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I know exactly where that came from.

And oddly enough, I do understand it :)

Seems like flamebait but I'll bite. How many BASIC compilers have you written in 2 months without touching the target hardware before you were 20? some bio page

OK, I did some searching for the Neowin article on this, and can just as well post it here too.
It's a bunch of fun historical documents. ;-)

- Screenshot of Tim-Berner Lee's web browser/editor gizmo (apparently two apps in one suite, kinda like Mozilla?)
- Web page (from 1992) describing a very early version of HTML
- Description of the web (from 1992)*
- The original WWW proposal from 1989**
- History of the web

* = It tells you why the WWW was made... "Tim decided that high energy physics needed a networked hypertext system and CERN was an ideal site for the development of wide-area hypertext ideas"

** = excerpt: "Note that the only name I had for it at this time was "Mesh" -- I decided on "World Wide Web" when writing the code in 1990."

you're simply wrong. the dvorak keyboard was designed to have as much alternating hand keystrokes as possible. just putting the vowels on the left side probably does it more than qwerty, but the rest of the keyboard was designed with that in mind as well. you're simply wrong. if you don't believe me, copy some text into http://www.acm.vt.edu/~jmaxwell/dvorak/comparePage .html and see the results.

oh, and by the way, i typed this in dvorak.

The problem is the establishment of a monoculture, rather than genetic modification. It doesn't matter if you've bred up your plants the old-fashioned way of collecting seeds from the ones the bear the biggest fruit or if you've grown it in a lab; if you've grown all your plants from a small pool of genes, then they're all going to share the same strengths and weaknesses. And given the way that any disease (or any other selective pressure) works, it is difficult to say in advance what will confer an advantage or a disadvantage until the chips fall.

Even if Terminator got loose via cross-pollination (http://filebox.vt.edu/cals/cses/chagedor/terminat or.html), I don't think it would be end of agriculture on this planet (although I think it's a horrible way to squeeze out cash from farmers). Terminator bred seeds have to be treated with an inducer chemical, which sets off the genes that sterilze the second generation seeds. Additionally, two genes (the recombinase and the toxin) out of the three genes involved have to be in working order for sterility to occur. Even if the toxin gene itself were to be horizontally transferred into other plants, the gene contains a blocker region which prevents the gene from being expressed until that blocker is excised. The DNA is sort of arranged thusly (promoter and blocker are just regions of the DNA strand with different function):

---[promoter_region]--[blocker_region]--[toxin_DNA code]---

In order to create (express in biogeekspeak) the toxin, you need both the promoter region and the toxin code. I wonder is how likely is it that the toxin gene gets tranferred via cross-pollination and somehow manage to lose the blocker and yet keep the promoter needed for expression. Additionally, if the toxin gene got mutated such that it didn't work (which is a real possibility with a single gene), then the whole sterility thing is out the door.

The other problem with hobbling the spread of GM foods is that not all GM foods are these monsters you describe, nor is all research into it driven by blind greed. A lot of basic research, particularly agricultural research, still goes on at public technical institutes funded by public money, where there is more transparency and more thought given to the ethical consequences. Crops that can be grown in arid regions, regions with saline groundwater, or that have improved nutritional value can do good where people can't grow their native crops or are undernourished.

I agree with you that Monsanto is one of the poster children for corporate irresponsiblity and that we need to be cautious our food supply's gene pool, but the situation is more subtle than you describe.

N.B. I am involved in human genomics research (no engineering, just studying the structure) and not plant genetics. Make of this what you will, etc.

"Earth's atmosphere allows for the triple-point of water which we all should know is vital to our functionality as living beings."

Not particularly, unless you consider 0 degrees centrigrade @ 611.2 Pa (0.006 atm) "allowable" in earth's atmospheric conditions. Hint: people like to breathe, and having one's blood boil does not make for a nice afternoon picnic. Consequently, it seems that you were just wrong.

Perhaps you should review your "introductory chemistry course."

This reminds me of a story about Steve Wozniak that might not be true. I was told by a lineman once that Wozniak had perfected his blue box and hooked it up to a switch board in his attic. He supposedly charged a flat rate free to his neighbors for the ability to dial into his switch board and dial out long distance using the blue box.

All I could dig up was this. The lineman could have been yanking my chain. Comments appreciated.

Yes people... Beowulf!

Now we can build a budget Virginia Tech thingy of our own.

I read the article (and it was one rambling screed to begin with, only more-so with the comments). I give the original author points for vocabulary, I give the annotator points for a valient attempt to bring it to a contemporary crowd.

I will attempt to clarify the issue for the community in more simple terms (see notes below for more technical explanation if so inclined):

1. A computer is a simulation device which can simulate anything at all, given unlimited resources.

2. In practice we (programmers) build a subset of simulations that are most useful or entertaining for the users (because that pays the bills).

3. An operating system is a simulation that allows us to more easily manipulate our computer to run other simulations and communicate to and through ever more complex and sophisticated devices (sound cards, video cards, network interface cards, joysticks, mice, etc) that we hang off the side.

4. A very small subset of programmers have made an ungodly amount of money selling said simulations. The article kind of loses focus at this point and goes off on a tangent - I won't burden the reader here with that.

5. The CLI will not die simply because its utility and expressiveness outweigh the lack of utility and expressiveness found in pure graphical interfaces. The future is begining now - and is a hybrid - both the CLI and GUI coexisting for mutual benefit leveraging the strengths of both in ways far more sophisticated than we can envision today.

My own editorial: Until people stop reading altogether, or natural speach recognition becomes a reality, keyboards will be around for the foreseable future.

Notes (numbered to reference the numbered sections above):

1. Alan Turing came up with the concept of a Turing Machine which could be used as a general purpose device to simulate any other machine or process using very simple instructions in building block fashion to produce more complex simulations. The brilliant scientist John Von Neumann further extended the idea to encompass the first stored program computer architecture for practical use.

It is interesting to note that modern computer chips do not have what we think of as the basic instruction set - Assembler - hardcoded into the chip. Instead the Assembler instruction set is itself a simulation running on a far simpler 'micro code' instruction set that is hardcoded into the chip.

I think a better metaphor for computer software (which encompasses everything running on a computer, from the OS to what we think of as applications) is a series of of small boxes within larger boxes, which themselves are inside of a larger box. Some of the boxes may have more than one box inside of them (like the OS running multiple applications, for example). The largest 'lower level' boxes have the ability to serve as simulation 'stage' for the boxes that they contain. At the highest levels (the small boxes at the 'top' of the stack) they may or may not have facilities for doing further simulation (now-a-days it is more prevelant to see applications that have macros up to and including full-blown programming languages and interpreters for creating your own simulations within the instruction sets provided). The OS is simply one of the larger boxes near the bottom of the stack.

2. Sometimes the users are ourselves; this is why we see a plethora of noddy programs/simulations that don't do much usefull for larger audiences.

3. See the 'boxes-within-boxes' metaphor in number 1 above.

4. Not much more can be said. I will state my own philosophical view: I think it is more useful to programmers and to society as a whole to invent more flexible and open simulations that allow computers (and other less-general purposes devices) to communicate more seamlessly and make them a true and natural tool to augment our senses and intellect. It is not impossible -- we just have to dream it up and make it happen.

I read the article (and it was one rambling screed to begin with, only more-so with the comments). I give the original author points for vocabulary, I give the annotator points for a valient attempt to bring it to a contemporary crowd.

I will attempt to clarify the issue for the community in more simple terms (see notes below for more technical explanation if so inclined):

1. A computer is a simulation device which can simulate anything at all, given unlimited resources.

2. In practice we (programmers) build a subset of simulations that are most useful or entertaining for the users (because that pays the bills).

3. An operating system is a simulation that allows us to more easily manipulate our computer to run other simulations and communicate to and through ever more complex and sophisticated devices (sound cards, video cards, network interface cards, joysticks, mice, etc) that we hang off the side.

4. A very small subset of programmers have made an ungodly amount of money selling said simulations. The article kind of loses focus at this point and goes off on a tangent - I won't burden the reader here with that.

5. The CLI will not die simply because its utility and expressiveness outweigh the lack of utility and expressiveness found in pure graphical interfaces. The future is begining now - and is a hybrid - both the CLI and GUI coexisting for mutual benefit leveraging the strengths of both in ways far more sophisticated than we can envision today.

My own editorial: Until people stop reading altogether, or natural speach recognition becomes a reality, keyboards will be around for the foreseable future.

Notes (numbered to reference the numbered sections above):

1. Alan Turing came up with the concept of a Turing Machine which could be used as a general purpose device to simulate any other machine or process using very simple instructions in building block fashion to produce more complex simulations. The brilliant scientist John Von Neumann further extended the idea to encompass the first stored program computer architecture for practical use.

It is interesting to note that modern computer chips do not have what we think of as the basic instruction set - Assembler - hardcoded into the chip. Instead the Assembler instruction set is itself a simulation running on a far simpler 'micro code' instruction set that is hardcoded into the chip.

I think a better metaphor for computer software (which encompasses everything running on a computer, from the OS to what we think of as applications) is a series of of small boxes within larger boxes, which themselves are inside of a larger box. Some of the boxes may have more than one box inside of them (like the OS running multiple applications, for example). The largest 'lower level' boxes have the ability to serve as simulation 'stage' for the boxes that they contain. At the highest levels (the small boxes at the 'top' of the stack) they may or may not have facilities for doing further simulation (now-a-days it is more prevelant to see applications that have macros up to and including full-blown programming languages and interpreters for creating your own simulations within the instruction sets provided). The OS is simply one of the larger boxes near the bottom of the stack.

2. Sometimes the users are ourselves; this is why we see a plethora of noddy programs/simulations that don't do much usefull for larger audiences.

3. See the 'boxes-within-boxes' metaphor in number 1 above.

4. Not much more can be said. I will state my own philosophical view: I think it is more useful to programmers and to society as a whole to invent more flexible and open simulations that allow computers (and other less-general purposes devices) to communicate more seamlessly and make them a true and natural tool to augment our senses and intellect. It is not impossible -- we just have to dream it up and make it happen.

Yes it is a conflict of interest. It's typical.

If you read this carefully, you might conclude that Bill Gates has been fixing the things he breaks since he was in high school. He and his buddies broke the first computer they were allowed to use and then hired themselves out to fix it:

Bill Gates, Paul Allen and, two other hackers from Lakeside formed the Lakeside Programmers Group in late 1968. They were determined to find a way to apply their computer skills in the real world. The first opportunity to do this was a direct result of their mischievous activity with the school's computer time. The Computer Center Corporation's business was beginning to suffer due to the systems weak security and the frequency that it crashed. Impressed with Gates and the other Lakeside computer addicts' previous assaults on their computer, the Computer Center Corporation decided to hire the students to find bugs and expose weaknesses in the computer system.

This was Bill Gates answer to the shortage of computing resources that existed when he was growing up. He made himself root so that he could have all the resources he wanted, essentially a robbery. The overall model applies to the software he sells to this day, there will always be something wrong with it so that you want to buy the new one. I like the answer RMS came up with better: make your own toys.

Yes.

If you read this carefully, you might conclude that Bill Gates has been fixing the things he breaks since he was in high school. He and his buddies broke the first computer they were allowed to use and then hired themselves out to fix it:

Bill Gates, Paul Allen and, two other hackers from Lakeside formed the Lakeside Programmers Group in late 1968. They were determined to find a way to apply their computer skills in the real world. The first opportunity to do this was a direct result of their mischievous activity with the school's computer time. The Computer Center Corporation's business was beginning to suffer due to the systems weak security and the frequency that it crashed. Impressed with Gates and the other Lakeside computer addicts' previous assaults on their computer, the Computer Center Corporation decided to hire the students to find bugs and expose weaknesses in the computer system.

This was Bill Gates answer to the shortage of computing resources that existed when he was growing up. He made himself root so that he could have all the resources he wanted, essentially a robbery. The overall model applies to the software he sells to this day, there will always be something wrong with it so that you want to buy the new one. I like the answer RMS came up with better: make your own toys.

Since the torrent link given is messed up up, I've set up another torrent tracker for short term abuse.

I know there will be a dozen predictable responses to this, deriding System X, Virginia Tech, Apple, Mac OS X, linpack, Top 500, and coming up with one excuse after another. But won't anyone consider the possibility that these Mac OS X clusters are worth something?

Your right!

1st, System X or the "Big Mac" was thrown together so that people like us would talk about it and to get a good standing for the November 2003 top 500 list. They did an excellent job at this.

Now for some reality. The system is not yet operational.

When it was first thown together, everyone "in the know" and myself questioned how this was going to work without a reliable memory subsystem, and the VT people responded that they were going to write software to correct any hardware errors, and we said OK, whatever. Then, they said, hmm, we kinda needa a reliable memory subsystem, so lets rip out all 1,100+ machines and start over with these new Xserve boxes that have ECC memory in them.

This system has not come up yet with the new Xserves, according to their website.

Now, I'm going to make a comment on Linpack. Linpack, like all good benchmarks are really good at measuring that benchmark's performance. Linpack is a good benchmark, but it is also a benchmark that does not require much RAM per node to run. Some applications do need a good amount of RAM/node to run and being that RAM costs $$, the cost adds up very quickly, and the cost/cpu/teraflop goes down accordingly.

With the comparison between System X and Tungsten NCSA cluster. Personally, I don't know why the Tungsten cluster cost more because the Mac cluster has more RAM/node and each node should have been cheaper in general. The NCSA cluster uses Myrinet which I know is expensive, but I do not know that in comparison to the Infiniband equipment on the Macs. Supposedly, the Infiniband interconnects were what got System X on the top500 list with such good results, or at least that is what the head of the project told me.

Although its popular here on slashdot because many of the readers are younger and inexperienced (and have no money) that they praise anything that costs less and extra brownie points go towards an underdog like AMD or Linux, however in the real world people actually will pay extra for something to ensure that it works. Working equipment may seem superfluous to the dorm room Linux guru, but trust me, I know what its like to work with equipment that cost about $1 mil and it doesn't work. We could have gone with the 2nd bidder at $1.2 mil and it would have worked. Yes, we "saved" $200,000, but we also wasted well over $500,000 when one considers that over 50% of the equipment is faulty and many people's time has been wasted.

By contrast, NCSA's surprise entry in November 2003's list, Tungsten, achieved 9.82 Tflops for $12M asset cost.

When I looked here, I found this: ``Tungsten entered production mode in Novermber 2003 and has a peak performance of 15.36 teraflops (15.36 trillion calculations per second).''

To me, that looks faster than System X, not slower.

Let's see: NCSA stands for ``National Center for Supercomputing Applications''. ``NCSA is a key partner in the National Science Foundation's TeraGrid project, a $100-million effort to offer researchers remote access ...''

Looks as if the NCSA has a huge budget. I'd guess that ``gold-plated everything'' and ``leave no dollars unspent'' are basic specs for everythig they buy.

What can we learn about Virginia Tech? How about this:

System X was conceived in February 2003 by a team of Virginia Tech faculty and administrators and represents what can happen when the academic and IT organizations collaborate.

Working closely with vendor partners, the Terascale Core Team went from drawing board to reality in little more than 90 days! Building renovations, custom racks, and a lot of volunteer labor had to be organized and managed in a very tight timeline.

Yes, System X and the Apple hardware is pretty neat, but don't use the price/performance ratio of these two systems as a metric for the relative worth of Linux and OSX clusters.

It's unfair and meaningless to compare volunteer labor and academic pricing and scrounging on a limited budget to bureaucratic design, bureaucratic procurement and an unlimited budget.

... the Object Oriented paradigm and the whole Windowing and GUI idea?
Smalltalk may well end up being a mere side-show in the Annals of Time 1972 page 43, but imho Alan Kay at least deserves a mention.

http://vtso.geol.vt.edu/paleo/pressabc.htm

to mention some of the existing doozies
- identifying an inteligence agent
- refusing to co-operate (no such thing as a right to silence)

and don't forget The Crimes Act VIA 1914 (as amended)
A sample
http://courses.cs.vt.edu/~cs3604/lib/Crime/Austral ia.law.html/

In some parts the Crimes Act VIA relating to Commonwealth data the onus of proof is reversed and possession of data = guilt until therwise established by a court of law

Don't forget that this is a "one time deal" that no one else can get if they want to build an Apple-based supercomputer.

As this article states, the $5.8 million cost was calculated by adding a $600,000 upgrade cost to the $5.2 million cost of the original PowerMac-based System X. As Dr. Srinidhi Varadarajan said in this article, the original System X cost $3.2 million for cluster hardware plus $2 million for facilities upgrades.

The $600,000 upgrade to System X included upgrading all 1100 PowerMacs to dual 2.3GHz Xserves, plus 50 additional nodes. Note that the fastest Xserves Apple sells to everyone else are only 2.0GHz, so System X got "extreme" versions of the Xserve.

A dual 2.0GHz Xserve "Cluster Node" starts at $2999 at the Apple Store. Since each node has 4GB RAM and the cheapest 4GB RAM upgrade costs $1450 at the Apple store, that makes it $4449 per node. According to this article, Small Tree's InfiniBand cards cost $1095 each, so that makes it $5544 per node (without cables). Therefore, Virginia Tech should have spent at least $277,200 for the additional 50 nodes.

That leaves at most $322,800 to upgrade the 1100 PowerMacs to the special 2.3GHz Xserves. That's about $245 per node, not including any additional costs I can't quantify like labor, additional hardware, and facilities upgrades (if needed).

No one else can buy 1100 dual 2.0GHz PowerMacs and expect to upgrade them all to dual 2.3GHz Xserves (with ECC memory) for only $245 per node (including labor). Comparing the cost/teraflop of System X with non-comparable government-funded, high-bandwidth supercomputers seems silly to me.

Don't forget that this is a "one time deal" that no one else can get if they want to build an Apple-based supercomputer.

As this article states, the $5.8 million cost was calculated by adding a $600,000 upgrade cost to the $5.2 million cost of the original PowerMac-based System X. As Dr. Srinidhi Varadarajan said in this article, the original System X cost $3.2 million for cluster hardware plus $2 million for facilities upgrades.

The $600,000 upgrade to System X included upgrading all 1100 PowerMacs to dual 2.3GHz Xserves, plus 50 additional nodes. Note that the fastest Xserves Apple sells to everyone else are only 2.0GHz, so System X got "extreme" versions of the Xserve.

A dual 2.0GHz Xserve "Cluster Node" starts at $2999 at the Apple Store. Since each node has 4GB RAM and the cheapest 4GB RAM upgrade costs $1450 at the Apple store, that makes it $4449 per node. According to this article, Small Tree's InfiniBand cards cost $1095 each, so that makes it $5544 per node (without cables). Therefore, Virginia Tech should have spent at least $277,200 for the additional 50 nodes.

That leaves at most $322,800 to upgrade the 1100 PowerMacs to the special 2.3GHz Xserves. That's about $245 per node, not including any additional costs I can't quantify like labor, additional hardware, and facilities upgrades (if needed).

No one else can buy 1100 dual 2.0GHz PowerMacs and expect to upgrade them all to dual 2.3GHz Xserves (with ECC memory) for only $245 per node (including labor). Comparing the cost/teraflop of System X with non-comparable government-funded, high-bandwidth supercomputers seems silly to me.

It's not even technically on campus. Its at the nearby Virginia Tech Corporate Research Facility. And in any case, you can arrange a tour if you want.

if we don't choose from column A (treaties and effective laws to reduce CO2 emissions) nature will choose for us from column B (flooding, loss of arable land, economic depression, famine, etc.)

In column B I would also like to add dwarfing
and extinction.

Actually his point about getting in trouble with the FCC is technically valid even if you misuse/abuse/modify the equipement. Most devices are supposed to have hardware limitations. [ ... ]

In which case, the vendor is already in violation of FCC regs, and is using software to try to obscure that fact.

Frankly, I'm not willing to let the vendor slide on this one. The story of the Therac-25, though considerably more grave, should serve as a lesson to vendors everywhere to never rely solely on software to limit the actions of hardware.

Schwab

That was one of the coolest costumes I've ever seen.

Website was updated this morning....

Correct me if I'm wrong, but it actually looks an awful like a Beowulf cluster by nature.

Oh, and btw: here are some pictures.

VT has officially got the BigMac up and running faster than ever at 12.25TF with 1150 dual 2.3Ghz XServes.
Check out the announcment.

I wonder how many Centrises that equates to...

Great post. Some comments:

Saying that just replacing DOS with CP/M would have made another company become Microsoft, is short sighted and idiotic.

As short-sighted and idiotic is to say that Bill Gates was not a good programmer:

http://ei.cs.vt.edu/~history/Gates.Mirick.html

"The MITS company did not know this and was very interested in seeing their BASIC. So, Gates and Allen began working feverishly on the BASIC they had promised. The code for the program was left mostly up to Bill Gates while Paul Allen began working on a way to simulate the Altair with the schools PDP-10. Eight weeks later, the two felt their program was ready. Allen was to fly to MITS and show off their creation. The day after Allen arrived at MITS, it was time to test their BASIC. Entering the program into the company's Altair was the first time Allen had ever touched one. If the Altair simulation he designed or any of Gates's code was faulty, the demonstration would most likely have ended in failure. This was not the case, and the program worked perfectly the first time [Wallace, 1992, p. 80]. MITS arranged a deal with Gates and Allen to buy the rights to their BASIC.[Teamgates.com, 9/29/96] Gates was convinced that the software market had been born. Within a year, Bill Gates had dropped out of Harvard and Microsoft was formed."

I wonder how many of the slashdotters can write a programming language from scratch without having a computer and make it work on the first try.

Of course Gates is a virtuoso businessman above everything else, but the guy was also indeed a high-skilled programmer. it's not fair that slashdotters deny that just because they don't like him.

People have already been making supercomputer clusters for the Mac, including Virginia Tech's third-fastest supercomputer in the world, but InfiniBand is supposed to make the latency drop.

Note that V.T.'s cluster already uses InfiniBand, courtesy of Mellanox.

It's mentioned at V.T.'s pages.

Rubbish. Iron carbide is a ceramic, but steel contains not more than 2% carbon. Thus, steel is a mixture of a ceramic and a metal, with most of its properties determined by the metal.

There is more detail about this here than you want to know, unless of course you are a taking a materials science class, and are confused about what exactly steel is.

In some mathematic tasks, when performing math operations with large (>32bit) numbers, things are speeded up significantly.
If you want to perform a sum(10,10) operation, its probably just as fast on 32 as on 64 bit CPUs (one CPU cycle).
If you perform sum(3000000000,3000000000), you can do this on one cpu cycle on a 64 bit, but you probably need 2 or 4 cycles on a 32 bit. (2 or 4x faster).
The dual FPU and 64 bit was the reason the systemX became the third fastest computer in the world.

yes -- Seymour Cray died in an auto accident in Colorado Springs in 1996.. I googled "Seymour Cray" for this: http://ei.cs.vt.edu/~history/Cray.Pepper.html

Your mother should have taught you better mannors.

Anyway, I know they were in the process of "upgrading" the G5 system. Its not too common for people to build and completely disassemble a $5 million computer within a couple of months. Yes, I realise that the new systems will have ECC memory. This was the #1 question when the first system was built, and the Tech people said "Oh, we have validation routines in our applications, we don't need ECC memory". Now they are putting in machines with ECC memory.

http://www.tcf.vt.edu/systemX.html

Woz wasn't a cracker? maybe not by some people's definition....but...

http://ei.cs.vt.edu/~history/WOZNIAK.HTM says:
"This love of mathematics drove Wozniak's ambition , as a child, to want to become an engineer (Slater). In the mid 1970's Wozniak decided to drop out of the University of California at Berkeley, where he was majoring in engineering, and start working for Hewlett-Packard. During this time, he started working with John Draper who was working on the "blue box" ,an illegal pocket-size telephone attachment that would allow the user to make free long-distance calls (Halliday, 205). Draper recalls that "Woz's first call was to the pope. He wanted to make a confession." "

Zero-G is a commonly accepted term.

That's because Zero-G is NOT Zero Gravity. Why is that so hard to understand?

http://www.aoe.vt.edu/~cdhall/Space/archives/00074 1.html
http://www.newton.dep.anl.gov/askasci/phy99/phy994 67.htm
http://www.astrodigital.org/space/zgr.html

Sigh, skydiving is ***NOTHING*** like freefall

If you say so. Honestly, you do get complete free fall up until terminal velocity is reached. Not necessarily as long as this ride, but it definitely happens. Same thing with amusement park drop towers. Terminal velocity usually isn't reached by the time they begin the braking procedure.

1 kiloton is not sufficient to produce a 2 km blast radius. For a ground level detonation, you need about 200 kt to attain a blast radius of 2 km.

a kiloton means the equivalent of 1,000 tons of TNT. Here is a graph of cloud radius to yeild in kilotons, "Approximate values of stabilized cloud height and radius as a function of explosion yield for land surface or low air bursts."

First off, it says the cloud had a 2 km. radius, or 2 mile, I don't recall but that scale difference doesn't affect what I'm saying. As far as I know, no news report mentions the actual blast itself, just the cloud. The graph from Virginia Tech shows that you can go about halfway between 100 and 1000 kiloton before the stabilized cloud radius gets to be bigger than 10,000 ft, or roughly 2 miles.

I haven't seen any mention of the blast in specifics, besides the lovely speculation going on here (keep it up). Remember, the offical US report was, "it could just be a forest fire." hehe, ok, yeah.

From the 15-megaton thermonuclear device tested at Bikini Atoll on March 1, 1954--the BRAVO shot of Operation CASTLE--the fallout caused substantial contamination over an area of more than 7,000 square miles. The contaminated region was roughly cigar-shaped and extended more than 20 statute miles upwind and over 350 miles downwind. The width in the crosswind direction was variable, the maximum being over 60 miles ( 9.104).

Hasn't this guy ever heard of Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale? Published fifteen years ago, IIRC. Blurb: "respected Canadian poet and novelist Atwood presents here a fable of the near future. In the Republic of Gilead, formerly the United States, far-right Schlafly/Falwell-type ideals have been carried to extremes in the monotheocratic government. The resulting society is a feminist's nightmare: women are strictly controlled, unable to have jobs or money and assigned to various classes: the chaste, childless Wives; the housekeeping Marthas; and the reproductive Handmaids, who turn their offspring over to the "morally fit" Wives. The tale is told by Offred (read: "of Fred"), a Handmaid who recalls the past and tells how the chilling society came to be." link

There was a feature film as well, starring Faye Dunaway, Robert Duvall, and other fairly well-known actors. This book didn't exactly slip under the radar.

Lemme tell you what. Every genre has an ebb and flow. Every style has its historical nadirs of quality. I mean, for Pete's sake, when's the last time you read a 1940s pulp serial? It was crap back then, and everybody knew it, but it sold and made people money, and that was that until the Futurians came along and got serious. And we had some great socially conscious sci-fi in the 60's and 70's (Stranger in a Strange Land, Gateway, Lord of Light, Dune).

Then it went downhill in the Reagan era, IMHO, and really hasn't bounced back. Ever since the prophets ran out of ideas, and the kids these days get their sci-fi from (honestly) shitty TV and shitty movies, few have picked up the reins. Gotta get kids to stop watching crap like Andromeda, Stargate SG-1, and Enterprise. It's all half-baked. It has no edge. It's watered down. I loved ST:TNG back in the day, but I look back on it now and there aren't a lot of episodes I'd bury with me.

And let's face it, genre fiction is overpoweringly name-oriented. As in, you shop by author name before any other consideration. "Yeah, that book over there looks potentially interesting, but I've never heard of her."

I think the genre also did itself a disfavor by heaping such accolades on American Gods. I know this position probably won't win me many friends, but it's a work that has some excellent moments but a hilariously underwhelming climax and denouement--the same problem I had with Neverwhere. The turn is so miniscule that merely describing my reaction could be qualified as a spoiler. I don't know, I just felt a little burned after a 600-some page build up leading toward a climax about as satisfying as the end of Matrix Revolutions. The book has some interesting ideas and touching moments, but the narrative flow is too episodic and the characters too shallow and uninteresting to me beyond their thumbnail description. If you liked it, more power to you. If you loved it, stop reading this instant and dive into Lord of Light . If you've already read it, read it again.

While I agree with the assertion that these could be retyped, CBS is claiming that's not what has happened, that these are originals.

I've made a superimposed image of Word vs. the documents. They have been lined up according to the period after the '1' in the first paragraph. The 'originals' are in red, the Word version in blue.

That can be turned off easily... see this page.

Now that the qualifier is done... It's going to be hard to get a potato gun supersonic. First, according to the calculations, getting supersonic flow out of compressed air requires a converging/diverging nozzle*. Subsonicly, as the tube diameter decreases, pressure and speed increase. Supersonically (and bizzarly), tube diameter must increase for speed to increase.

If there's no nozzle, you can get supersonic projectiles** (and my experiance doesn't exactly include calculations with obstructions), but with a compressed air gun, you tend to have a large air tank connected to a small diameter barrel (so pressure doesn't drop off linearly). That junction between large tank and small tube looks like a nozzle.

Basically, what I recall happens is a shockwave forms, kind of like an internal sonic boom. The shockwave causes the flow to stagnate (if you can call 'only doing the speed of sound' stagnating). Mach 1 always occurs (if it ever will) at the smallest diameter of the c/d nozzle, the 'neck'.

I'm going to have to look up the equations again.***

* Assuming you don't feel like adding/subtracting heat, anyway.
** well, I'm guessing... and considering some firearms have supersonic projectiles, I'm figuring it's a good guess.
*** This is probably WAY too much information, but here.

Change the following registry value to 4 and the new "Windows Security Center" will stop working upon reboot... it runs as a service that any admin user can kill. Did I mention that by default all XP users are admin ;)

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\ControlSet001\Services\w scsvc\Start

Also, here's a Python script that will automatically kill the new "Windows Firewall" in to XP Service Pack 2. You can bet your ass that hackers are already tampering with this. Click a URL and bam... the firewall goes down.

This is just two example of what MS does to "secure" their systems. God help us all.

It has happened
Very interesting read.

But how then shall he emulate master Gates? I mean what would any of us do without mommy's money? What besides that distinguished Gates from any other wanna be Unix fuck off in his early years? Arrr, harr, harrr, the asshole had the last laugh.

i found this on the subject.
They were suppose to get this working by satellite (remember... the large dishes)

1. Information for the games sent via satellite
2. Special adapters with on-board memory connect the Sega Genesis to the cable signal coming in
3. The user selects which game he/she wants to play, via on-screen programming and the D-pad controller
4. The game is then downloaded to the respective Sega Genesis machine. This takes less than a minute.
5. The user can then play the game for as long as he/she likes as long as the unit is turned on.

Check it out: The Sega Channel.

It ran from '94 to '98.

MS says it's a feature... I think it's a bug: programmatically disable windows firewall

In case you don't have one of these Belkin Speedpad 52s already, they're awesome. I use it for gaming, and there's no limit to what you can program these things to do. In fact, I might even consider using one borderline cheating if you program the macros well enough.

Anyway, because I had some with the "profile editor" of the included software, I went ahead (after reading the article) and made a profile that does (what I believe) the original author had intended.

I did this in about 30 minutes, so bear with me if some keys are missing or if it's a little buggy. All major symbols and lettered keys are included but I still need to find where to put keys like "[", "]", and so on.

I broke the keyboard down into 4 logical secions:
1. All function keys / most symbols
2. Right lettered side
3. Left letter side
4. Numpad

From there, I made each of those sections one of the four "shifts" for the controller. Shifting is controlled via the 4-way D-pad with up being "cycle shift", right being right letters, left being the left letters, and down being the numpad. Function keys are the default. Additionally, because of the frequency of their use, the enter and space keys exist in all "shifts" on the circle button and button number 15, respectively.

I know this sounds complicated, but it's really not. Once you take a look at the design in the profile editor, you'll know exactly what I'm talking about.

I'm posting these files up on my university filespace. They're small, but if anybody wants to mirror, feel free to do so. Also, feel free to change my design and distribute as you see fit. (Patents/copyrights are for the birds, imo.)

To use these files, you'll have to already have to use the software that is included with the device. Directions, which consists of 2 steps, are included within the readme.

DOWNLOAD HERE

-Grym

Haven't you heard of this one running OSX on 2200 processors:

http://www.tcf.vt.edu/

I think one of the other posters was right, you really don't know anything about OSX.