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Wouldn't the pitch remain the same as long as the speakers vibrate at the same rate? Wouldn't the sound just travel at a different speed, but still have the same frequency (although a different wavelength)? Huh.

A similar thing should happen with a speaker, since the sound will resonate through the gas within the speaker cone.

I wasn't sure what chords the phone tones actually were, so I went to over to howstuffworks and took a look. On page 2 of this article on telephones, it has a great section on the tones.

In particular, I learned that "the dial tone sound is simply a combination of 350 hertz tone and a 440 hertz tone," and "if the number is busy, you hear a busy signal that is made up of a 480 hertz and a 620 hertz tone, with a cycle of 1/2 second on and 1/2 second off" and there is a great chart showing the tone for each button on the keypad. For example, the tone for "1" is a combination of a 1209 Hz tone and a 697 Hz tone.

A little more research turned up this cool frequency to note converter and where I discovered that 1209 Hz is equivalent to D6 plus 50 cents, and 697 is F5 minus 4 cents. So basically the keypad one is an out of tune inversion of the D minor chord. (music majors feel free to Score: -1, Moronic)

Of course, if you were into phreaking then you'd already know all that.

TenDRA (http://www.cse.unsw.edu.au/~patrykz/TenDRA/) also exists. The only thing I know about it is that it is included in Debian Woody. If anobody knows more, please reply :)

America has attacked, essentially, unprovoked before. During the invasion of Panama, just to cite a recent example, more than 400 bombs were dropped on Panama City. Civilian casualties were reported from at least 200-some to as many as 4000. See: this.

The problem is that American deaths are much more well-reported than 3rd-world deaths, not just in America, but anywhere than American media dominates (it can be frustrating, I assure you, for someone in Latin America to get more news about the school shooting in Colorado than about the hurricanes that just hit them. It is hard to communicate the resentment towards American hubris that this sort of situation creates.) We sentimentalize our own casualties and not those of foreigners.

And we aren't the only ones that do this, either - it's a simple product of nationalism and tribalism and groupthink. It's usually only a thoughtful minority in any country that sees past this. The fact is that America has treated civilian deaths elsewhere as "collateral damage," but civilian deaths here as a national tragedy. That double standard is part of the problem.

You have to be silly to think that humonguous companies have morals. The only moral and only rule is to make money. If it takes killing a few, who cares, especially if it's in a far away country. You have to increase your profit or you suck and die. Read this about Coca-Cola and browse through this google search. Being an unionist (trade unions) is one of the most dangerous "pastimes" on Earth. And if you think it doesn't happen in the "Civilized" world - think again.

I have recently put a page up about our entry which came fourth (and now equal third due to the judges being nice...) written in C. Find more about it here

It's mostly a problem of chicken and egg, at least in the comercial software world. You know; employers want to use languages they know lots of people know, and programmers learn languages so they can geta job.

Now in the free/open source software world, there should be less resistance to using the right tool for the job. Haskell is just beginning to be used for non-accademic projects. Check out the GTK+/GNOME bindings for Haskell www.cse.unsw.edu.au/~chak/haskell/gtk/

We could really get some extra leverage over comercial software by using better languages, especially for things like proto-typing where performance is less important.

"I am generally interested in using observations of distant quasars to test fundamental physical parameters. In particular, high resolution spectroscopy of quasars can be used to search for variations in the fundamental constants of Nature. Our recent results hint tentatively that the laws of physics may not always have been the same as today. "

No, you go & do other bloody things while the computer's humming along.

Like chatting up one of the pretty girls in human resourses.

Or buggering off down to the 'cross' (less than 10mins walk from the central business district) & scoring some smack, then you can go to the legalised injecting room to wack it up, to put you in a good mood while you killing time at work till knock off time (oh you can't beat ole Sydney town for conveniance). Or you can duck next door to the pub & have a bit of a liquid lunch.

Fuck, who wants a fast computer at work, they'l only give you more work to do.

Its much better having a slow one, so you can spend the day browsing pr0n & download MP3s while its humming away on your maths/science calculations or re-compiling or ripping video, in the background.

Scientists who reviewed the findings have not found any obvious flaws. Professor Webb was "not surprised". His team, including Professor Victor Flambaum and PhD student Michael Murphy, both of NSW University, had "been working like hell".

Here are links to the web sites of each of the investigators:

• Professor John Webb: http://www.phys.unsw.edu.au/STAFF/ACADEMIC/webb.ht ml
• Professor Victor Flambaum: http://www.phys.unsw.edu.au/STAFF/ACADEMIC/flambau m.html
• Michael Murphy: http://bat.phys.unsw.edu.au/~mim/res.html

Scientists who reviewed the findings have not found any obvious flaws. Professor Webb was "not surprised". His team, including Professor Victor Flambaum and PhD student Michael Murphy, both of NSW University, had "been working like hell".

Here are links to the web sites of each of the investigators:

• Professor John Webb: http://www.phys.unsw.edu.au/STAFF/ACADEMIC/webb.ht ml
• Professor Victor Flambaum: http://www.phys.unsw.edu.au/STAFF/ACADEMIC/flambau m.html
• Michael Murphy: http://bat.phys.unsw.edu.au/~mim/res.html

Scientists who reviewed the findings have not found any obvious flaws. Professor Webb was "not surprised". His team, including Professor Victor Flambaum and PhD student Michael Murphy, both of NSW University, had "been working like hell".

Here are links to the web sites of each of the investigators:

• Professor John Webb: http://www.phys.unsw.edu.au/STAFF/ACADEMIC/webb.ht ml
• Professor Victor Flambaum: http://www.phys.unsw.edu.au/STAFF/ACADEMIC/flambau m.html
• Michael Murphy: http://bat.phys.unsw.edu.au/~mim/res.html

Country % at-home % gun homicide
burglaries ownership rate
Netherlands 48 2 0.9
England 26-59 5 0.7
Australia 10 20 2.0
Canada 10 31 2.1
USA 14 49 8.8

The Australian "at-home" burglary rate is actually for Victoria. The range given for England is because the rate is 59% for attempted burglaries and 26% for completed burglaries, so the overall rate must be somewhere in between.

It doesn't help when imbeciles like Representative Dana Rohrabacher (R., Calif.) dismiss scientific evidence as "Liberal Claptrap"

My school (Knox Grammar in Sydney, Australia) has a joint satellite project with another school in Sydney, Ravenswood and a school in Russia.
The satellite is named "Kolibri" and each school has equipment for communicating and recieving data from the satellite.
The students are performing actual research regarding "the structure and intensity of low-frequency electromagmetic fields around the Earth".
You can read more about this project here and here.

• QNX: Everyone's heard of this one. They have a very good u-kernel.
• Opearting Systems Group at Dresden: They do alot of great work with u-kernels. They have code for L3 and L4, the first very promising, high-performance u-kernels(though they may not have designed them). They even have Linux running as a service on top of L4, so you may be able to run it right now! Also see This University and the L4KA page for other implementations of L4(ie. other architectures).
• Eros: EROS is a new operating system based on the architectures of earlier high-security capability systems(KeyKOS). Very promising and has performance comparable to L4. The measurements are in the papers section(usually towards the end of the paper). System is GPL'd.
• VSTa: a cool GPL'd hobby u-kernel system(in that it has no university or company backing). This one has a somewhat complete system, ie. self-hosted with gcc, vi, emacs, etc. Runs on a windows partition and uses GRUB to boot(all of which you'll need to run it). No performance metrics that I'm aware of.
• Fluke: No working system as far as I know. The kernel is complete and some performance measurements have been made. Looks promising and source is available(GPL I think).

pardon my dweebness in regards to html on Slashdot. Mea Culpa.

The links are:

Sinn Fein/IRA censorship Australian article

and

Good Friday agreement

cheers

front

The best teacher(s) I've ever had where the two Johns at the University of New South Wales. John Storey and John Smith tought us electronics, and they actually cared about the students and their interests. For example, one day I noticed the little yellow flash that precedes the fluorescent lights turning on. I remembered that it's called a "condenser" and it has to be replaced every now and then. I remarked about this a fellow student, and after unsuccessfuly trying to work out what the condenser does and why it flashes, we went back to work. The next day, John gave me seven photocopied pages from a magazine and a textbook about what condensers are and how they work. Apparently, he overheard us and decided to satisfy my curiosity. I didn't even have to ask.

The best teacher(s) I've ever had where the two Johns at the University of New South Wales. John Storey and John Smith tought us electronics, and they actually cared about the students and their interests. For example, one day I noticed the little yellow flash that precedes the fluorescent lights turning on. I remembered that it's called a "condenser" and it has to be replaced every now and then. I remarked about this a fellow student, and after unsuccessfuly trying to work out what the condenser does and why it flashes, we went back to work. The next day, John gave me seven photocopied pages from a magazine and a textbook about what condensers are and how they work. Apparently, he overheard us and decided to satisfy my curiosity. I didn't even have to ask.

If you can't stretch to the M2 then the least obtrusive of any display is from MicroOptical Corp who make either tiny clip-on's which do QVGA (compress a 640x480 down to 320x240) and are VERY small, the other model is the integrated eyeglass - it looks just like prescription glasses. These are available now.

The inviso eShades that have had stories run on here are likely to hit market at around US$1000, the advertise in their press releases that it will be about 400-500, but after recent inquiries the price keeps rising, last I heard it was upto 800+. Don't hold your breath.

For displays NOW, unless you can build your own driver electronics - FPGA use is what people are looking at for n=building the driver logic from.

I'd go with an M1, fairly cheap (As far as HMD's go) and well tested and known amongst the borg community. They can be hacked to fir into sunglasses with a lil bit of effort. For colour, most people go the hacked glasstron route.

see wearables.los-gatos.net for a comprehensive listing of most things wearable.

for arm based architecture I'd imagine you'd checked out the LART pages, but there is also an ARM based effor at MIT, its called mithril I believe, and the PLEB effort in Australia.

Hope that helps

The textbook that the University of Colorado has a good deal of information about the Mach microkernel (orginally derived from BSD), (although most implementations of Mach are somewhat old and/or abandoned). Mach had its hayday a few (like 8 or more) years ago (with Digital's OSF/1 and the NextSTEP system using the Mach2.5 implementation), but is currently pretty obsolete. The Hurd uses the GnuMach implementation (based on Mach3, i think), but is moving toward a better microkernel abstraction and to the L4 microkernel specifically.

There is a small OS that was build on top of the L4Ka implementation for a class project, called ChacmOS, and the authors graciously GPL'd the source. This is a wonderful source of information regarding the L4:
http://www.l4ka.org/projects/ChacmOS/

And a page dedicated to L4:
http://www.cse.unsw.edu.au/~disy/L4/

The textbook that the University of Colorado has a good deal of information about the Mach microkernel (orginally derived from BSD), (although most implementations of Mach are somewhat old and/or abandoned). Mach had its hayday a few (like 8 or more) years ago (with Digital's OSF/1 and the NextSTEP system using the Mach2.5 implementation), but is currently pretty obsolete. The Hurd uses the GnuMach implementation (based on Mach3, i think), but is moving toward a better microkernel abstraction and to the L4 microkernel specifically.

There is a small OS that was build on top of the L4Ka implementation for a class project, called ChacmOS, and the authors graciously GPL'd the source. This is a wonderful source of information regarding the L4:
http://www.l4ka.org/projects/ChacmOS/

And a page dedicated to L4:
http://www.cse.unsw.edu.au/~disy/L4/

Wireless just does not seem like a good idea for the United States. Here there are phone lines everywhere and ethernet jacks spread across campuses, and hotels. For the money, the temporary convenience of being able to move around in a limited area that comes with wireless is not that wonderous

Countries that are technologically strong, but dont'have the people-base that the United States has are good candidates for wireless ISPs. Take, for example, Australia. Australia's population is concentrated in a few major cities. With wireless, a company manager can take his laptop in essence to any other venue and know for sure that he will be connected. Without wireless and with the limited spread of LANs within cities such as Sydney this would not be possible.

Large universities in Australia are already taking advantage of wireless. Large campuses (they have the space over there in Australia) provide their students with wireless (take for example University of New South Wales. Acting like a wireless ISP, UNSW does not have to spread ethernet jacks around its many buildings for the limited number of people that use the service while on campus. This saves money for the school.

I'm interested. For those slashdotters that live in countries with large populations centered only in a few cities, how common are wireless ISPs?

---

Information about how quantum computers work, from a competing team also hoping to build a quantum computer, is here,

Maybe it's time to scrap Netscape and look at other open source browsers like this

A lot of the teams in robocups Aibo division have reprogramed the robots walks and vision processing systems to be more efficient. Here is a quote from the match report of the grand final from this years winners (UNSW United) - :

The French walk seemed largely unchanged since last year, when they had an advantage over our robots, as their walk was stronger, and they often knocked our robots over in pursuit of the ball. This year the tables were turned, as the new UNSW walk was much faster and stronger than the LRP walk. Often in the Legged League robots will tangle their legs, but this year UNSW was often able to pull free and continue pursuit of the ball.

I think the previous couple of years the winners had been the ones who had done the best job of reprogramming the vision processing system.

Well, according to what I found here, my problem stems from Redhat installing a kernel that expects a Pentium instead of an Athlon... When it disables the CPUID it crashes the system.

Anyone with Mandrake 7 experience here who can testify that it works with an Athlong 700 Socket A processor, and an Asus motherboard (I don't have the model number handy, but it's 5 PCI, 1 AGP, if that helps identify it at all).

Or maybe I'll just get Redhat 7, and upgrade from that once fixes are available...

One project that comes to my mind is the School of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of New South Wales's 'Pleb' project. About the length of two Australian fifty cent coins lined up next to each other, it contains a StrongARM processor and can use a number of different kernels and OSes, but most importantly Linux. I was recently lucky enough to see a demonstration of the system where a stripped down version of Debian GNU/Linux being booted off it at the university's last open day.

The main goal of Pleb is produce a "Flexible, Low-Power system for use in Portable and Embedded applications which is capable of a high level of processing power." However, more impressive is that the project's guidelines even states:

"Where possible GNU tools should be used as much as possible since both the multi-platform availability and the GPL licensing insure accessibility to all interested parties. Software requiring tools which are prohibitive to most developers (through pricing or lack of platform support) is discouraged"

MashPotato - Mobile Array of Support Helpers for Potato

One project that comes to my mind is the School of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of New South Wales's 'Pleb' project. About the length of two Australian fifty cent coins lined up next to each other, it contains a StrongARM processor and can use a number of different kernels and OSes, but most importantly Linux. I was recently lucky enough to see a demonstration of the system where a stripped down version of Debian GNU/Linux being booted off it at the university's last open day.

The main goal of Pleb is produce a "Flexible, Low-Power system for use in Portable and Embedded applications which is capable of a high level of processing power." However, more impressive is that the project's guidelines even states:

"Where possible GNU tools should be used as much as possible since both the multi-platform availability and the GPL licensing insure accessibility to all interested parties. Software requiring tools which are prohibitive to most developers (through pricing or lack of platform support) is discouraged"

MashPotato - Mobile Array of Support Helpers for Potato

One project that comes to my mind is the School of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of New South Wales's 'Pleb' project. About the length of two Australian fifty cent coins lined up next to each other, it contains a StrongARM processor and can use a number of different kernels and OSes, but most importantly Linux. I was recently lucky enough to see a demonstration of the system where a stripped down version of Debian GNU/Linux being booted off it at the university's last open day.

The main goal of Pleb is produce a "Flexible, Low-Power system for use in Portable and Embedded applications which is capable of a high level of processing power." However, more impressive is that the project's guidelines even states:

"Where possible GNU tools should be used as much as possible since both the multi-platform availability and the GPL licensing insure accessibility to all interested parties. Software requiring tools which are prohibitive to most developers (through pricing or lack of platform support) is discouraged"

MashPotato - Mobile Array of Support Helpers for Potato

During the true competition UNSW had only one goal scored against them - an own goal... Seems like the goalie AI was pretty good too...

I think you are knocking them for no real reason.

http://www.cse.unsw.edu.au/~robocup is the UNSW site of the challenge.

Here is their page, if anyone is interested.

Voting does nothing except give legitimacy to a system that no longer works, and whose replacement is long overdue (I`m talking about that sacred cow Democracy here). The DMCA and similar laws don`t pass because too few people cast their opinion in the popularity contests. They pass because politicians` roll is too general - no politician has time to become an expert on all issues, thus "experts" (lobbyists) get to write laws to present to legislatures as an expert`s solution to the problem at hand. Don`t vote if you want to vote against corporate influence in politics. Support an alternative form of "government", such as Demarchy, a system where a group of citizens are chosen at random to examine an issue and come to an ideal solution.

oh shit, just killed slashdot's sacred cow.. where's the flamesuit when you need it?

This of course implies that you make good use of the type system and choose good type abstractions and annotate all top-level functions with type signatures.

Chilli

PS: Look at my Web page, I have written a lot of Haskell code and it works very well for me.

There is an ----

In fact there is a mathematical theory that most humans don't learn which in a significant portion of endgames can determine who wins the last point.

Of course in general we don't know how to get computers to win at Go. What we do know is that the technique used in chess is useless because of the branching factor. The state of the art of chess programs today is not much better than it was 20 years ago. But they can throw more computational power at the same problem and that makes the difference.

Even with Moore's law, raw computational power will not suffice to become good at Go within the next few decades.

Cheers,
Ben

You may also wish to check out the PLEB project.

Surprisingly, there are collaborating groups around the world (e.g. Australia) that are in the process of designing building working prototypes of some of these weird and wonderful machines. The problem is that we still don't really have a good grasp of what commercially useful domain will drive the need for mass demand. I suppose it was the same electronically in that early boards were more toys until people mastered the assembly of megagates into useful building blocks. Peole like Pen rose have speculated on physiological process underlying a given thought that may initially involve a number of superposed quantum states. I hope there are some really smart guys out there who can take some of the ideas through to the next stage. Now if someone could come up with decent quantum algorithms for massive parallel search and comparisons of multiple genetic strands databases, they'd make a killing. LL

at my university, the 3rd year introductory OS course uses topsy as the os background
and it involves writing such things as the
virtual memory handling as one of the assignments.

http://www.cse.unsw.edu.au/~cs3231/

as it is now linux is probably too complex to be used, ie modified/improved on by most 3rd year students doing an intro OS course...

Unix Console was released yesterday. It is not exactly what you're looking for, but if you're a Mac user setting up a Linux box it may help. Basically it allows you to use most of the monitoring/configing tools on a unix box graphically, in a nice little app. It logs you in via telnet and then sends the command line commands when you perform certain tasks. Granted, it's optimized for Solaris, but it seems to do most of the things Webmin does.
(Runs on MacOS)

Acutally, the best efficiencies are getting close to 25% now. Mind you, that'd only be for single crystal silicon. According to my uni web pages, they've also done 19.8% for multicrystalline silicon cells.

UNSW Photovoltaic achievements

-=-=-=-=-

I got it slightly wrong: it was a Hawk jet (still made by BAe though), and it was four women (not two). Still, it's a nice story, David & Goliath writ very large. Read it here.

I've been thinking about something similar - have a look at EROS and Mungi. I think a complete break with Unix will be necessary sooner or later - a security model which allows any program to delete all its owner's files is not strong enough for modern software distribution channels - with a system based on beta code from the internet you are running a lot of untrusted code, and (unfortunately) Open Source development/distribution will start to attract malicious hackers sooner or later. We are wide open.

If we break with Unix we can dump the command line - if you have a scripting language which can manipulate and communicate with objects, you don't need a shell. This would improve usability a lot - whatever people say about Gnome/KDE, Unix is still hard to learn, because to do anything advanced you have to use obscure shell commands.

So, what language are we going to write this wonderful, capability-based, object-oriented, network-transparent OS in? Java? Too slow - the insistence of the designers on creating a portable binary format means it will never be as fast as native code. For Open Source development we don't need a portable binary format - we can distribute the source code and compile it into native object code on the target machine (transparently to the user if necessary). Java also contains various security hacks which would be unnecessary under a secure (capability-based) OS. So we want something similar to Java, but simpler. An object-oriented language designed for efficiency rather than as a demonstration of OO dogma... any thoughts?

Michael Rogers bastard_machine@hotmail.com

I was about to moderate this one up a notch, but the URL seems to be a bit out of date:

http://www.cse.unsw.edu.au/~pleb/

Everybody knows email and sendmail is GNU, so Linux should say that they are the @ in your email adress. It would be reinforced very well whenever someone types in an email adress or gives out there's - you get free advertising right next to their name. Mine is Linux is the future. The future is now. (I did it with word for irony - see metatag) - I didn't see it before, but there is also a cool logo that has a cute japanimation woman holding a stuffed and very happy tux. Didn't Microshaft steel icons from Apple? Forget about the desktop - go for business - tell them that linux is bigger than the Internet and they will have to turn to it if they want to stay in business. The key is business, because who has a Win computer other than they want to be able to bring stuff from work. "The business of America is business" -Grover Cleveland