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A ferromagnetic domain can be as small as 20nm in diameter or even smaller and stable at room temperature. A reference can be found at http://www.biophysics.uwa.edu.au/STAWA/magbac_5.ht ml. This size is way smaller than current fabrication limit.

Also, only two magnets are required to form a magnetic tunneling junction in the MRAM. While pretty complicated circuit is need to store one bit in DRAM.

• U.S. Naval Research Laboratory, Navy Coastal Ocean Model (NCOM); Computer simulation of current currents with counterclockwise swirl NW of SW tip of Australia.
• WA ocean movies, 1993-2000
• The Leeuwin Current - life of the west

However, the "death trap" viewpoint is somewhat different from this one:

"The canyon begins at a depth of 50 metres and falls to 5,000, making it one of the worlds largest submarine canyons. It is a fascinating area that annually attracts pygmy blue whales, drawn by an abundance of krill. During summer, as many as 20 whales may be found at one time at this site. The whales eat up to 10 tonnes of krill a day and we want to find out whether there is a correlation between the presence of the canyon and the physical oceanography and the biological productivity of krill."

"Are the authorities maintaining, on the one hand,
that evolution is documented by geology and, on the other
hand, that geology is documented by evolution? Isn't this a
circular argument?" Larry Azar, "Biologists, Help!"
BioScience, Vol. 28, November 1978, p. 714. _In the
Beginning: Compelling Evidence for Creation and the Flood_
(7th Edition) by Walt Brown http://www.creationscience.com/on-
linebook/ReferencesandNotes65.html

The article is from pages 712 to 715.

This quote takes the cake for dishonesty. How this one is out
of context is fairly unique though.

Larry Azar at the time of this article was with the Philosopy
Department of Iona College in New Rochell, New York (
http://www.iona.edu/about/description.htm ). He describes
himself as a "philosophy teacher" and in the context of
biology he calls himself an "outsider."

His question, "Isn't this a circular argument?" is not a
rhetorical question, it is a real one. Basically this article
is a philosopher who is _not_ an expert in the sciences asking
a series of questions about biology including evolution in
hopes that biologists would respond and clarify the issues for
him. And they did exactly that. There were a number of letters
to the editor on pages 208 to 209 of the April 1979 issue
which also had an article in response called "Evolution: Help
for the Confused" by Bradley T. Scheer on pages 238 to 241. In
that article the quoted question was answered.

The young-earthers might as well quote questions asked by
students to instructors in freshman classes as "evidence" for
young-earth dogma.

The shear amount of research being canceled because of licensing issues is astounding,

That's not true. Shear Research is alive and well.

These photographs taken by one of my colleagues, which have been linked elsewhere from this topic

The depth edge maps bear a superficial resemblance to phase congruency maps. It's the best edge detection method I've come across, and works on ordinary 2D images. Check out some examples on Peter Kovesi's pages, there's also some code for download.

I know it's not aimed at this, but I wonder what would happen if you threw Weierstrass at this

http://www.maths.uwa.edu.au/~berwin/humour/invalid .proofs.html

OK, so I was wrong. He apparently IS in opposition to Genetically Modified foods. (RTFADA).
I wonder though, what those folks would have thought if he had been a part of this project. Frankenstein?

This is more like the before and after
poster images for a weight loss program hehe

Anyways I think he should go easyer on us and use something to prevent harm in a costume party

Which method is cheapest overall?

Reverse osmosis has been shown to be the most economical in many cases due to its lower energy consumption, leading to lower unit water costs. However, the process has higher up-front investment costs compared to thermal processes. Its unit water costs are primarily determined by membrane life and energy cost (Ericsson et al., 1987; Wade, 1987). Reverse osmosis plants have flexibility of operation in the face of fluctuating water demand and benefit a little from economies of size.

Several economic trends for multistage flash distillation plants are apparent: a relatively low investment cost, benefits from economies of size (relative to other processes), site specific costs (for example pretreatment requirements, energy costs) have a direct affect on the unit water costs, and low flexibility in response to variable water demand (meaning that freshwater production cannot be adapted to fluctuating demand ) (d'Orival, 1967; California Coastal Commission, 1993). The main economic drivers for multistage flash distillation are costs of materials and energy, and increasing plant capacity to take advantage of economies of size (Water Corporation, 2000).

Comparing multistage flash distillation and reverse osmosis, the distillation process has been the preferred method due to its reputation as a mature and reliable process. However, reverse osmosis plants are replacing the older multistage flash distillation plants of the Middle East and being the first choice for desalination implementation in Australia. This is due to their simpler operation, reductions in energy consumption and ultimately, cheaper unit costs of fresh water (Anon, 1999a; Glueckstern, 1999). The overall cost of fresh water from a reverse osmosis plant is often less than half of that produced by means of distillation (Water Corporation, 2000). As technical advancements of membrane processes improve their costs and efficiency, they will continue to be the preferred choice for countries moving into desalination.

Presently, the reported costs of desalinating water using current technologies fall within the range A$0.80/kL to A$2.10/kL, depending upon the process, location and the potential for blending with marginal quality groundwater (Water Corporation, 2000). These costs do not include disposal or distribution costs.

Read more here.

IAAN, and this is not a big breakthrough in any sense. Basically, this is something that was first done using manually-positioned electrodes probably twenty years ago, and now they can grow neurons on a dish that has electrodes built into it and do it that way. WoO-hAH!

The computational power of neurons comes from the way they work in groups, not the way they work alone. Therefore, it's strongly dependent upon the detailed organization of their connectivity. Grinding up a piece of brain and regrowing it on a dish will obviously not retain native connectivity. Additionally, the time it would take to manually rewire an interesting circuit by giving little localized electrical pulses (or do anything else interesting) is longer than neurons are viable in culture, and that's not a problem that's been solved yet.

I'm not saying this technology won't have important uses as a research tool, just that it won't be useful for what people here seem to think it will be useful for (high-density pornography storage). BTW, one of the more interesting characters in this field is Steve Potter, a somewhat strange guy who does some technically impressive work

This is just magnetic radiation. Get that? No "electro" involved. just like the poles of the earth, and magnets on your fridge. it won't hurt you any more than walking around with a magnet next to your head for 5 hours a day would.

That being said, what little I remember from Physics 310 tells me that the field energy from those lift magnets should be concentrated in the vicinity of the rail (since that's where the work is being done) with relatively little leakage up & to the sides. And any reasonable amount of shielding should keep what's left out of the passenger compartment. Note that a number of mass transit systems, e.g. the Detroit People Mover, have linear induction motors driving the cars. Lots of magnetic & electromagnetic activity, and yet the DPM web page notes no relevant precautions, even for pacemakers and such.

.

(..."magnetic radiation"?)

The Professor Jeff S Rohl not mentioned in most of the Pascal articles (possibly because he's more famous for Modula2 etc) lives about 20km south of here.

We don't need stupid microwaves on the moon. We need to chrome the moon. Just imagine how shiny it would be. It is obviously much better than making the moon into some goofball giant telephone tower that nobody could ever like.

While we are speculating on the wonderful future, never forget that someday mankind will reach its acme and pave the earth.

This makes sense, even from the view point on increasing density and complexity of data alone being packed into smaller and smaller containers. Even if you only allocated 1 electron per bit, after a while all of those bits start to add up. Unless you go to another system.

As an example, people often cite the human brain, with all of it's nueral connections and pathways. But this might not be all that is going on.

Biomineralization of ferrimagnetic magnetite is known to occur in a number of organisms including animals. Recent investigations have revealed the presence of biogenic magnetite in human brain tissue as well. The presence of magnetite in the brain has been established using a variety of magnetic and electron microscopic techniques.

This has interesting implications for data processing in the brain, as well a exotic areas of research into the phenomena of consciousness

Regardless of your opinion on the above (some of which is highly speculative), this leads us to the vision of a computer technology where not not only electronics states are used for data processing, but magnetic ones as well.

http://tartarus.uwa.edu.au/~trs80/Terascale/

With the time server at uwa.edu.au.

UWisc is big enough to look after themselves and presumably doesn't pay for traffic by the megabyte like we do.. 3.5c/mb might not sound like too much, but SMC's arrogance in hard coding the time server cost us thousands in network traffic.

Bastards. In vengence, we now don't buy anything from SMC :> All in all, buying a hardware NTP server and sticking it in a colo would have worked out a lot better economically for them.

Bittorrent file for the ISO coming out of australia, but I'm in the US and I'll leave mine open for the next several hours. You do that too, ok?

-Adam

No, no, no. It's not a matter of if you want to or not. If you do, there's a world of mathematicians who will tell you that what you are doing might not qualify as mathematics.

One is not prime. Prime means having exactly two divisors, one of which is one. Please find enclosed a snider definition and commentary.

(Yes, I took MATH 230, but no, I didn't pass. Sorry I couldn't hold on, Clive.)

Systems that extract power from wave energy as opposed to tidal energy may be a little less problematic and a lot cheaper to build, albeit also on a smaller scale. The basic idea is to find a waterfront cliff and drill a hole straight down to about 10 feet below the water level, then turn and drill until you encounter ocean. The result is a tunnel with a column of water in it that moves up and down a dozen times a minute or, pushing a fair amount of water and air. Put a turbine in that tunnel in either medium, and you've got power.

Here is a diagram of such a design that uses a prefabricated tunnel rather than drilling. Google will turn up quite a bit about various designs and research.

All crackpots of course. Every good SUV-drivin' Amer'kin knows thar ain't no energy sources other than oil!

Lots of information about the radix sort is available. Data Structures and Algorithms: Radix Sorting describes the algorithm and its performance characteristics, and Radix Sort Revisited describes how to work around the problem of sorting negative floating point values, as well as reducing the complexity and increasing temporal coherence.

The definitive online resource for algorithms is NISTS's Dictionary of Algorithms and Data Structures. There is a list of algorithm resources, and you can also find some free e-books using The Assayer.

In print you should be looking for "Introduction to Algorithms, 2nd edition". It is the bible of the field. Other excellent candidates are "Data Structures and Algorithms" ( / in Java / in C).

Google will also tell you to look here, here and here.

You forgot to mention the cost of cataloguing the items, and maintaining bequests. A collection at my alma mater is now costing a fortune to maintain because they have to now collect other books to maintain the appeal of the collection to researchers and ensure its uniqueness, and pay large amounts of money on preservation. I don't think I've ever seen anyone use it.

Perhaps they're busy being sheared by another robot?

Some really good info about the real problems of humanitarian demining (during peacetime) here:

Demining Research at the University of Western Australia

The problem won't be solved by these high tech solutions which, while very ingenious, are too expensive for the countries to afford to use. Not to mention that they often require specialist operators, support crew, resources, transportation etc. There's also the issue of actually getting into the areas that need to be demined - especially in places like Afghanistan where the terrain is mainly mountainous (and much of the demining takes place on rocky mountain/hill sides where vehicles, even helicopters, can't go).

The main problems are not technological, but related to the local culture and geography.

It's the cheap solutions that the local deminers can be easily trained to use that will be actually used. I remember going to a talk on this subject (see link above) in which it was stated that the most effective and successfull demining tool is still the use of mine sniffer dogs.

These have been at my university (UWA) a couple of months now. The machine is right outside the photocopying place, which sells blank CDs.

It seems to be intended more for backing up data - it'd be a right pain to have lost your thesis because the CD it was burnt on was lost/unreadable/etc

I should encourage him to put that sort of old stuff up on his website. He needs a good reason to update it.

Meanwhile, my only contribution to data packs for existing games are a pair of DOS Monopoly packs based on the Star Wars Ep1 and Pokemon boards.

Dijkstra's algorithm is very nice, and it's parallelisble too! I used a varation in a class called the Longest Common Subsequence algorithm and we had to parallelize it.

Dynamic programming =)

I also like radix sorting, BSP trees, and B+ trees. Memory managers (allocators/gc/swaping) are fun too.

Dijkstra's algorithm is very nice, and it's parallelisble too! I used a varation in a class called the Longest Common Subsequence algorithm and we had to parallelize it.

Dynamic programming =)

I also like radix sorting, BSP trees, and B+ trees. Memory managers (allocators/gc/swaping) are fun too.

In the Bay of Fundy in Nova Scotia, there is a small tidal power plant (experimental, I think).

There is a tidal power plant (not experimental) in Brittanny (France). It's been working for more than 30 years and powers 250 000 homes.

See here (in French) and here about the Bay of Fundy(in English).

In Brittany, the tidal power has also been used to power mills since the XIIth century. They would trap the the tide behind a wall and let it go back through the paddle wheel of the mill.

Long before internet gaming, serious RPG addicts were paying real cash for things that didn't exist even on hard drive somewhere in Texas. Giant gaming cons would see people offering cash under the table for other members of their gaming group to have their character/s give them weapons, etc. Since you could also leave a sort of will in many cases, there was often deals of the "buy me lunch and I'll leave my mace of +4 against zombies to you when I die."

This came of age with the net, of course. Ebay finally had to ban (or just regulate?) the sale of virtual property after several Ultima-related fiascoes caused bad publicity. Katz wrote about before that here: 'Ebay launches virtual property' and there was quite a bit of mainstream coverage of this.

While looking for that coverage I found this essay on Gaming Culture that mentions Ebay. Also a mention on USA Today. Apparently the selling violated the games' terms of use.

Saludos, Mig
(Karma for sale)

There's one limitation with ground-based arrays that might be avoidable in space (or on water for that matter) - being stuck with an array covering a fixed area, once you've spent your money.

Could a space-based array be designed so that once it reaches its target location, it spreads itself out, gradually increasing the distance between its elements in a coherent manner, thereby increasing the effective size of the array over time? I would assume that a space-borne array would already be designed with plenty of fuel/rocketry for compensating for massive objects passing nearby and tugging on its corners... The same principle might be handy for adjusting/balacing the spacing between elements if an asteroid hits the jackpot, or a failure is detected.

Here is a link to the audio recording of Bart's famous quote. And here is a transcript:

Bart How would I go about creating a half man, half monkey type creature?
Krabappel: I'm sorry, that would be playing God.
Bart: God, Shmod. I want my monkey man!

I hope this clears up any confusions among readers. Thank you.

When are people going to learn that it's not art that makes the game?

Did anybody say that it was art that made the game? No. Hell, I've been playing Slime Volleyball recently. It has some of the lamest, most childish graphics I've ever seen, but it also has very engaging game play. Nonetheless, better graphics in both SV and FC would be nice, and their implementation needn't affect the game play one bit.

Which gets us back to the issue at hand. I don't know anything about the inner workings of the Radeon driver, but there are probably a number of similar tradeoffs involved in its design. The most reasonable interpretation is *not* that Radeon has optimized for Quake 3 at the expense of other programs. If that were true, it would run at the same rate whatever it were named. The better explanation is that when the driver knows what program is being run (such as Quake 3) it optmizes itself to the known characteristics of that program, and when a program which the driver knows nothing about (such as "Quack") is run, it uses default settings.

Thus, it's not necessarily favoring Quake 3 over other applications, but is instead using optimizations for for known programs which are not available for unknown ones. There's nothing in this article to indicate that similar optimizations haven't been made for Counter Strike, Half Life, or any other popular 3D programs.

I mean, there are a ton of ways to program the little guys, and it's vaguely practical too. And of course people have used them to drive robots and stuff using their onboard serial/usb port. I picked up a handspring deluxe for <$100 a week ago at Fry's.

Here's some programming-palm linkage:
Lisp (scheme)
waba -- micro JVM (~71k), quite cool if you're into Java
extra classes and tools that work with waba, really nice data storage classes for example
a ui gen program for waba, written in waba :-)
super waba, a bigger derivation of waba
waba community site
[yeah, I've been having lots of fun with waba :) ]

All of the above is free (beer & speech). LispMe you can actually hack code ON the pda. PocketC also allows you to hack code on the pda, but it is shareware (not _that_ expensive, about $18 iirc, the runtime is free). The java stuff you compile on your machine and HotSync across onto the target. And of course both Palm and Handspring have developer sections on their sites with tool stuff and doc sets you can nab for free.

The GTK anti-aliasing is still being handled by the FreeType engine, which is IMHO perceptively as good as it gets. But you're begging for the screenshots aren't you? Here are some tiny morsels for you :)

• Konqueror (and the rest of QT) has xft enabled for a while now - shot 1
• And here is the gdkxft working on the gnapster menu bar - similar results. shot 2

The GTK anti-aliasing is still being handled by the FreeType engine, which is IMHO perceptively as good as it gets. But you're begging for the screenshots aren't you? Here are some tiny morsels for you :)

• Konqueror (and the rest of QT) has xft enabled for a while now - shot 1
• And here is the gdkxft working on the gnapster menu bar - similar results. shot 2

That's twisting thet truth significantly. The major reasons cited in the Wired article for the failure of Linux adoption were:

• Problems with hardware compatibility with theexisting computers in use. This would not apply if compatible hardware had been initially targeted upon purchase of the system, as it had been done with Windows.
• A lack of local Linux expertise among teachers. Just because the teachers are not experienced with using Linux as opposed to Windows does not draw the conclusion that Linux is more difficult to use - just that the knowledge base is not there yet.
• Political movements from the Government. Of course proprietary vendors weren't going to just sit back and lose out on a contract this large.

Furthermore, it appears the ScholarNet initiative is not over yet. The current progress has not achieved the penetration desired, but future iterations hold more promise, as hardware compatibility improves and the "seeded" Linux knowledge from the successful installations trickles down.

Anyone interested in the attractions of Linux implementations in developing countries might want to have a look at a paper I wrote for a final year Engineering unit: postscript version. It has some mistakes in it I haven't corrected yet, but I'm open to revising it :)

All we need now is a Linux version of ReBirth 338 and the distro should be complete.

Doug Lea (well known C++ programmer and writer; teaches at SUNY/Oswego)

Kevin Sullivan (U. of Virginia)

A couple of less positive articles from Australia.

An article at O'Reilly.

July 1989 - The first bits of NT run for the first time on a system built by the NT team using the Intel i860 processor.

January 2, 1990 - Bill Gates brings together NT's top designers to discuss the importance of running NT on Intel's 386+ processors and to choose a new RISC processor other than the Intel i860.

If the course was about building complex systems, then borrowing other code would probably be OK.. As long as you make it clear what's you're code, and what came from elsewhere. If the course was about learning how to write programs, then 'borrowing' someone elses' code would be against the purpose of the course.

Think about it for a second. Just about any problem simple enough for a beginner programer to solve already has a solution written. Bubble sort? No problem. Quick sort? Right here!. You can get a garbage collector from this page. (none of these took me more than a minute to find with google).

So how are you going to actually learn how to program if all you're doing is stealing other people's code. More importantly: How do you learn how to fix problems with code if you're doing this?

Of course, it would be hell for an instructor. If you wanted to force your students to write their own code, the only problems that you could give them would be problems that even the best experts hadn't been able to solve.

Welcome to computing 101. This week I'm going to be teaching you about loops. To force you all to write your own code, I'm going to assign each one of you a different device for which the manufacturer has not released specs. Your first assignment is to reverse engineer your device and write a device driver using a polling loop.

Any questions?

http://www.general.uwa.edu.au/u/toivo/kpackage/

Check out a two-legged walker here.

:wq!

:wq!

If Doubleclick starts hiding behind hostnames in many domains, the cookies from doubleclick.foo.com won't go to doubleclick.bar.com, and they can't track. They have to use one domain to get their cookies back. And that makes them vulnerable even if you don't have an armored backhoe to dig up their net connection.

We also use Operating Systems: Design and Implementation (2nd edition) (Tanenbaum and Woodhull) as a textbook which includes Minix media and goes into great depth about the Minix OS.

The Linux kernel may not be as well documented for educational purposes.