Slashdot Mirror

The Computer Science department is consistently ranked as one of the top 10 in the United States, and also ranks in the top 10 in several specific CS graduate areas. The department and its faculty and staff are the recipients of numerous honors and awards. The CS department has a wide variety of research areas, including computer networking, and operates the Wisconsin Advanced Internet Laboratory (WAIL), a one of a kind laboratory for network testing and research.

The University of Wisconsin itself is a premier public research University with a yearly budget of $1.7 billion. It ranks number 2 in research spending (and number 1 among public universities), number 2 in number of research doctorates granted, 16 of 39 major academic programs ranked in the NRC top 10, and 35 of 39 major academic programs ranked in the NRC top 25.

There are so many top notch faculty, staff, and students here at the tops of so many fields that it's amazing, from bioinformatics to nuclear engineering, from music to Slavic languages, from space physics to medical physics (including the only freestanding medical physics department in the United States), from medicine (and 3 affiliated hospitals) to literature. The University has a significant commitment to research, expanding and improving its infrastructure, and is continuously embarking on major new building inititives. The city of Madison itself is also a wonderful place to live.

Keep your Potassium chlorate away from your motherboard!
or you may have some explaining to do. :-)

Click here to see what happen when you hit Red Phosphorus

oh and to stop it, you would, naturally, hit the start button.... (brilliant post btw)

better still: "Do you really want to ignite the airbag? Yes No Cancel" :)

post is an honorable variation of this, for those who care.

Enjoy, ALeX

Do you mean a Tualatin core, or the P6 core that is the basis of the Pentium Pro, Pentium II, Pentium III, and Pentium M (and Celeron counterparts)

Well, when I was writing this, I was only thinking of the PIII/Tualatin. You're right about the Pentium M... but it does have some major design changes. For example, up to the PIII, the core uses micro-ops (uops). According to this, the Pentium M uses macro-ops. This says so too, even though they don't specifically call it a macro-op. I tend to think of the Pentium M as somewhat "loose" implementation of the P6 core.

Here's some advice applicable to your question unlike the other 98% of unrelated opinions already posted:

OCW will get you started on the right foot, but I would recommend finding a suitable research field to apply those skills to.

Some of the best programmers I've worked with have been in a research lab at my alma mater's comp sci dept. And several of these grad students came from a non-computer science background such as physics, chemistry, genetics, etc. Once they found an immediate application for their programming skills, their skills progressed at an amazing rate. This does not mean that all science-based individuals are good programmers, but the purpose and foundation for learning (and learning properly) is already there.

So my advice? Use the internet to start researching some of the better computer science schools research groups and see if there is anything out there you like. Conjoining your medical background with a CS focus might lead to neuro/bio/medical -informatics, or maybe computational biology. You can also go into simulation, such as scientific visualization of specific area of medical research or even go into computer graphics. There are literally thousands of specific areas to look into.

Here's on example: Sticking with the foundation learned in OCW and applying proper programming techniques (such as learned in "Effective C++" by Scott Meyers) to fields such as computer graphics can be a great way to get immersed in the field - as long as you have an end application to apply your skills. So picking up a project like applying computer graphic visualization and simulation to a medical process or generating physical-based character animation can be extremely beneficial. You'll obviously have to learn computer graphics programming somewhere along the way, but that that'll just sharpen both your math skills and visual sense, along with having another great tool under your belt.

Go research some of the current projects going on at research labs at the top computer science schools. Here are some suggestions for you to check out:

And of course not all computer science research falls under the header of the computer science department. Research medical departments doing interdisciplinary research with both engineering and computer science.

Almost all research labs have papers of their work (even their most recent) avaialble in PDF format. Download some of the earlier papers to get a feel for the research focus and try to find something that interests you. Try to implement the same techniques and algorithms using your skills. This will bea great way for you to realize what you still need to learn and get a great foundation in a new area of research.

But always keep in mind that proper programming is of utmost importance. So while your trying to leanr a new area of research by applying your skills, also focus on the studying from the better programming books out there that teach you how to become a better programmer. Go on amazon for suggestions. Start with looking up my previous suggestion and go from there.

Good luck, and sorry about all of the hundreds of wasted postings coming from IT people bitching about their lack of applicable skills.

Martin

Why not try your hand at biomedical engineering. It would may work well you your existing experience in medicine, and there is probably a software side to it if you insist on working with computers.

Now plutonium as a safe substance to eat? well maybe today, or next month, but that same piece will decay, and the left over bits or new matter will then decay to something else which will give up badass gamma rays after 9 years.

It's "safe" to eat, because your body can't digest it. It just passes through and give you the radioactive shits. My favorite link on the subject is the most infuriating to environmentalists.

Marco Polo wanted to tap into the exotic goods that he could bring back to Europe from Asia and Columbus was trying to find a quicker route to the East Indies so the spice trade could move faster.

That's what you may have been taught in school, but it was not actually the case. While improved trade between Asia and Europe was a happy coincidental result of Marco Polo's journey, it was not the primary cause. Marco Polo traveled to Asia in search of a legendary Christian kingdom, the land of Prestor John. He would then enlist their military support against the onslaught of the heathen Muslims.

He didn't find Prestor John's kingdom, but the improved Asia-Europe trade his journey spurred gave the European economy the kick in the shorts it needed to get out of the post-High Middle Ages doldrums, and that was probably just as effective at stemming the Muslim threat.

Yeah, I didn't know that either until I took an honors course in the history of apocalyptic cults at Virginia Tech.

It'll most likely be slower per clock cycle.

Yes, I agree. My guess is that they're trying to achieve higher absolute performance. What surprises me is that this is still considered a P4 core, since adding pipeline stages (even 1 stage) is a very non-trivial task.

This'll also kill the benefits of reduced power consumption of 90 nm technology (increase in area from the additional pipeline registers, increase in frequency), which is important in server design. An argument about the benefits of having a trace cache is the reduction in power consumption since you can remove some decoders (x86 decoders are horribly complex, yet having enough to feed the rest of the processor is critical for high performance). The P4 only has one x86 decoder (plus the uROM) and is able to perform well in general.

It'll be interesting to see the power consumption numbers (average and max) as well as the die size. Also, I wonder how AMD's CPU rating system will change as a result of this.

I love my Alma Mater.

Very informative comment off of SciScoop by RickyJames

Kulcinski and FTI have presented a graduate course entitled "Resources From Space" in 1996, 1997, 1999 and 2001, taught by a variety of instructors including Harrison Schmitt. Each of these have extensive notes and pdf files online, and probably are the best sources for data on the Internet on the topic of using lunar resources for energy. These two guys are the leading proponents of helium-3 use; if anybody is going to make a good case for this, it's them.

The key factor is the dilute nature of the helium-3 in the lunar regolith, and all the other stuff that's mixed in there with it. Schmitt estimates on page 19 of lecture 10 in the 2001 course that the He3 abundance is "up to 30 ppb" or 30 parts-per-Billion-with-a-B in the top 10 feet of lunar soil. Also embedded in the lunar soil is 30-180 parts-per-Million-with-an-M of hydrogen and 30 parts-per-Million-with-an-M of normal helium or He2.

So, say you want a ton of helium-3 from the Moon. You've only got to do two things.

Step one, heat up 1,000,000,000 / 30 = 33,333,333 tons of lunar soil. That's a lot of dirt and a lot of heat. All of the hydrogen and helium gas in the soil is baked off and captured. You get 2001 tons of hydrogen and helium - 1000 tons of hydrogen gas, 1000 tons of helium gas, and one ton of helium-3 gas.

Step two, you've got to separate the ton of helium-3 you want to ship back to Earth from the 2000 tons of normal helium and hydrogen you don't. Getting the hydrogen out is relatively easy; just combine it with lunar oxygen to make water. Try to avoid a titanic explosion in the process. Separating that one-in-a-thousand helium atom you want from the helium that's left, though, is hard. It's the same problem faced with the Manhattan Project people trying to separate the U-235 uranium atoms that could make a bomb from the U-238 uranium atoms that couldn't. You'd have to recreate wartime Oak Ridge isotope separation plants on the moon - and those aren't going to be built from lunar material, I assure you.

As a point of interest, coal strip mines in the West get out 25 tons of coal for ever manhour of labor used. By this criteria digging up 33 million tons of moondirt per year would take 1.32 million manhours of labor. At 2000 manhours per year, that's a required crew of 660 miners for one ton of He3 per year.

You say we need 30 tons of He3 per year - that's the equivalent of 20,000 miners moving as much moondust around as the entire U.S. coal mining industry mines in coal in a year. I know, I know - the situation isn't comparable, NASA would create a super-automated unmanned bulldozer fleet, etc. etc. Running on what? Costing what? Getting to the moon how? None of these are impossible factors, only impractical ones.

Then, there's the question if a fusion reactor could ever be built that would use helium-3. Sure, it sounds good. But we haven't even built a deuterium fusion reactor yet, and the physics of that is a LOT easier than getting a helium-3 reactor to work. In the 1950s fission reactors were going to be cheap and simple, too. Remember "electricity too cheap to meter"?

I dunno, Sylvia. It sure sounds good to say, here comes this shuttle with a one ton can of helium-3 on board back from space that's landing on the runway to solve all of our problems (for two weeks - you need 30 tons per year, remember?), wave the flag and strike up the band. But when you look at what it takes in infrastructure to get that helium in the can on the moon, and what kind of infrastructure you're going to pour it into once the can is offloaded and the band's gone home, well, it's just not quite so attractive to investors. Especially as long as they kn

Very informative comment off of SciScoop by RickyJames

Kulcinski and FTI have presented a graduate course entitled "Resources From Space" in 1996, 1997, 1999 and 2001, taught by a variety of instructors including Harrison Schmitt. Each of these have extensive notes and pdf files online, and probably are the best sources for data on the Internet on the topic of using lunar resources for energy. These two guys are the leading proponents of helium-3 use; if anybody is going to make a good case for this, it's them.

The key factor is the dilute nature of the helium-3 in the lunar regolith, and all the other stuff that's mixed in there with it. Schmitt estimates on page 19 of lecture 10 in the 2001 course that the He3 abundance is "up to 30 ppb" or 30 parts-per-Billion-with-a-B in the top 10 feet of lunar soil. Also embedded in the lunar soil is 30-180 parts-per-Million-with-an-M of hydrogen and 30 parts-per-Million-with-an-M of normal helium or He2.

So, say you want a ton of helium-3 from the Moon. You've only got to do two things.

Step one, heat up 1,000,000,000 / 30 = 33,333,333 tons of lunar soil. That's a lot of dirt and a lot of heat. All of the hydrogen and helium gas in the soil is baked off and captured. You get 2001 tons of hydrogen and helium - 1000 tons of hydrogen gas, 1000 tons of helium gas, and one ton of helium-3 gas.

Step two, you've got to separate the ton of helium-3 you want to ship back to Earth from the 2000 tons of normal helium and hydrogen you don't. Getting the hydrogen out is relatively easy; just combine it with lunar oxygen to make water. Try to avoid a titanic explosion in the process. Separating that one-in-a-thousand helium atom you want from the helium that's left, though, is hard. It's the same problem faced with the Manhattan Project people trying to separate the U-235 uranium atoms that could make a bomb from the U-238 uranium atoms that couldn't. You'd have to recreate wartime Oak Ridge isotope separation plants on the moon - and those aren't going to be built from lunar material, I assure you.

As a point of interest, coal strip mines in the West get out 25 tons of coal for ever manhour of labor used. By this criteria digging up 33 million tons of moondirt per year would take 1.32 million manhours of labor. At 2000 manhours per year, that's a required crew of 660 miners for one ton of He3 per year.

You say we need 30 tons of He3 per year - that's the equivalent of 20,000 miners moving as much moondust around as the entire U.S. coal mining industry mines in coal in a year. I know, I know - the situation isn't comparable, NASA would create a super-automated unmanned bulldozer fleet, etc. etc. Running on what? Costing what? Getting to the moon how? None of these are impossible factors, only impractical ones.

Then, there's the question if a fusion reactor could ever be built that would use helium-3. Sure, it sounds good. But we haven't even built a deuterium fusion reactor yet, and the physics of that is a LOT easier than getting a helium-3 reactor to work. In the 1950s fission reactors were going to be cheap and simple, too. Remember "electricity too cheap to meter"?

I dunno, Sylvia. It sure sounds good to say, here comes this shuttle with a one ton can of helium-3 on board back from space that's landing on the runway to solve all of our problems (for two weeks - you need 30 tons per year, remember?), wave the flag and strike up the band. But when you look at what it takes in infrastructure to get that helium in the can on the moon, and what kind of infrastructure you're going to pour it into once the can is offloaded and the band's gone home, well, it's just not quite so attractive to investors. Especially as long as they kn

Very informative comment off of SciScoop by RickyJames

Kulcinski and FTI have presented a graduate course entitled "Resources From Space" in 1996, 1997, 1999 and 2001, taught by a variety of instructors including Harrison Schmitt. Each of these have extensive notes and pdf files online, and probably are the best sources for data on the Internet on the topic of using lunar resources for energy. These two guys are the leading proponents of helium-3 use; if anybody is going to make a good case for this, it's them.

The key factor is the dilute nature of the helium-3 in the lunar regolith, and all the other stuff that's mixed in there with it. Schmitt estimates on page 19 of lecture 10 in the 2001 course that the He3 abundance is "up to 30 ppb" or 30 parts-per-Billion-with-a-B in the top 10 feet of lunar soil. Also embedded in the lunar soil is 30-180 parts-per-Million-with-an-M of hydrogen and 30 parts-per-Million-with-an-M of normal helium or He2.

So, say you want a ton of helium-3 from the Moon. You've only got to do two things.

Step one, heat up 1,000,000,000 / 30 = 33,333,333 tons of lunar soil. That's a lot of dirt and a lot of heat. All of the hydrogen and helium gas in the soil is baked off and captured. You get 2001 tons of hydrogen and helium - 1000 tons of hydrogen gas, 1000 tons of helium gas, and one ton of helium-3 gas.

Step two, you've got to separate the ton of helium-3 you want to ship back to Earth from the 2000 tons of normal helium and hydrogen you don't. Getting the hydrogen out is relatively easy; just combine it with lunar oxygen to make water. Try to avoid a titanic explosion in the process. Separating that one-in-a-thousand helium atom you want from the helium that's left, though, is hard. It's the same problem faced with the Manhattan Project people trying to separate the U-235 uranium atoms that could make a bomb from the U-238 uranium atoms that couldn't. You'd have to recreate wartime Oak Ridge isotope separation plants on the moon - and those aren't going to be built from lunar material, I assure you.

As a point of interest, coal strip mines in the West get out 25 tons of coal for ever manhour of labor used. By this criteria digging up 33 million tons of moondirt per year would take 1.32 million manhours of labor. At 2000 manhours per year, that's a required crew of 660 miners for one ton of He3 per year.

You say we need 30 tons of He3 per year - that's the equivalent of 20,000 miners moving as much moondust around as the entire U.S. coal mining industry mines in coal in a year. I know, I know - the situation isn't comparable, NASA would create a super-automated unmanned bulldozer fleet, etc. etc. Running on what? Costing what? Getting to the moon how? None of these are impossible factors, only impractical ones.

Then, there's the question if a fusion reactor could ever be built that would use helium-3. Sure, it sounds good. But we haven't even built a deuterium fusion reactor yet, and the physics of that is a LOT easier than getting a helium-3 reactor to work. In the 1950s fission reactors were going to be cheap and simple, too. Remember "electricity too cheap to meter"?

I dunno, Sylvia. It sure sounds good to say, here comes this shuttle with a one ton can of helium-3 on board back from space that's landing on the runway to solve all of our problems (for two weeks - you need 30 tons per year, remember?), wave the flag and strike up the band. But when you look at what it takes in infrastructure to get that helium in the can on the moon, and what kind of infrastructure you're going to pour it into once the can is offloaded and the band's gone home, well, it's just not quite so attractive to investors. Especially as long as they kn

Very informative comment off of SciScoop by RickyJames

Kulcinski and FTI have presented a graduate course entitled "Resources From Space" in 1996, 1997, 1999 and 2001, taught by a variety of instructors including Harrison Schmitt. Each of these have extensive notes and pdf files online, and probably are the best sources for data on the Internet on the topic of using lunar resources for energy. These two guys are the leading proponents of helium-3 use; if anybody is going to make a good case for this, it's them.

The key factor is the dilute nature of the helium-3 in the lunar regolith, and all the other stuff that's mixed in there with it. Schmitt estimates on page 19 of lecture 10 in the 2001 course that the He3 abundance is "up to 30 ppb" or 30 parts-per-Billion-with-a-B in the top 10 feet of lunar soil. Also embedded in the lunar soil is 30-180 parts-per-Million-with-an-M of hydrogen and 30 parts-per-Million-with-an-M of normal helium or He2.

So, say you want a ton of helium-3 from the Moon. You've only got to do two things.

Step one, heat up 1,000,000,000 / 30 = 33,333,333 tons of lunar soil. That's a lot of dirt and a lot of heat. All of the hydrogen and helium gas in the soil is baked off and captured. You get 2001 tons of hydrogen and helium - 1000 tons of hydrogen gas, 1000 tons of helium gas, and one ton of helium-3 gas.

Step two, you've got to separate the ton of helium-3 you want to ship back to Earth from the 2000 tons of normal helium and hydrogen you don't. Getting the hydrogen out is relatively easy; just combine it with lunar oxygen to make water. Try to avoid a titanic explosion in the process. Separating that one-in-a-thousand helium atom you want from the helium that's left, though, is hard. It's the same problem faced with the Manhattan Project people trying to separate the U-235 uranium atoms that could make a bomb from the U-238 uranium atoms that couldn't. You'd have to recreate wartime Oak Ridge isotope separation plants on the moon - and those aren't going to be built from lunar material, I assure you.

As a point of interest, coal strip mines in the West get out 25 tons of coal for ever manhour of labor used. By this criteria digging up 33 million tons of moondirt per year would take 1.32 million manhours of labor. At 2000 manhours per year, that's a required crew of 660 miners for one ton of He3 per year.

You say we need 30 tons of He3 per year - that's the equivalent of 20,000 miners moving as much moondust around as the entire U.S. coal mining industry mines in coal in a year. I know, I know - the situation isn't comparable, NASA would create a super-automated unmanned bulldozer fleet, etc. etc. Running on what? Costing what? Getting to the moon how? None of these are impossible factors, only impractical ones.

Then, there's the question if a fusion reactor could ever be built that would use helium-3. Sure, it sounds good. But we haven't even built a deuterium fusion reactor yet, and the physics of that is a LOT easier than getting a helium-3 reactor to work. In the 1950s fission reactors were going to be cheap and simple, too. Remember "electricity too cheap to meter"?

I dunno, Sylvia. It sure sounds good to say, here comes this shuttle with a one ton can of helium-3 on board back from space that's landing on the runway to solve all of our problems (for two weeks - you need 30 tons per year, remember?), wave the flag and strike up the band. But when you look at what it takes in infrastructure to get that helium in the can on the moon, and what kind of infrastructure you're going to pour it into once the can is offloaded and the band's gone home, well, it's just not quite so attractive to investors. Especially as long as they kn

Fusion generators at this moment require that a very strong magnetic field be in place to keep the plasma from touching the walls of the reactor, thereby cooling the plasma (and possibly damaging the reactor), thereby stoping the reaction. .

There is also Inertial Electrostatic Confinement IECwhich doesn't require the huge magnetic fields.

Something like IEC will most likely be used for he3 fusion reactors.

Fusion generators at this moment require that a very strong magnetic field be in place to keep the plasma from touching the walls of the reactor, thereby cooling the plasma (and possibly damaging the reactor), thereby stoping the reaction. .

There is also Inertial Electrostatic Confinement IECwhich doesn't require the huge magnetic fields.

Something like IEC will most likely be used for he3 fusion reactors.

This is more or less the basis for the course NEEP 533 which is offered through the department of nuclear engineering at UW Madison. Although I have yet to take it (I am only a lowly freshman), the notes from 2001 are available for download. Enjoy.

I don't claim to know how much effort has really been put into He-3 fusion research, given how scarce He-3 is on Earth. The U Wisconsin guys seem to think it's an easier problem than traditional fusion research has tried to tackle (based on this document).

I'm not sure why this warrants an article now, seeing that no real developments on the topic have happened in a long time...

If just the US can run on "one space shuttle load" per year of this astrofuel, then what about more densely populated countries, like China or Japan?

What political repercussions would result if a US president pulled crap like OPEC does (threatening embargoes, being real bastards with prices, etc;) today if the US were to follow through with a plan like this?

What will mining the moon do to things like tides here on Earth? (shifting mass like that on the surface/possibly expelling it into space -which I hope won't be the case, that would be really bad-)

Do you honestly think this will remove our dependence on fossil fuel completely? Look at your computer. It's prolly got a lot of plastic in, on, and around it. Same with probably the rest of your room. Multiply that by a couple/few billion and you get the idea. Also, with the demand for plastic products growing ever more insistent, by the time (if) we get to enact a feasible plan for mining the moon, how much oil will be required to make non-energy products?

How greatly do you think this will change civilization as we know it? We'll still have electricity, the only difference would prolly be that we're mining it from the moon, from a consumer standpoint, that is. What humanitarian /technology/quality-of-life improvements do you think we, as people in a social/civilization context will see as a direct result of mining energy from the moon?

Call me a pessimist bastard who says the glass is half empty. I don't necessarily see THIS glass as half empty, but I don't see it as half full either. I'd say I see it as just another damn glass with some damn water in it. If we get our energy from the moon, whoopty-friggin'-do, we'll be getting it from the moon, we'll still pay for it. We'll still have electricity. Just be sure to inform me when they find a way to make something like plastic out of something other than oil (for instance polymerizing something more readily available, say, water. ) THEN will I be more enthusiastic.

You might find this link interesting. Just because you see the characters on Back to the Future in rad suits, doesn't mean that's how they actually handle plutonium.

You'll love this guy. He still hasn't taken me up on my "nuclear challenge". I wonder why? ;-)

Reminds me of this nuclear challenge. During the debate over RTGs in the Cassini probe, Dr. Bernard Cohen challenged Ralph Nader to eat as much caffeine as he would plutonium. Eating a gram of caffeine would kill you fairly quickly.

Of course, the energy expended in retrieving the helium-3 would negate any benefit from fusing it.

Manned space flight is a solution searching desperately for a problem. Please solve it with your own cash. We have better uses for the money here on Earth.

I don't know if you're just regurgitating a pre-formatted polemic there, but you are laboring under the misunderstanding that I'm in favor of manned space flight.

Just to make my position clear: I see this announcement as a boondoggle for the Military-Industrial complex. I'm in favor of non-manned space missions and pure science which obtains information and knowledge. I'm also in favor of spending a hell of a lot more money (obtained by ramping up taxes on anyone making more than $80,000 per annum) on schools, welfare and healthcare.

There's an stream of an interview with Bruce Gagnon and James Van Allen (of Van Allen Belt fame) on DemocracyNOW! which raises some of my concerns.

Thanks in any event for your response above.

Sure, it easy to compare VeriSign with the Vogons, but in all fairness, the Sirius Cybernetics Corporation fits them better.

Not to mention they're a bunch of mindless jerks who will be the first against the wall when the revolution comes.

For a lot of problems, having a fast network interconnect between the computation nodes is essential to getting good performance. The interconnects in the lab may not be enough.

That said, various software packages already exist to do opportunistic supercomputing using the spare resources in machines suitable for use in a lab -- Condor is one such package. We have it deployed in our computing labs, and several research groups in our department make use of it.

Cheers,

David

Thanks for the picture. I mirrored it for you at http://www.cs.wisc.edu/~stefan/mars-hires.jpg

That should survive any slashdotting we can throw at it.

See this paper. I remember reading the original document in (CACM IIRC) and was pleased to see it updated showing just how far "forward" we've come.

This reminds me of this picture. It's from the Viking-1 lander and shows the effects of duststorms.

I had always imagined the storms to be like thick fog on Earth, but it seems you can still see clearly to the horizon. I does affect light levels a bit but likely not enought to prevent a lander from getting some charge.

(The image has had it's contrast enhanced)

[1] Albedo of the Earth is about 0.3. Earth receives about 1360 W/m^2 of disc, or 340 W/m^2 of surface; roughly 30% is reflected, the rest is absorbed. The radiation from a blackbody is 5.67 * 10^(-8) W/m^2/K^4, so:
340 W/m^2 * 0.7 = 5.67e-8 W/m^2/K^4 T^4
T^4 = (340 * 0.7 / 5.67e-8) K^4
T^4 = 4.1975e+09 K^4 --> T ~= 255 K.

Problem with that is that it assumes the same "code density".

Strictly speaking, yes. Of course, while that might mean that MySQL was rated too highly (if it had a lower code density), it might also mean that MySQL's quality was underrated! (If it had a higher code density). Of course, since MySQL is free/libre/open sores, it can be examined to determine whether the former or latter is more probable.

I will point out, though, that the findings are reasonably consistent with a more emperical test, the University of Wisconsin's fuzz tests, which stress-tested standard Unix utilities on several systems, including GNU, and found that the GNU code was much more solid and robust overall.

I'm just saying that I wouldn't take any statistic that is derived using "lines of code" as a variable as a serious, hard number.

Absolutely not. On the other hand, it's somewhat suggestive. And a error rate six times higher is hard to explain purely as a matter of code density. Or much of anything else, for that matter. And it's consistent with other studies. But I agree that anything which mentions "lines of code" should be taken with a huge grain of salt.

Kudos if that's your lady, dude.

The wires are such a mess that they would be considered a clear safety hazard by most peoples standards. I was in Shanghai (one of the most advanced cities in china) and I took some photos of both how low the wires were (as low at 4 feet off the ground!) and the over head rats nest . There was worse, I just didn't have my camera at the time.

The wires are such a mess that they would be considered a clear safety hazard by most peoples standards. I was in Shanghai (one of the most advanced cities in china) and I took some photos of both how low the wires were (as low at 4 feet off the ground!) and the over head rats nest . There was worse, I just didn't have my camera at the time.

Anedotally: none of the iPods in my office have died. One of my coworkers ordered a 30 GB iPod two days before Apple revealed the 40 GB. He called to complain, but there was no reason to - they readily agreed to ship the 40 to him with an RMA label for the 30. Another coworker sent his back only days after getting it because it wouldn't turn on. Apple obliginly let him send it back, even though I, and other coworkers, had found instructions on how to get your iPod up and running when you let the battery drain too far. Two days later, the iPod was back, with a full charge, and instructions on how not to do it again (nevermind the fact that he did).

Non-anecdotal: Check this out. Let's then go back to the original Cnet coverage of this on November 26. The Cnet article also mentions the beginning of Apple's policy, which began before the Neistats video appeared.

Completely biased: The Neistats are media whores who use poor grammar (it's "irreplacable," not "unreplacable") and they are simply looking for some attention.

Looks like you gave them some.

So, tell us again: who was played by whom?

This "typical Mac person" is going to go finish compiling KDE on his iBook now. Y'all come back now, y'hear?

"Jesus, I cannot BELIEVE you guys. In good faith, I put the video back on the basis of the email you sent me, hoping that at least some people would click on the mirror link at at least get the truth, and information about how to replace the battery. Instead, you removed the mirror link entirely, used the bandwidth and resources that I was providing you exclusively on your front page, AGAIN without providing ANY information whatsoever about how users can solve this problem, or the fact that Apple now has an official $99 battery replacement, and on top of it all, put ThruPort's banner on the front page! I've now served 91,629 downloads for you, for over 0.6 terabytes of data transfer. What the f*** is you guys' problem? I guess that fact that you are liars shouldn't surprise me, since that's exactly what your whole site and the video is. Have fun with it, and whatever f***ed up satisfaction you get from having as many people as possible see your video, and not even wanting to tell people that there is a solution."

Read the rest here

1. My iPod also had the battery die early and out of warranty
2. I contacted Apple far before the $99 replacement offer
3. Apple replaced the battery. In short, I just plain don't believe the Neistat's story. Yes I've known people whose battery has died, and NONE of us have been told to get a new iPod. We had them replaced, by apple, for substantially less than the cost of a new iPod. I suspect the Neistat's are either lying or attempting to take advantage of an utterly atypical customer experience for a bit of showmanship. Apple's customer service has made me all the more likely to buy a mac, and soon.

Read about the Neistat brother's refusal to point out Apple's true replacement policy until they had no other choice. Finally after more than a month the link is there to Apple's replacement program. Their site wasn't about information, it was about being drama queens.

In any case, whatever you believe or don't about batteries and how long they should/shouldn't last, all battery tech is a tradeoff between weight, size, capacity, cycle life, total life, storage life, charge time, etc.

Read Batteries in a portable world with some simple explanations of the chemistry in batteries. After seeing some of the crap about battery life thrown about here, it's eye opening to read the truth.

I just got a couple of these joysticks from ebay, and am going to build an adapter so I can use them with MAME. I found two circuits on the net for this purpose:

This link has a wealth of information on older game controller hardware.

This one has another (perhaps simpler) circuit design, with diagrams in postscript format. (Use gsview to view them on Windows.)

What's so bad about a harmless generic-MIPS emulator?

That's why there are thousands of people around the world walking around with plutonium powering their ticker? Not to mention the various RTGs used in industry and scientific applications that require long lived batteries. I actually checked the regs at one point, and they state that a sealed alpha or beta emitter may be sold in consumer devices as long as they don't emit more than a small amount of radiation (0.03 rads IIRC). It still requires government approval, but if you get the public excited about it, the government will cave.

people ALMOST NEVER pay attention to any of those warnings

If it's sealed in lead, it doesn't matter all that much, does it? Besides, I've got it figured out. Read my post here on the best way to handle the economics. Remember, unlike other batteries, you want the power source back!

In ths era, when our government puts radiometers at our borders to detect small quantities of radioactive materials, materials that could be used to create dirty bombs, you'd have to be out of your mind to think that giving such materials to Joe Average will EVER fly. What the HECK are you thinking?

I'm thinking that it's time to change it. First I'll power their cell phone indefinitely. Then their laptop. Then! The WORLD! BWHAHAHAHAHA!!!!

Errmm... yeah. Honestly, every merchant ship on the waters should be powered by a self contained reactor. Airplanes could use the electricity to add significant power and fuel saving to their engines. Individual towns could have their own tiny reactor that powers themselves and no one else. No more grid outages! No more brown outs!

The one thing I haven't figured out is cars. Too much energy for an SRG, too little for a reactor. (Besides the fact that I don't exactly feel safe giving private individuals fissionable materials. Sealed isotopes are one thing. Fissionables are another.) Some people would say that we could just use batteries, but I haven't yet seen a battery stack with the necessary power density. It's a problem. :-/

1. Since long before this. 3rd party offers iPod battery replacements and replacement services (typically $50 for battery, $80 for battery + service). There were many rumors of an Apple-provided solution.
2. November 14th: Apple offers a battery replacement policy for $99.
3. November 20th: the brothers registered the domain name ipodsdirtysecret.com.
4. November 21st: Apple offers a AppleCare protection for iPod. ($59 for 2 years).
5. November 23rd: Brothers finish editing video claiming that the iPod battery is not replaceable and post it to the internet.
6. November 24th: Mac sites and Slashdot pick up the story
7. November 25th: The brothers promise to put a link to the battery replacement and AppleCare policy in exchange for bandwidth.
8. November 27th: .7 terabytes later and after not fulfilling their side of the promise, U Wisc pulls the mirror and the brothers give an interview to MacDirectory trying to find another person to dupe.

Since their attempt to "stick it to the Man" occurred after a program was in place. I just have to add that I can only hope for the time machine the "Man" obviously must have be able to put a warrantee in place in response to a video that didn't even exist yet.

1. What date the support messages were recorded and were they actual recordings?
2. What date the filming occurred?
3. If the brother's purchased a used out-of-warrantee iPod from someone.
4. What time the brothers fubar'd their iPod battery swap (too cheap to pay $30 I guess).

And if anyone is interested in the truth...you may be interested to know that I offered to mirror their video after their original webhost apparently pulled out, with ONE condition: that they link to, or otherwise inform users about, Apple's official $99 iPod battery replacement, since the video, as it stands, is incorrect: the iPod's battery is replaceable, and, on top of it, there's an official Apple program for $99 (not to mention third party options).

They agreed to provide this information, and said they had no problem telling users how to solve the problem. I, in turn, provided webspace and bandwidth for them. The bottom line: after two days of lies and false starts, and milking my institution's generosity by providing almost 100,000 downloads and 0.7 terabytes of data transfer, they NEVER posted any information about how to solve the problem that they promised to post. Their agenda seems clear, and that's sensationalism, melodrama, and attention. The full email exchange is here:

http://das.doit.wisc.edu/neistatsdirtysecret.txt

The replacement programme may not have existed at the time it was made (who knows), but it was announced and publicised before the video was ever put on the net.

Turns out these guys are not even remotely interested in solving the problem. They're in it for the publicity.

Here's the email exchanges that show what these guys really care about

Turns out these guys are not even remotely interested in solving the problem. They're in it for the publicity.

The inciminating email exchanges that prove it.

Also...

http://depot.info.apple.com/ipod/
(Official Apple iPod battery replacement for $99)
http://www.ipodbattery.com/ ($49)
http://pdasmart.com/ipodpartscenter.htm ($69)

For example, I have a program called autopoem (written by Bill Sethares) loosely based on an idea from Shannon's original paper on information theory.

Suppose you took all the words in the English language and calculated how often the character "s" is followed by the character "t", the character "e", and so on. You'd end with a table of transition probabilities that showed how often each letter is followed by any other letter (or punctuation mark or space) and starting with a single seed letter you could generate "english-like" words randomly. The output using the probability that a single letter is followed by another letter doesn't actually resemble English much, nor does the output using probabilities based on two letter combinations (how often is "th" followed by "e", by "a", and so on) but by the time you get to 3 letter combinations, (how often is "the" followed by "a" or by "s") the output starts to look a lot like "twas brillig and the slithy toves", like ye olde englishe with very creative spelling.

The scheme I described above is difficult to implement in practice, because the table of probabilities gets big fast as the number of letters used to determine the next letter gets longer. Autopoem uses a particular text as a source and instead of generating a table of probabilities it scans the text looking for the next of the letter sequence, say "the", and then selects whatever letter or punctuation mark comes next, say "a", then it continues scanning until it finds the next occurrence of "hea", and selects the following letter, and so on. the longer the sequence of letters, the more likely it is that whole words or phrases from the original text will appear in the output. An alternative version, requiring a reasonably long text, applies the same principle on the word level, how often is the word "red" followed by the word "hat" or "dog" or so on.

Here's some autopoem output:

Your strip of entirely
tired witches scarecrow me at night
That reached the next
He witches at and glow in a cruel head
Done behind the mark

Nothing but the Land of blue
And the green wizard answer with sharp teeth

(anyone care to guess the source text?)

Other ideas/algorithms/programs that fall into the same genre are dilbert's corporate values generator (now defunct?), eliza (especially when she interacts with zippy), madlibs (I don't know of a computer application), scott reynen's poetry and prose generators, rob malda's poetry generator (currently offline) & googlism.

Any suggestions or links to related programs would be greatly appreciated.

I took a class called "Resources From Space" at University of Wisconsin, Madison, in 1998. It was taught by, among others, Harrison "Jack" Schmitt, who was the only scientist and last man on the moon (Apollo 17 - he was a geologist). He's now a fusion researcher and teaches this class along with other professors from geology, economics, physics, and nuclear engineers from the fusion technology institute at UW.

The final impression left with me from that class was that, back in 1998, if we were to start up an initiative to mine the moon we would have to raise $215 billion and not see any return until the year 2015 (our focus was on He3, but I think this'll apply to most any moon mining operation). That's essentially a 20 year investment with huge risk, so finding either public or private funding to help launch the operation was the biggest obstacle. Technology was also obviouisly an issue, but the mantra "You can always count on technology to catch up to you" was definitely enforced since most of the profs were fusion researchers.

Also, back then there was little competition in the public eye. My professors were aware that China was ahead of us in the push since they had government funding, but the competition existed only within a few small, scientific circles. No public awareness at all. We were looking at long-term energy-crisis solution, and this was a feasible answer. Our hopes may have been lofty, yet the projections realistic, at the time given the current sentiment. Currently there may be more eagerness by potential investors to get involved, but I'm unaware of a project of these proportions of both scale and risk that's been executed in the present day.

BTW, the web site for the class (last offered fall -2001) is a very thorough and exciting read (esp. the Apollo 17 space mission from the second day). It's also a great resource for questions regarding everything involved in mining the moon.

This page shows you how to burn the ISOs using one of three windows based CD burning programs.

Randum Stuff

I know that MIPS assembly can be tough to learn, but never thought CS students would ever get to the point of annoying people on the internet with it...

Oh, err, nevermind...

I thought "SPIM" was a PC program that simulates a generic MIPS architecture processor, used in computer architecture courses in computer science and computer engineering curricula.