science, and fluid dyanmics, frex.

Now you may not be able to donate supercomputing time, but you might want keep this in mind when you go to think about what HS kids are interested in. Kids are often interested in a lot. You just have to be willing to teach them in a way that they'll remember, show them its useful, and make it interesting.

A general solution can be written for any (n^k)-1 puzzle using the A* algorithm. To implement A* you calculate the value of your state, and the value of each successive state. The possible successive state that gets you closest to the goal state is the state you move to next. You keep track of all visited states, so you don't keep following paths that don't reach your goal.

With a 15-puzzle, you can develop a heuristic that allows you to determine how far you are away from the goal, as well as how far each successive state is from the goal. With the same algorithm you can extend your solution to solve any (n^k)-1 puzzle.

This was actually a programming assignment in a previous class of mine. We had to implement A* and then use it to solve (n^k)-1, missionary-and-cannibal, and the shortest path problem. (and if you're interested and/or masochistic, check out the other projects that we had to complete in the space of a semester)

I guess what I meant is that the proof (or at least, the only one I can remember) is for the case of numbers which are coprime to 10...

See the other reply below about how it's also true for those cases... But for some reason I can't quite get my brain to cough up the proof for the general case... (Which is disappointing, time to turn in my Maths degree...) I can feel the slightest hint of a proof in the back, a gut feeling that it's right, but all that comes out is the routine proof as I studied it in Discrete Maths...

http://www.gallup.unm.edu/~smarandache/euler-gn.tx t seems like it might help... If my mind wakes up and helps, I might post the general solution later...

Children turn pidgins into creoles. (as summarised here)

Actually, the excess Pu is already very useful in Candu reactors. These reactors can burn weapons grade Pu into lighter isotopes useless for weapons production, while at the same time providing electricity for a whole region

umm... no... There's a reason why it's called a breeder reactor; read here just to the right of the bottom right hand corner of the picture of the neutron hitting the U235 Nucleus about how "difficult" it is to change a burner reactor into a breeder reactor... basically all you do is add "common" U238

Didn't someone actually make something in that line some years ago? Now, with the Quake3 source soon to be released, someone should improve upon that idea! :) (just wait, ID has traditionally released the code of their previous engine when the new one is used in a comercial project.)

But maybe not as fun as DOOM for System admin job. Still seems it may have the same effect of making a rather boring job more interesting.

But we *have*; and given the repeated observations...regardless of the curve, there will *still* be some particles at the extreme ends. Given that our detectors are still fairly primitive, it's possible that the high-e events are statistically more likely to be detected, is it not?


(Yes, I know we've seen them. Otherwise I'd be in a different field right now, and the waiters in Malargue, Argentina wouldn't all know me by name. :) But the fact that we've seen them probably implies that we don't know the source, not that we don't understand the propagation.)

I think you're missing what I'm saying - the only way we could've seen any of these particles is if they came from less than 50 Mpc. The GZK effect gets much, much stronger as you go to higher energies. After 50 Mpc, a particle that starts off at 1E21 is below 6E19. Same with particles of higher energy. Astrophysically, that's right in our backyard. There's nothing we know of that could accelerate particles like that. There's an additional problem, which is the fact that there's a spectral change in the 10^19 range that we can't explain, either. Spectral changes occur when acceleration mechanisms change. Supernovae fall apart in the 10^14-10^15 range, and there's a spectral change there, too. The fact that the spectrum continues after 10^19 (in fact, it flattens) implies that there's a new source that's "turning on" in that energy range.

As far as I understand it, the mw background is the peak energy distribution, not the total one. It's what we built our detectors to observe because it's easiest to observe - sorting random noise from the detector noise in gamma/XR is damned difficult.

It's a pure blackbody distribution, with a characteristic temperature at 2.7K. In order to have a particle out of that spectrum at 10^20, it would need to have about 10^23 times the most probable value. I haven't done the math, I'll admit - but something like e^-(10^23) probably times even the size of the Universe probably doesn't even equal *1*. (Oddly enough e^(-(10^23)) times the *number of bits* in the Universe through the end of Time wouldn't even be 1)

We don't know that, because we don't have a source for those protons. Sure, there's nothing on that vector, but even ultra-high-c factor particle paths can be altered by gravitational fields - which were not mentioned in the OMG webpage)

Yes, we do. The GZK cutoff is not "experimental physics". It's the delta++ resonance. This is stuff that they did in the 1950s, and has been extremely well studied since then. It's just proton-photon interactions. Unless Lorentz invariance is wrong (which is possible! but you should read the paper on that suggestion, and it's very, very bad), we know that GZK will slow a particle travelling faster than 6E19 couldn't've travelled more than 50 Mpc.

And gravity doesn't alter particle's paths anywhere near as much as magnetic fields do, and those particles have such high speed that neither gravity, magnetic fields, or anything else could possibly alter their path more than a tenth of a degree.

The "OMG particle"'s webpage (which, by the way, I've never heard it called - which is... odd) is a little sparse. Try the Auger homepage, this UNM site, or this LSU site. If you've got access to Science magazine, also here.

There are actually many, many more interesting things going on in the UHECR field which I haven't even mentioned.

...the meaningful display of information is about removing visual clutter, not introducing it.

True enough and the service is flawed by that standard but what it is trying to do is a bit more ambitious. As this writer puts it, the service is trying to map an abstract operation to an intuitive environment.

The type of displays that Tufte talks about are often trying to do the reverse: map an intuitive environment to an abstract display. An example would be a flight control system which maps a two dimensional radar screen with labeled, blinking dots to aircraft in three dimensions.

The service's use of SimCity as the intuitive environment is plausible since SimCity is fairly successful in mapping abstract processes in its domain. The problem is that Web site activity doesn't map very well to urban activity.

The extraneous details or visual clutter in conventional graphs are often what give a metaphore its power. What the service may need is simply a better metaphore.

To the end user, you have a nice SIMPLE directory structure:

%systemroot%\System32\ {--- System tools and what not

%programfiles% {---- programs!

%userprofile%\desktop\ {---- desktop

%userprofile%\My Documents\ {---- documents!

Doom is already the preferred process management system for the Emacs Operating System. So I guess you'll be able to play Doom recursively; just don't kill the emacs process...

What, are we going to have 3D word processors? Play a game of Q2A to kill a process? Or have 3D File managers? Maybe Superior Speech Recognition?

Maybe the average computer will not do more. The average computer user seem to have problems using email without getting viruses. They can not rip mp3's. They get confused using software that that is about as simple as it gets to convert a digital camcorder to a DVD. Both Apple's iMovie and Sony's Click to DVD boil down to little more complex than a "push here dummy" button. The only thing that an average user wants is to have a computer that wil do the thinking for him.

Lighter and smaller? Please. A microstrip array such as this only weights a few ounces and is easily built using a conventional circuit board. Also, the electrical phase and hence the 2 angles of the beam can easily be manipulated with a simple phase shifting circuit.

By the way, you can pretty much get the beamwidth as tight as you want by adding more array elements, I think 10 or so elements will give you back lobes of -40dB or 1% of the main beam.

Microstrip phased arrays are the way to go, they are cheaper and can provide whatever directivity and beamwidth is needed.

-

Those are great links, but please use HTML <a href="..."> tags to make them clickable, like this:

Interesting way to manage files. But I think psdoom is much more fun:
http://psdoom.sourceforge.net/

The original idea for psdoom was by Dennis Chao:
http://www.cs.unm.edu/~dlchao/flake/doom/

(And reported on slashdot sometime recently:
http://slashdot.org/articles/99/10/20/1110242.shtm l).

That way people can just click on them instead of creating new tab, copying, pasting, remembering to remove the spaces inserted by Slashcode, etc.

Doom as a tool for system administration

Yup, that's PSDoom, as featured in one of Ars Technica's excellent Linux.Ars articles (amongst other places).

I was going to post it, here is the any way.

Doom as a tool for system administration - Sourceforge project page

First person shooter.

This reminds me of a cool hack that uses Doom as a "process manager". Killing a Doom baddie basically "kill -9"s the process.

Of course you could always layer the doom sysadmin control interface for the background .. works well until your processes start killing each other ..

The ultimate 3D desktop is here.
But I think desktops and GUIs are a sham anyway. Unix became what it is because of the console and the shell, not some pretty icons and tranluscent windows.

Darn I wish I had done a quick search before posting...here is the link to it...
href=http://www.cs.unm.edu/~dlchao/flake/doom/afte r.html

If you think a REAL comp sci degree is all about being a code monkey you have no farking idea, and got your comp sci degree from a tech school.

Obligatory kudzu joke:

A man in Texas decided he wanted a nice gazebo in his backyard and wanted some nice ivy growing over it. He didn't want to wait a decade or so for the ivy to grow around the gazebo. He'd heard that kudzu was pretty fast growing though and so he planted some near the base of the gazebo.

A year later he burned the thing to the ground, poured concrete over it, and sold the place. The kudzu probably came back.

Serious notes -- planting kudzu anywhere in the US is a federal crime, a violation of the Noxious Weed Act of 1974. It's virtually impossible to kill the roots -- which can have root nodules the size of a basketball -- and so while RoundUp and similar herbicides will kill the leaves it'll simply be back within a few weeks or months (depending on time of year -- kudzu goes dormant in winter. Never, ever buy any land in the SE US during late fall or winter if there are vines anywhere near; very few other ivys go dormant during this time period). Those root nodules will let it keep doing this for a decade or more.

Speaking of "zombie processes", check out this port of DooM: http://www.cs.unm.edu/~dlchao/flake/doom/.

I'd love to see an FFT implementation (maybe it's not so hard ... will have to download and play with it.)

A paper on that very subject was presented at Graphics Hardware 2003. You should be able to find it here

The original HLA spec (up to 1.3) as defined by the DoD was kind of nebulous, so much so that the industry groups had to create their own HLA spec that was actually practical/implementable/useful (IEEE 1516). This page provides a good overview on the differences.

nice try buddy, do you call everything that you do not agree with a troll? This is a true event that was completely horrible. But, the overall attitude in this city was the same as mine. People are sick of jerk drivers. and most people they talked to on the street had the same response, sad that someone died but there is one less jerk on the road. the majority of the public are sick of rude drivers that have no self control and think they are more important, or just plain do not have to obey the law, and therefore put others around them at risk.

if someone keeps standing 2 inches away from you in line at the movies and then steps out of line and races ahead of you, are you happy? are you ok with them invading your personal space and being rude? why is it acceptable behaivoir when you are travelling at 102 feet per second or more in a 3000+ pound projectile?

Hmm let's look at what documented evidence there is out there....

this is one

I'll give you that in some states the DOCUMENTED state information shows that speeding related deaths are lower than non-speeding related deaths, but this does not lower the risk added to others on the road.

So when you speed, you make sure you have a much larger space between you nad the next car? you are travelling at a higher rate of speed and can not stop anywhere near as fast, you also have less control over your vehicle. These are TRUE as you can not have a magical physics eliminator in your car nor are you trained to drive at those speeds NOR does your vehicle have the proper equipment to handle steering and breaking at high speeds. (I highly doubt that your car has cross-drilled and vented large rotors with 3 piston calipers on all four tires with a larger master cylinder piston coupled with the correct tires for high speed driving in whatever conditions you are currently driving in. very few people will drop $5000.00 in their brakes and another $2500-3000 in tires for only one road and weather condition combination. Oh and let's not forget the suspension upgrades and steering system upgrades required for high speed safe control. Therefore you are driving beyond the capabilities of your vehicle unless you are driving a race car or a car built to race levels.

(Note: no car sold in america under $100,000.00 is built to race standards... and certianly cars like mercedes and bmw are not race cars or race capable without the above parts but at a 3X price increase.. hell the Corvette ZR has higher performance parts than the european cars and it is not race ready.)

Speeders are found to not limit their reckless driving and lack of self control to the highways. 70% of all speeders happily speed in residential and school areas gladly risking the lives of children and pedestrians... how about you? do you stick to the posted speed limit in residential areas and in school zones?

I find it funny that people that drive recklessly and speed are just like a drug addict. they try to justify their rude and unacceptable behaivoir to themselves and others.

you are a law breaker, and a person that pride's himself in being rude with no regard for the safety of those around you. That's fine, just admit it, and quit making excuses and trying to convince people that you are anything different.

here

and here

Hope this helps

V.P.

Things are undoubtedly stranger than the original simple models.

Take the examples of alternate splicing of exons, or RNA editing.

Or, my favorite is in the immune system. The immune system must generate lymphocytes that can recognize the something like 10e14 different pathogens that we encounter. There are obviously not enough genes in our genome to individually code for these. So, our immune system shuffles and recombines thousands of "gene segments" to achieve this. This might explain it better.

All of these lead to more gene products than genes, if you use a simple definition of a gene.

So about $10-$15 seems "fair" for Windows and Office in Vietnam, if pricing follows the strict PCI ratio (which isn't really fair, or make any sense). That's also probably why the price is what it is in the US and why the market in Vietnam has settled on $10 - apparently Windows+Office is valued at about a week's pay for people.

I'm sure there are interesting conclusions to be drawn here somewhere.

I'd like to work on a text editor

If you ever get the time, you might find this paper useful.

I suppose I'll get modded OT for this, but I'm just feeling helpful today :-)

Prepositions are words that combine with nouns/pronouns to make
a phrase. A phrase, in turn, is a group of words that express a
single thought or idea. In a prepositional phrase, the preposition
logically comes at the beginning: "at the store," "on the table,"
"with much interest." Ending a sentence in a preposition requires
the listener/reader to reconstruct the idea. Compare: "The store
we saw the coat at," with "The store at which we saw the coat."
Again: "The table you left my book on," with "The table on which
you left my book."

Winston Churchill is said to have asserted that this is a
rule "up with which I will not put," but the reason for the rule
is clear if one ends a sentence in several prepositions: Consider:

What reason did you bring the topic up for?
What reason did you bring the topic we disagree about up for?
What reason did you bring the topic we disagree and fight
over about up for?

The best way to avoid getting tangled up in sentences that are
hard to untangle is to avoid ending sentences with prepositions.