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My personal hunch is that if you conducted a random poll of developers with *significant* experience with both languages (say, a minimum of 1 year full-time experience with each), probably 90-98% would agree with this.

I'll put my hand up: 5 years Smalltalk, 2 years Java.

I think Smalltalk is a much more pleasant language to program in: closures (blocks), the IDE (especially senders and implementers), no casts and numerous other features. (Although Brewmaster provides some of the nicer IDE aspects.

Smalltalk also has software engineering features that I would love to see in Java, particularly open classes. Open classes prevent the hell of library classes not anticipating your every need; it's one of the nicest things about Smalltalk and every other OO language seems to have utterly missed the point. (MultiJava has these).

What Java does have is standards, such as EJB, JFC, JMS and so on. They may not be particularly good or coherent standards. But they do encourage component development and interoperability. Smalltalk is good at the core language level, but differences in GUI building and other libraries between vendors can make Java a more attractive option if you want to avoid legacy lock.

"Multiple dispatch is one of the most powerful and elegant features of Dylan."

It's been implemented in Perl.

It might be implemented as a Python module, without sullying the language itself.

Multiple Dispatch as Dispatch on Tuples

Many popular object-oriented programming languages, such as C++, Smalltalk-80, Java, and Eiffel, do not support multiple dispatch. Yet without multiple dispatch, programmers find it difficult to express binary methods and design patterns such as the ``visitor'' pattern. We describe a new, simple, and orthogonal way to add multimethods to single-dispatch object-oriented languages, without affecting existing code. The new mechanism also clarifies many differences between single and multiple dispatch.

Go to town!

-Don

The article's author says "I confess that this psychographic niche -- the Christian, free-software-writing, Emily Dickinson-identifying raver on the attack sub -- was new to me", but in fact Cornell has been turning these types out for years.

I did some looking into his research a while ago for a seminar talk I did. Hopefully, you'll find it has more technical info than the article: here it is

I'd suggest you first see how high-level concepts are handled. Try papers from the UW Cecil/Vortex project:
http://www.cs.washington.edu/research/projects/cec il/www/Papers/papers.html
And maybe start from:
http://www.cs.washington.edu/research/projects/cec il/www/Papers/whole-program.html

I'd suggest you first see how high-level concepts are handled. Try papers from the UW Cecil/Vortex project:
http://www.cs.washington.edu/research/projects/cec il/www/Papers/papers.html
And maybe start from:
http://www.cs.washington.edu/research/projects/cec il/www/Papers/whole-program.html

Well, where do we start...

Multi-core CPUs like IBM's are SMP-on-a-chip, which is not the same as SMT by any stretch.

SMT, because more of the functional units on the chip are staying active at one time, increases heat and power consumption just about as much as SMP-on-a-chip, though it may be marginally better because the core-level overhead won't be present.

"SMP-aware" applications? Yeah, you need something like that with the Mac and its cooperative multitasking and wacky thread model. However, with any normal preemptive multitasking, thread supporting OS, introducing threading into a program makes it "SMP-aware" by default (though you may find new/different bugs on an SMT or SMP system).

The only thing I can think of that would be an "SMT optimization" at the application programming level would be threading any floating point calculations separately from integer calculations, thus allowing the FP units to be running independently from the rest of the application.
Methinks Vince needs to bone up at little...

Some more links:

Universiity of Washington SMT info, this is also linked to from the UMass link previously posted
Look at some more Alpha specifics from the source
I believe these Real World guys were quoted in the last Slashdot SMT reference (and look, Hemos posted that one too... you'd think they'd read the links...>

Disclaimer: I worked for Compaq (though not the DEC side) on porting an OS to Alpha a couple years ago and having to be aware of SMT in EV8 coming down the pike.

More info: geeky, geekier, geekiest. An interesting tidbit is that the data is interleaved serially, meaning the data and the parity codes are spread across wide arcs of disc. That's why it's recommended to clean discs from the center out, not around the discs (so if you scratch it, you damage unrelated segments).

So, I think the idea of duplicating your CD-Rs and sending them to your relatives is a good one. For more fault tolerance, just send some more copies to some more relatives.

Recently there have been lots of "anti-terrorist" domestic military exercises taking place in major US cities, as well as the escalating usage of military weapons/personnel against protest efforts by peaceful American citizens during events such as the WTO conference recently in Seattle, constituting possible violations against the Posse Comitatus Act of 1878.

The increasing use of military force right here in America lends weight to the idea that "non-lethal weaponry" is being deployed more as a domestic deterrent rather than as true war weaponry for use against other countries. Obviously they don't want to kill American citizens if they don't have to, but a zap from something like this would, apparently, be acceptable to the People In Charge...

__

Never ceases to amaze me that people are insisting on physical sails for solar sailing, given that there are a slew of problems to contend with. Furthermore, the mission profile simply calls for a deployment test and minimal motion (no plans for a planetary or extrasolar mission).

Using an M2P2 (Mini-Magenospheric Plasma Propulsion) drive would be a much better choice, because in addition to the lack of launch mass (expensive!), you don't need to worry about deployment problems, and can then think about actually doing some science instead of a publicity stunt. More on M2P2 here and here.

There are more photos at the University of Washington Super-K website.

Nice article explaining what a Buckyball is.

--

And remember that computers are very simple indeed.

And yet it's not exactly the cutting edge.

meanwhile, I ran across this site: http://www.r1edu.org run out of MIT that organizes what I am looking for.

The best options seem to be this certificate program from the University of Washington (note, the course descriptions actually suggest Linux rather than DOS or windows for your C programs; how far is this place from Redmond?). Or one of these courses from one of my alma maters, Cal Berkeley.

Anyone know anything of these programs. Good schools at least.

UW imapd supports a file format called mbx. It is similar to mbox except that each mail record has a length pointer to the start of the next record. It is fast to use even on fairly large mailboxes.

My mail pipeline works like this.

1. sendmail receives the mail
2. sendmail reads ~/.forward sends it into procmail
3. .procmailrc categorizes the email, filters spam, etc. and uses dmail to store the mail (note: dmail is a part of imap-utils). The actual delivery lines look like "|dmail +Mail/Personal.spool".
4. UW imapd running on the mail server machine reads the mailbox file over NFS (I know, I know, I didn't design our mail system!) and delivers the mail to whatever IMAP4 mail client I'm running at the momemt (usually pine)

I don't know how you're supposed to create mbx files normally. However, I stumbled upon this great little Perl script a while back, called creatmbx (don't know the author):

#!/usr/bin/perl
# Ported from imap/src/osdep/unix/mbx.c
my $NUSERFLAGS = "30";
my $HDRSIZE = "2048";
my $string;
die "ERROR: creatmbx <file>\n" unless ($#ARGV == 0);
open(FILE,"> $ARGV[0]");
$string = sprintf ("*mbx*\015\012%08lx00000000\015\012", time);
for ($i = 0; $i < $NUSERFLAGS; ++$i) { $string .= sprintf "\015\012"; }
# Pad the rest of the file with nulls as expected
$string = unpack("a${HDRSIZE}", pack("a${HDRSIZE}","$string"));
print FILE $string;
close(FILE);

To use it, say "creatmbx MyMailboxFile". At that point, dmail will recognize it as being an mbx file when it delivers the mail, and UW imapd will, too; using it is then a lot like using an mbox file, but far faster.

It works pretty well for me. Your Mileage May Vary.

I'm an undergraduate developer at the University of Washington for a program that we call Catalyst and we develop tools that do all sorts of interesting things for distance learning. We have a remotely postable, editable tool called Peer Review for example that allows students and teachers to read and use eachothers work in a live and active environment. They can (for instance) put a comment on a word or paragraph that can then be viewed by other students and teachers and can be commented on further.

We are also developing tools that will hopefully integrate dynamic HTML and simple updates so that teachers who are away from the campus and their home computers can make updates to their websites and can administrate a course webpage easily and effectively. We also have another tool, EPost that allows teachers to use discussion boards in their course websites.

The addition of these tools allows teachers to make their classes more intersting and also will hopefully lead to courses that are educational and run from a remote location...

Check out the UWired project at the University of Washington... we did some really interesting things with educational technology there, including some distance learning stuff. I left school two years ago, and as a student employee had to leave my job there at the same time, and haven't followed the program too closely, but at the time it was one of the premier educational technology programs in the country. The web site is UWired.

You really think you could produce something as good as this or the other pictures you can see here with a webcam? The information that is hard to come from is pressure, tempature, dewpoint. That kind of stuff. Hint they take these pictures from space they can see the whole world. And a weather station already gets pretty good reports from the pilots. Trust me I did this for 4 years they don't need a crappy little webcam picture

You really think you could produce something as good as this or the other pictures you can see here with a webcam? The information that is hard to come from is pressure, tempature, dewpoint. That kind of stuff. Hint they take these pictures from space they can see the whole world. And a weather station already gets pretty good reports from the pilots. Trust me I did this for 4 years they don't need a crappy little webcam picture

A very good history of laser beams can be found at http://students.washington.edu/jboyd/laser.htm.

I believe you will find it informative and of relevance to this story.

So much for the Yilmaz variant of General Relativity,
which predicts that black holes do not exist
more...

I worked for WHOI for a year doing onboard science support (net admin, programmer, technician, whatever it took, etc.). There is a heavy use of linux by oceanography folks. The WHOI and UW ships all use linux mostly, though Scripps uses a lot of Solaris.

As someone else pointed out, you can download the Japanese IME for Windows 98 from Microsoft. It only allows you to input japanese text on web pages though, so it probably is of little use to you. (Information on the Windows Global IME
I've had the best luck using Windows 2000 - when you install the system, you can install a Japanese IME. If you then set your regional settings for Japan, it is also really easy to copy/cut/paste kanji, ICQ works right, etc. etc. It is pretty nice.
Of course, if you don't want to bother with getting IME input to work right at the OS level, you can get multibyte support for ntemacs up and running, which does have its own Japanese (and Chinese, Korean, Thai, etc.) IME.
If you are interested in reading Japanese web pages, then you will probably love www.rikai.com. The site uses a server side script to load in edict readings for each kanji which pops up on mouseover.
That's about all I have to say about that.
BTW, if you are interested, I'm currently translating the Great Teacher Onidzuka manga using a Win2k system with Japanese input (along with a Java client / server thing)

I expect this is the Trinity attack that is described in considerably detail here by X-Force. You can find the actual article and anlysis of the Stacheldraht tool here written at the University of Washington. The author of that article claims that he wrote a program that detects Stacheldraht on a system. Of course, getting the ISPs that are sending these DDOS messages to actually use some security might be a bit difficult. By the way, this is old news, since the CERT advisory is dated June 99.

Thalia

I expect this is the Trinity attack that is described in considerably detail here by X-Force. You can find the actual article and anlysis of the Stacheldraht tool here written at the University of Washington. The author of that article claims that he wrote a program that detects Stacheldraht on a system. Of course, getting the ISPs that are sending these DDOS messages to actually use some security might be a bit difficult. By the way, this is old news, since the CERT advisory is dated June 99.

Thalia

The park you mentioned is in Lynwood, which is outside of Seattle by about a 15 minute drive. However, in the very same Magnuson park where the monolith was erected, they have this sculpture made of retired submarine fins

A link to his SMT page is here: http://www.cs.washington.edu/research/smt

Since I'm not really qualified to say much about SMT, I recommend those that are interested to visit the link above and read some of the research. I attended Prof. Levy's lectures on SMT and it sounded very interesting.

One very interesting note I'd like to make is that SMT is a way of keeping today's superscalar out-of-order architecture, and pump it with the benefits of running multiple threads without a context switch. VLIW machines rely on the COMPILER to organize and arrange machine code to take advantage of the parallelism inside the VLIW architecture. Of course, the problem with VLIW is that you live and die by the compiler. Not only that, but because the scheduling is static for VLIW, subtle changes in the architecture could result in the code no longer running at optimal scheduling.

SMT allows the processor to execute multiple threads "simultaneously" (ie without requiring context switch). You allow maximum utilization of your functional units because a math hungry thread can run along-side a "light" thread, maximizing processor utilization simultaneously. As others have pointed out, this helps increase utilization especially with today's long latencies for a cache miss. And, because the processor does this dynamically, you can achieve close to optimal utilization across different running scenarios, and across multiple iterations of the architecture.

Please correct me if I made mistakes, either through mis-understanding or lack of proof-reading.

In any event (and this is not my specialty, so take this with the standard grain o' salt), the reason that a collapsar is expected to stop collapsing at neutron-star stage is that the neutron degeneracy pressure (basically, the Pauli Exclusion Principle in action) is able to resist the mutual gravitational forces up to some limit -- by calculation, 1.4 to 1.8 solar masses, although it appears that a value of 2.3 solar masses has been observed. Clearly, though, greater densities can exist, because if the limiting mass is exceeded the collapse continues -- to form a black hole, if you accept the present standard formulations of the problem. It's just that we don't know of a stronger force than neutron degeneracy, which will be able to resist the gravitational collapse. During the formation event (typically a supernova), if the collaspe forces (gravitation, implosion) exceed the neutron degeneracy forces, there's nothing to stop the continued collapse (through higher densities) to a black hole. Our lack of knowledge doesn't mean there's not a further stable state, though -- only that we don't know about it. Some scientists have speculated that a further point might exist in a quark star, which would consist (at least in its core) of free strange quarks. But some models of quark stars end up with lower densities than neutron stars... the problem is that we just don't know enough, yet.

(BTW, there's good info here on neutron stars, from a specialist.)

---

but I seen to recall that in Japan the patent laws are more liberal in some regards than in the USA.

(Of course, if you are expert in Japanese Patent law, please feel free to correct any errors, and make me look like a complete fool) ;-)

Japaness law has changed recently, but this is the way it has been for many years. Here is a link to a specific case that is easy enough to follow, and illustrates the point well enough. It also reveals recent shifts in Japanese law:

The Epoch case is truly an "epoch" making decision in Japanese case law.

First, the court's analysis in the case shows a stark contrast with Japanese courts' analyses in early decisions on claim interpretation.

These decisions relied on the inventor's recognition theory and limited the protection scope to cover only embodiments expressly disclosed in the specification.

This rule applied to both functionally defined claims and structurally defined claims.

However, the Tokyo District Court clearly rejected this view by refusing to use embodiments to limit the claim scope.

Further, the addition of functions or steps did not prevent the court from finding infringement in Epoch case. This contrasts highly with some early cases.

It goes something like this. Minor variations qualified the unit as a separate patent.

The upshot probably is not as serious as needing to have patents on green cars vs blue cars (for example), but patents had to be on specific implementations of things. I am not enough of a lawyer to know how much of this is still the case.

But Reverse engineering so that there are some marginal performance differances was common, and there are a lot of copycats that did exactly that. (Sometime old habits die hard.) You build something, say a car engine. They reverse engineer it, find out all of the really important stuff like your design tricks, and them implement them in their own designs.

This situation is really similar to learning code by reading code. The problem is in the setup costs to get production ramped up.

In the USA it is a little more liberal, in that patent can cover more general principles. Things, for example, like the integrated circuit. They did not have to patent all possible circuit implementations of that technology. And their Patent ran out after the usual length of time.

But this is where we get into trouble, because this is where patents get applied to software. A possible incorrect analogy is made between something that involves a manufacturing process (an engine, for example) compared to something that does not.

Quick research reveals that Japans' Patent law was revised in 1998 to correct some of the problems inherent in this. Here is a link to a quick summaryThe important section in this has to do with Design law.

This is all interesting in that it provides a practical example to the problems in different implementations of Patent Law. It has interesting parallels to the the discussions regarding software design, etc.

I don't post often on Slashdot, but I think that this article hits close enough to home that I really should. I hope that I can bring some perspective to those working with or who have "gifted" children. I have some recommendations based on my experience at the bottom of this post that you should read if you aren't interested in wading through this entire post.

I've been characterized as "gifted" youth for as long as I can remember. I was enrolled in an accelerated program here in the Seattle School District called APP. Although the coursework was a bit more challenging than in the regular programs, I was still quite bored. Because of this, I forged ahead, teaching myself Trig and BASIC at 11, Calculus and OOP with C++ at 12. This was really enjoyable, but there was always a big discontinuity between what was being taught in classes and what I was interested in learning.

A solution to this problem was discovered by my parents, who found out about a program run here in Seattle called the Early Entrance Program which takes kids under 15 and, after one year of very rigorous preparation at "Transition School," sends them into the UW as regular students. To get in, one has to take the SAT and school higher than 1300. I did that, and proceeded to enroll in this program.

The other kids were VERY talented, and it was strange to go from the top of the class to the middle (and sometimes the bottom!). And they were what you'd expect: geeks. I don't mean to say that as a derogatory comment, but basically they were very technical, very smart kids who didn't place a big emphasis on social skills and following mainstream trends. This wasn't true across the board, but it was the majority of the class. It was an interesting experience, and I made friends with quite a few, but I had more than the usual number of personality conflicts with others.

I left out a few details here and there, but for those of you that are interested in hearing more, take a look at this page by someone who enrolled in the program and dropped out. It's a few years old, but fairly accurate.

Anyway, college was interesting, though I felt kind of burned out (at 14!). My friends were still mostly kids from the program, and I didn't integrate well into the college environment. That started to change sophomore year, when I was able to convince my parents to let me move into the dorms. This was one of the most pivotal moments of my life, because I socialized with normal people and I got out of an environment that was extremely focused on academic success and got into one that was more about being happy (and by that I don't mean drinking all day either!). My experience in the dorms changed my perspective on EEP as well, because the closer I looked at the people that graduated from the program, the more flaws I saw in the entire process.

I found that a lot of people were graduating with 3.9+ GPAs but were unable to find jobs in the real world. I found that a lot of people were going directly into grad school without knowing why they were doing it. I found that a lot of people were sacrificing so much of their life and of their childhood without knowing what they wanted to do. These are 16 year olds living life from test to test without any long-term perspective. Quite frankly, a lot of these kids should have stayed in high school instead of coming to the UW so early. They simply weren't ready, and when they graduated, they weren't ready for the real world either.

When it really comes down to it, my advice boils down to two phrases: Be Practical, Be Well-Rounded.

My most important piece of advice: Human civilization consists of PEOPLE. As talented as this kid is, he NEEDS to be able to get along with other people. And it doesn't matter what field he's in, there's still plenty of networking and politics in research sciences! He needs to have the skills not only to do what he likes (technical stuff), but he also needs to be able to communicate what he's done. If he doesn't master those skills, he'll probably end up managed by people much less intelligent than him (maybe even the jocks that terrorize smart kids in grade school!).

Getting him involved in sports, getting him to experience normal things that a typical 9 year old would experience is a great idea. It's a good idea to encourage his abilities, but make sure that he gets that same level of encouragement in other activities that an intelligent adult might look on as "unnecessary."

As for me, I'm graduating at 19 (I'm 18 now) in Applied Math. I had to take a few quarters off here and there to "find myself" but it's been worth it. I don't need to graduate a full 4 years ahead anyway! I'm planning on going to a top business school after a few years, and I'm doing as much schmoozing as I can to make that dream a reality. Additionally, I'm starting a EEP Student Association with a few other students to make sure that this knowledge that I've gained through a few quarters of horrible grades gets spread to the younger EEP students. I think that they have a lot more to learn about the world than they think they do.

Thanks for reading.

I wish you were right.

Most of his research has been to use Instrumental Neutron Activation Analysis to measure trace elements in samples from the Atmosphere. His work also has been with the measurement of RadioIsotopes in the environment from atmospheric weapons testing and reactor accidents such as Chernobyl in the Former Soviet Union. Zoller also has worked with a lot of nuclear weapons for the military, but that's not on any of his web pages.

The reason Zoller does his Chernobyl lecture ("Chernobyl: A Glowing Account"), is so that people will hear what he has to say. Again, he's not allowed to talk to the press, but he is allowed to lecture on it.

We can all be grateful for the grue-driver courage and sacrifice. There's no greater gift than laying down our lives for another; I believe that is true. But, the people who were initially putting out the fires in the Chernobyl plant were not functioning voluntarily. At least, that's what Zoller told me: The KGB instructed people to put them out. People went to the top of the whatever-you-call-it, pointed their hoses to the whatever-it-was, and died after a short while, to be replaced with someone else. There work was important, we should be thankful, but we should not be operating under the illusion that they were operating voluntarily.

From what I understand, everyone that was on the scene or in the nearby city is now dead.

That you're shocked and accusing me is a good sign. It means that you value human life.

I'm sorry. I just tell this because I have a priveledged position- I was able to hear this, and I wanted to rely this out. Again, I'm very sorry. But this is what Zoller has told me.

The Chernobyl accident is far from over. I attended a special lecture by Professor William Zoller at the University of Washington, in which he described what happened, and is continuing to happen, at Chernobyl. It is not an entertaining lecture to attend. He told us a lot of things.

Professor Zoller showed us images of the radioactive goo at the bottom of the reacter. He told us that 3 people died to get the picture. The government just kept sending people down with cameras until someone went down, took a picture, and survived the trip back up, and then died. (Prof. Zoller was functioning as a UN inspector, or something. I have forgotten just what he was doing over there.)

If there are pictures of the interior of the building where the accident occured, you can pretty much assume people died to take them.

No, they didn't send robots to take those pictures.

All Russian nuclear plants were breeder plants. Apparently, they wanted plutonium for their weapons. Nuclear submarines, and, yes, NUCLEAR HANDGRENADES are the stupidest ideas in history, but, hey... There wasn't/isn't exactly a concern for human life over there.

Arctic dumping was the primary means of evacuating radioactive waste. Rivers were also a way of getting the waste out of there. As far as I can tell, people panicked, and thought, "Well, if we just dump this in the sea, it'll all just go away." In 10 years time, here in Seattle, we'll be told not to eat our fish. (This is according to Professor Zoller.) He also claims that the EPA knows about this, but is required to keep quiet. But, they continue to monitor the radioactivity of boats coming in on the ports here in Seattle.

The so-called "Brave Firefighters" who put out the fire were not brave. They were forced to put it out by the KGB.

There is a place called Chelyabink-Tomask (unfortunately, I don't have my notes with me and cannot spell the name correctly.) that is a living graveyard, guarded by the military; They are essentially, waiting to die. Nobody goes out, nobody goes in.

You can verify this yourself by contacting him. He will ask you if you are a member of the press. If you are, he is not allowed to talk about it with you. So ask him personally.

I wonder if posting an email to Slashdot is equivelent to being a member of the press.?

These notes are from my memory, not my written notes; I'm afraid there will probably be imprecise. But they are accurate. That is, what is described is true, though I may have numbers and names wrong. His lecture scared me immensly. The room had only about 10% of the people in it by the time he finished...

Related links:

• Professor William Zoller Unfortunately, he does not talk about any of this, nor his military role in the discovery of the Chernobyl radioactivity, nor his security clearance. I encourage you to e-mail him personally to verify all this. (Hmm. I hope he doesn't mind me posting this..!)
• Arctic Pollution Issues: Radioactivity
• Naval Nuclear Waste Management in Northwest Russia

The Chernobyl accident is far from over. I attended a special lecture by Professor William Zoller at the University of Washington, in which he described what happened, and is continuing to happen, at Chernobyl. It is not an entertaining lecture to attend. He told us a lot of things.

Professor Zoller showed us images of the radioactive goo at the bottom of the reacter. He told us that 3 people died to get the picture. The government just kept sending people down with cameras until someone went down, took a picture, and survived the trip back up, and then died. (Prof. Zoller was functioning as a UN inspector, or something. I have forgotten just what he was doing over there.)

If there are pictures of the interior of the building where the accident occured, you can pretty much assume people died to take them.

No, they didn't send robots to take those pictures.

All Russian nuclear plants were breeder plants. Apparently, they wanted plutonium for their weapons. Nuclear submarines, and, yes, NUCLEAR HANDGRENADES are the stupidest ideas in history, but, hey... There wasn't/isn't exactly a concern for human life over there.

Arctic dumping was the primary means of evacuating radioactive waste. Rivers were also a way of getting the waste out of there. As far as I can tell, people panicked, and thought, "Well, if we just dump this in the sea, it'll all just go away." In 10 years time, here in Seattle, we'll be told not to eat our fish. (This is according to Professor Zoller.) He also claims that the EPA knows about this, but is required to keep quiet. But, they continue to monitor the radioactivity of boats coming in on the ports here in Seattle.

The so-called "Brave Firefighters" who put out the fire were not brave. They were forced to put it out by the KGB.

There is a place called Chelyabink-Tomask (unfortunately, I don't have my notes with me and cannot spell the name correctly.) that is a living graveyard, guarded by the military; They are essentially, waiting to die. Nobody goes out, nobody goes in.

You can verify this yourself by contacting him. He will ask you if you are a member of the press. If you are, he is not allowed to talk about it with you. So ask him personally.

I wonder if posting an email to Slashdot is equivelent to being a member of the press.?

These notes are from my memory, not my written notes; I'm afraid there will probably be imprecise. But they are accurate. That is, what is described is true, though I may have numbers and names wrong. His lecture scared me immensly. The room had only about 10% of the people in it by the time he finished...

Related links:

• Professor William Zoller Unfortunately, he does not talk about any of this, nor his military role in the discovery of the Chernobyl radioactivity, nor his security clearance. I encourage you to e-mail him personally to verify all this. (Hmm. I hope he doesn't mind me posting this..!)
• Arctic Pollution Issues: Radioactivity
• Naval Nuclear Waste Management in Northwest Russia

At UWaterloo we use Nachos for our OS course.

Nice things: it is microkernel based (unlike Linux), and it is written in an OO language.
Bad things: the OO language is C++.

Check out some of the funky pictures of penguins. ;)

http://www.cs.washington.edu/451

http://www.cs.washington.edu/homes/voelker/ntemacs .html

First, get the cygnus (now owned by RedHat) toolkit . This gives you a great many unix type commands (tar, ls, cp, dd, less, cat, pwd, ftp, cut, sort, etc), and a real bash shell, and a decent terminal window. Just having the bash autocompletion and command line history is worth the price of download, not to mention your directory slashes now go the right way :)

Next, get yourself the activestate perl port for windows. This gives you perl, which combined with the cygnus toolset makes easy and highly portable scripts very easy to throw together.

Next, get the putty secure shell tools . This gives you pscp (like rcp, but better in every regard) and a pssh (a secure telnet replacement). These will both connect right up with a RedHat 7 system running the openSSH stuff right out of the box.

Of course, get the latest version of emacs for windows.

Finally, just for good measure, throw on Apache so you can serve up files in a pinch. This is handy in case you need to move files around with a system that lacks secure shell for whatever reason. Just throw together a quickie page and use browsers to do all the transfers.

I keep all these tools on a single burned CD (with room to spare). They are the first things I put on any system I use. With this toolset, windows goes from a useless development platform to a slightly annoying development platform, which is better then nothing when your clients require windows on your desktop box.

consumers must possess a little ring that adjusts the optical device in their standard CD, CD-Rom and DVD machines; it's sort of like the plastic gizmo that snaps into a 45-rpm record

As for the optics of it, just a quick search on "CD laser optics" ("I'm Feeling Lucky")finds this site that points out that The polycarbonate itself is part of the optical system for reading the pits.

Maybe the polycarbonate isn't really needed, maybe it's just icing on the cake for robustness. If you do the math on one of the illustrations from the afore mentioned page, if the polycarbonate weren't there, the CD, instead of being 1.2mm thick, would have to be (let's see, cotan(27degrees) times 1/2 of 800microns is 785microns less than the regular 1.2mm thickness- duh, I could've assumed the angle was 30degrees and made things much easier) 0.4mm thick. That's not quite 1/5 the regular CD thickness- I guess the other 1-1/2mm comes from the reinforcing ring/plate you'd have to glue the whole floppy CD to.

Okay, someone else pointed out that the bournelli (sp?) effect could be used to keep the disc from fluttering by keeping it flying just a little bit above the read head, but is it really going to work with a head of unknown geometry and possible with other flat surfaces around? Like CD trays, caddies, slot feed mechanisms, etc.

Not that I'm disparaging the product even before it comes out (but I guess I am), it seems like it would be a nice trick to be able to make it work in almost any CDROM drive. I'd wish the company luck, but I'm afraid of where technology will lead- my no-name peripherals are already cheaply made- can you see getting your drivers and documentation on a floppy CD that won't even last a week on my desk. Admit it- you leave your CDs in a dusty pile too. Can you imagine if you had to reinstall?

And I thought we were through with the idea of disposable DVDs when Divx (the first one) died.

consumers must possess a little ring that adjusts the optical device in their standard CD, CD-Rom and DVD machines; it's sort of like the plastic gizmo that snaps into a 45-rpm record

As for the optics of it, just a quick search on "CD laser optics" ("I'm Feeling Lucky")finds this site that points out that The polycarbonate itself is part of the optical system for reading the pits.

Maybe the polycarbonate isn't really needed, maybe it's just icing on the cake for robustness. If you do the math on one of the illustrations from the afore mentioned page, if the polycarbonate weren't there, the CD, instead of being 1.2mm thick, would have to be (let's see, cotan(27degrees) times 1/2 of 800microns is 785microns less than the regular 1.2mm thickness- duh, I could've assumed the angle was 30degrees and made things much easier) 0.4mm thick. That's not quite 1/5 the regular CD thickness- I guess the other 1-1/2mm comes from the reinforcing ring/plate you'd have to glue the whole floppy CD to.

Okay, someone else pointed out that the bournelli (sp?) effect could be used to keep the disc from fluttering by keeping it flying just a little bit above the read head, but is it really going to work with a head of unknown geometry and possible with other flat surfaces around? Like CD trays, caddies, slot feed mechanisms, etc.

Not that I'm disparaging the product even before it comes out (but I guess I am), it seems like it would be a nice trick to be able to make it work in almost any CDROM drive. I'd wish the company luck, but I'm afraid of where technology will lead- my no-name peripherals are already cheaply made- can you see getting your drivers and documentation on a floppy CD that won't even last a week on my desk. Admit it- you leave your CDs in a dusty pile too. Can you imagine if you had to reinstall?

And I thought we were through with the idea of disposable DVDs when Divx (the first one) died.

I have read and re-read ENM and the follow-up, Shadows of the Mind. I understand Penrose is what is known as a Platonist. My take is that the whole edifice he constructs is a smokescreen for the Platonist -belief- (almost an axiom) he holds, that somehow consciousness is an ideal that really is too cute to be merely the product of a machine (and of evolution). Hence construct a smokescreen to shore up said belief, garnish with big words, etc. You can read for and against reviews of his books all over the WWW: for example

Dodn't Penrose do something to do with tiling the plane?

For simple techniques (without learning or any kind of intelligence) such as regular expression to extract or label contents from web pages, you won't expect a good coverage from pages written in all kinds of templates and with so many types of errors.

Right now I'm writting a Java program to extract links from Google search results (easy, don't shoot! Academic use only). What I'm using is OROMatcher, one of the best regular expression packages for Java. I'll say it's still a mission impossible to get 100% recall and be error-free even for this simple task.

The formal name of such a program (labelling and extracting contents) is a "wrapper". Probably the only way to improve the efficiency of a wrapper is to apply machine learning techniques. A well-trained wrapper program with good learning algorithm could be smart enough to adapt to HTML coding formats with small variances. A good example is in this paper.

I forgot up some href's ... so here they are:

Horde
IMP
IMAP
PostgreSQL

It's called pine .

If so you can grab it from my University site:
Here It's a ziped AVI file using the Cinepak codec. Yes I know DivX ;-) would have been much better, but I don't have the option available right yet :)

As for hating the embedded quicktime movies (I know the pain) - for $29 you can buy quicktime pro and make use of the little dropdown button that says "Save source as...". Greatest feature of it :)

It's a recipe including, among other things, 2 1/2 oz. baking soda, and a cup of fresh lemon juice. Swedish Lemon Angels
Also see some pictures.

There is a website at http://www.geophys.washington.edu/Space/SpaceModel /M2P2/ that holds much more technical information. The "Technical Report Phase I" appears to be broken, but there is a white paper here.

There is a website at http://www.geophys.washington.edu/Space/SpaceModel /M2P2/ that holds much more technical information. The "Technical Report Phase I" appears to be broken, but there is a white paper here.

Regarding the electrical-engineering project, where it says:

Since the shift registers only store the data, a start bit and stop bit have to be separately slipped into the communication stream. The stop bit can be sent by clocking in an extra 0 from the shift register. The start bit will most likely be handle by the PAL and perhaps a one-shot, however, this aspect of the design has not been completed yet.

This can be implemented very easily. You can use the first bit of the data transmitted from the shift register as the start bit simply by insuring that it is a '0'. Then, you have seven bits to encode whatever you want to encode (remembering that it will be shifted by one bit when it is received), and then just let the line remain high (idle) for two bit times after the transmission stops.

These extra bit times can be handled in the same way that the clock signal is divided down between the D flip-flop and the shift-register clock. Obviously, there needs to be a 10+ divider in there somewhere to give enough time to transmit the sample.

These popped up with a trip to Google:

Student's electrial engineering project, includes schematic (scanner + RS232 interface)

And another.

Can't be too hard to do anyway; just need an IR LED, IR phototransistor positioned to pick up the reflections, clean the signal up into digital and stuff it into a computer for processing.

Or the software way, if you've got a decent enough quality webcam, write some image recognition stuff to read the barcode off frame grabs.

Obviously this will be vulnerable to failure, but for something that collects massive quantities of statistics, such as Ifile, it can be worthwhile.

With Ifile, an early edition stored stats in DBM files, and would do simply massive numbers of increments to entries. On disk, this meant that for a relatively small mail spool, the analysis would take hours.