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Better yet, use Ghostscript. It's also much lighter and faster than Acrobat Reader, and -- more importantly, and unlike Foxit Reader -- is Free Software.

Not only that, but H.264 (MPEG-4 Part 10, MPEG AVC) is already an open international standard (and, for those who don't know, one of the three mandatory supported codecs for all Blu-ray Disc (BD) and HD-DVD disc players - MPEG-2 and VC-1 are the other two).

While VC-1 (formerly known as VC-9, the Windows Media 9 (WMV3) codec) has been submitted to SMPTE, VC-1 is still not open, and must still go through the patent pool process, which itself is being administered by MPEG LA.

While WMV3 is an arguably good codec, Microsoft worked hard to get it into things like Blu-ray and HD-DVD, so that it could be in a position to get people to use it as the codec for HD content. Since VC-1 is nothing more than Windows Media Video 9, I guess I don't blame them for wanting it to be everywhere. Then all of a sudden, the same content can easily be repurposed for other things, and work extremely well with other Microsoft- and Windows Media-based products. Genius, on their part.

For what it's worth, H.264 is generally seen as similar in quality and functionality (and better in some ways) than VC-1; it's the official next-generation successor to the MPEG family of video codecs.

And no, to reiterate what's been said elsewhere, H.264 is NOT "Apple's codec". Apple uses and promotes it, but it's hardly "Apple's codec". It's an open international standard that is already heavily used in DTV/HDTV and satellite TV, and is being deployed in more industrial and commercial video equipment every day. Why? Because it's open, and didn't stem from one company. (If anything, Apple's involvement was to pressure MPEG LA to actually have reasonable licensing, so that it would also be able to actually be useful to individual users instead of just commercial users and equipment OEMs, which was positive for everyone involved.)

If people are switching to VC-1 instead of H.264, given that it's not open and came 100% out of Microsoft (and indeed is nothing more than WMV3 plus Windows Media Audio (WMA), you can believe Microsoft has likely had involvement. Every VC-1 user is a huge win for Microsoft and a blow to already-open MPEG standards.

You have to remember that the rumour of the irreplaceable batteries started out as pure thruth. It may not be true anymore, but it should never be forgotten that it was true once.

Even at that time, there were many options from third parties to replace the batteries, including some who would do the replacement for you, and many with batteries better than Apple's own (especially on the first generation iPods).

And while it was true that Apple didn't have its own mechanism for replacement, the battery was still covered under warranty, and all but the very earliest iPods wouldn't have even touched a timeframe, statistically, where they'd start needing their batteries replaced. But yes, customers did start noticing they needed new batteries, and Apple responded.

People payed several hundred dollars for these devices and when the batteries failed, Apple first refused to do anything, even for money. When a battery failed after the warranty, the reply from Apple was "Throw your iPod away and buy a new one. We do not sell or replace batteries."

Ahh, talking about iPod's Dirty Secret, huh? I bet they were glad to get someone from Apple on tape saying that for their little childish video. Yeah. That was true. Then. Three years ago. Not only has it not been true since (and again, ignoring all the numerous third party ways to replace the battery), but Apple's price to do the replacement actually went down by about half.

I'm pretty involved in keeping up on Apple news, products, support issues, and so on, since that's, well, kind of my job. I don't remember ANY outcry or publicity about the battery issue until iPod's Dirty Secret.

Except for one little problem.

Apple had already launched its battery replacement service. A fact that the Neistat brothers refused to acknowledge.

It took a lot of customer pressure to convince Apple to change that policy.

Oh? Where is your evidence of this?

I think Apple was actually caught off-guard by people even needing batteries that soon. Frankly, they may have partly expected/hoped that the batteries would last the lifetime of the product for most people, as it was designed to do. When it became apparent that the lifetime of the battery and the lifetime of the product were divergent, Apple introduced its replacement program. Did some customers get screwed in the meantime? I'm sure they did. But it was a vanishingly small number compared to people who were either never affected, or needed batteries replaced AFTER Apple launched its program (and who

And now you are suggesting that people must be fools if they think that the battery of their iPod is irreplaceable?

Yes. I am. Because the batteries have been replaceable directly through Apple for three years, and have been replaceable by literally dozens of other third parties, including several prominent, established, reputable companies in the Apple product business, many of whom offer mail-in and do-it-yourself service, and some of which will even do the replacement overnight.

So anyone who still thinks - or is just beginning to think, now, according to this survey the Guardian mentions - that the iPod battery isn't replaceable is indeed a fool, and quite a large one at that. (And no, they weren't talking about just user-replaceable: the context gives every indication that people think it can't be replaced at all, which is quite astounding. And not only that, they apparently got a response strong enough to be mentioned from people who not only think that it can't be replaced, but think it was intentionally designed to fail after the warranty expires, which is ridiculous given that they're just normal LiIon cells from the likes of Sanyo, Sony, and LG.)

Oh, and I found this, too: http://www.cs.wisc.edu/~jerryzhu/cs540/project/rep ort/webcam/final_report.html

And there might be something good here: http://www.cs.wisc.edu/~jerryzhu/cs540/project/rep ort/webcam/final_report.html but, then, I didn't poke around here too much.

And this one: http://hcvl.hci.iastate.edu/cgi-bin/openEyes.cgi

And....I'm done. That's enough link to keep anyone busy for a while.

Layne

Oh, and I found this, too: http://www.cs.wisc.edu/~jerryzhu/cs540/project/rep ort/webcam/final_report.html

And there might be something good here: http://www.cs.wisc.edu/~jerryzhu/cs540/project/rep ort/webcam/final_report.html but, then, I didn't poke around here too much.

And this one: http://hcvl.hci.iastate.edu/cgi-bin/openEyes.cgi

And....I'm done. That's enough link to keep anyone busy for a while.

Layne

You mean like this?

I didn't sign a "loyalty oath". I got a ticket through the (Democratic) mayor's office of Prairie du Chien, WI. She didn't sign a loyalty oath either.

I also didn't vote for Bush.

Yet, amazingly, there I was. At a Bush event. Taking pictures of the President. Without taking a "loyalty oath".

Do I get a cookie, or a pony, now? I hope it's a pony. I'd really prefer a pony.

Since I cant figure out how to reply to the article I will chuck something here (perhaps someone can help a slashdot noob here). http://www.linux.com/article.pl?sid=05/11/08/19402 10 http://www.cs.wisc.edu/condor/

This is an interesting notion. But how can you compare? The curriculum that students have access to these days is far and away better. Access to Advanced Placement classes is increasing. Case in point is the Wisconsin Advanced Placement Distance Education Consortium WAPDEC. The expectations may not be there from teachers, but the individual drive of the "elite" students should make up for that. The access of current students to technology is much greater today (I believe). These elite students have always been outside of pop culture thus that has no effect on them.

When you are talking about Bell Labs of yester-year, you are talking about some Nobel Laureates. Can you even compare genuis of that level? So... if you think the "go-getters" that made it to the top Labs, such as Bell, back then are your Average Joe that attends public school, you are wrong.

I totally agree with Peter Norvig.

There has been a lot of enthusiasts but also a bunch of stumbling amateurs in AI all around the Semantic Web project, and this has not been a good thing.

They are reinventing the wheel. RDF is nothing more than knowledge representation 101.
Don't forget that Russell & Norvig's book devotes 5 out of its 26 chapters on KR.

And now with the DAML language they are reinventing Prolog interpreters.

From their Website - Why use DAML?
http://www.daml.org/2002/04/why.html

(motherOf subProperty parentOf)
(Mary motherOf Bill)

when stated in DAML, allows you to conclude

(Mary parentOf Bill)

Check this from an introductory course in Prolog
http://www.cs.wisc.edu/~noto/cs540/lecture/14-prol og.html

fatherOf(keith, duane).
motherOf(keith, diana).
adoptedBy(webster, mrPapadapolis).
parentOf(X, Y) :- adoptedBy(X, Y).
parentOf(X, Y) :- fatherOf(X, Y).
parentOf(X, Y) :- motherOf(X, Y).

Given a query, parentOf(keith, X)., Prolog will:

?- parentOf(keith, X).

X = duane ;

X = diana ;

LOL ;-)

I see, maybe two real innovations : URI (Uniform Resource Identifier) and Digital Signatures and Web of Trusts.

Even the best design can be implented sloppily, and Microsoft has made that practice a part of their culture, IMHO. This is why when the guys at wisc.edu did fuzz testing of Windows/NT (and later Windows 2000), they noted [emphasis mine]:

We noted (as a result of our completely random input testing) that any application running on Windows platforms is vulnerable to random input streams generated by any other application running on the same system. This appears to be a flaw in the Win32 message interface.

The fact of the matter is that more people are going to believe a simple quantified statement than an abstract technical discussion; so Sophos is making the argument that will convince the most people, rather than an argument that would convince, say, the more technical folks on Slashdot.

Oh, you want the technical reasons? Okay, here goes my list:

• MacOS/X has a much more stable and mature core Operating System base (Mach). Mach is MUCH older (circa 1985) than the windows NT core (circa 1993), and has been changed less. For example NextStep, released in 1989, was based on Mach, and already did much of what MacOS/X does.
• Mach (the underlying OS) was designed with security in mind. Note however, the Mach layer doesn't define security policy, it just gives you tools with which to implement such policies. That said, if the current MacOS upper layers get the policies wrong, flexible tools are there to fix it. Contrast that with Windows which has serious design flaws in its interprocess communication mechanism.
• The MacOS command-line code, so far, also seems to have a lower bug-density (similar to Linux) in fuzz testing than the MS code, although GUI code is unfortunately sucky in both OS-es.

Look I've seen code break. You haven't. I don't care if you get a team of 30 coders with a combined experience of 900 years to tell me their apps haven't broken. I've seen apps break, and not only when the code's compiled for a later JRE. We've had to develop specific workarounds and re-release stuff due to this. I can't show you because I'm bound by an employment contract and I'm not about to embarass my employer even if I wasn't. That you don't believe me doesn't make an inkling of difference to my life. Enjoy your fantasy.

If you are going to reply at all the first thing I challenge you to do is explain this migration guide by Sun for Java 1.3 to 5.0:
http://java.sun.com/j2se/JM_White_Paper_R6A.pdf ...complete with a whole section on runtime issues

More references. Again not the best. Wish I could show you my good example but see above.
http://forum.java.sun.com/thread.jspa?threadID=731 921&messageID=4212821
http://www.codecomments.com/archive251-2005-5-4986 00.html
http://forum.java.sun.com/thread.jspa?threadID=432 494&messageID=2042086
http://bugs.sun.com/bugdatabase/view_bug.do?bug_id =4783788
http://helpdesk.wisc.edu/page.php?id=2891
http://www.javalobby.org/java/forums/t18329.html
http://bugs.sun.com/bugdatabase/view_bug.do?bug_id =6204839

The above links very clearly show installing the latest JRE is not sufficient to run all your old code. With many Java applications, you can't just remove all older versions of a JRE and upgrade to the latest.

I also recall that if your code is applet based, the tags used to invoke the JRE changed after Microsoft dumped their custom JVM due to the legal action between Sun and MS.

The bottom line is that you're calling anyone who has seen anything break due to a newer JRE a fool and a liar based on your "30 years of experience". I know for a fact that this is false. Your arrogance is astounding and your insistance on this makes me wonder what you've been doing for 30 years since I know of no complex environment where the runtime backward compatibility is so fantastic that you don't need to test a new version to be sure it works for your application.

(Note that microwaves haven't enough energy to ionise the brain like your gamma or X rays do - they work by heating molecules rather than by ripping the electrons off an atom to change the chemical structure.)

The point at which photons become energetic enough to start damaging organic molecules by cutting them to pieces (photoablation) is somewhere in the deep blue range. Photons above that energy level (i.e. at shorter wavelengths) are the dangerous ones, starting with UV and on to X-rays and gamma rays.

Photons below that energy level (from blue to red, infra-red, microwave and radio) can do nothing more than heat them up. That's it.

That's the inconvenient fact which blows all the brain cancer and EM alarmists out of the water. The photons of ordinary visible light have much more energy per photon than do infrared, and infra-red photons are more energetic than microwave photons. Every day we are awash in visible light, and anybody warming up near a campfire is just getting buried in infra-red photons... and yet nobody's screaming about campfires, why?

It isn't about penetration. That's just an issue of location, which affects nothing. All we get out of any interactions with electromagnetic radiation on the long side of visible light, at any depth, is heat -- and we usually get a lot more of that out of the carbon-hydrogen-oxygen combustion which powers us than we do from any radiation. About the only hazard that could come of that is extremely localized heating -- and cell phones aren't masers AFAIK.

Was this some kind of cosmic blast that blew out the space instruments and blasted waves across the extent of the entire Pacific Ocean?

It seems very odd that the same day the Hubble went off-line
(due to a possible 'strike by cosmic radiation' or a 'memory corruption event due to energetic particle bombardment')
that the global satellite imagery went off-line for the entire day ( at http://cimss.ssec.wisc.edu/tropic/tropic.html )( due to a 'power failure that kept it from retrieving images from its memory')
and massive waves caused by a storm more than 3,000 kilometres away washed away homes, hotels and restaurants along the coastline of Central America. The barrage began Sunday the 18th, and the waves weren't beginning to weaken until Tuesday afternoon.

Heavy surf was pounding the Pacific Coast from Chile to California -
A FREAKISHLY POWERFUL storm far off in the South Pacific propelled huge swells to the Americas, causing a surge of waves that battered homes and beachfront businesses from Peru to Mexico.
Several hundred people were evacuated in at least eight countries.
The waves resulted from a particularly intense low
pressure system several hundred miles off New Zealand that caused
hurricane force winds and rare snowfall at sea level. Masses of water were shoved eastward, creating UNUSUALLY big waves when the swells hit the Americas.

http://www.cbc.ca/story/world/national/2006/06/20/ central-america.html

http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2006/06/20/ap/world /mainD8IC743G1.shtml

Add to that sentiment, that there were only one geologist that even went up to the moon... the rest were test pilots and aviation specialists, or had degrees in very different fields from geology. Mind you, the brief survey that Harrison Schmitt performed revealed that a trained eye could find much, much more material.

In fact, here is an interview that Mr. Schmitt did with the Australian Broadcasting Company talking about why we need to go back and do a more extensive survey:

http://www.abc.net.au/7.30/content/2002/s603826.ht m

For a first-person account of the trip to the Moon by this astronaut to go into details about this "field survey", see: http://fti.neep.wisc.edu/neep602/LEC1/trip.html

That Mr. Schmitt has decided to put his money where his mouth is and has formed a lunar mining company should speak volumes over the value that can be obtained from this sort of activity.

There is a great in-depth article here

http://uw.physics.wisc.edu/~himpsel/wires.html ... very fascinating stuff the potential for small scale electronics is just staggering.

i wonder how long before they can mesh nanowires directly to nerve cells... plug me in!

Apple has not, and still does not, get the enterprise.

While Apple has been *extremely slowly* working to provide enterprise services (Apple's enterprise-specific phone support options are extremely improved, particularly the Preferred and Alliance levels), there are other areas that are still sorely lacking. Currently, we use AppleCare Enterprise Help Desk support, and have been fairly satisfied.

Apple does now offer 24x7 and 4 hour on-site service and support plans, and matches fairly well, most of the time, with our other vendors (primarily Dell, Sun, and IBM).

Where we get killed is on any kind of roadmap or planning information.

At Macworld San Francisco 2004, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, which used to be the largest Mac site in the world, talked about what they learned integrating Macs in their enterprise. I've made the presentation available here. I recommend people take a look at it, as it covers other issues as well. Like many organizations, Apple suffered during the late 90s, when it wasn't clear what Apple's direction was, and when Apple's future seemed uncertain. This meant that LLNL went from having 14000 Macs in 1997 to having about half that in 2003. In the meantime, the Windows installed base increased commensurately. (I believe that since then, we've gone to being one of the largest Mac sites outside of Apple, with well over 10000 institutionally-owned Macs, and many Apple server and storage products both deployed centrally and around the campus. Some examples.)

What is one of LLNL's top recommendations for Apple?

Develop a working balance between Apple's needed "confidentiality" and Corporate IT's need of "roadmap" information

This balance, or lack thereof, is also listed as one of their top "difficulties" when working with Apple. And I couldn't agree more.

You touched on some other issues related to software development, integration of OSS components into the OS, acknowledgment of and tracking of bugs, bug fixes being pushed out to next major releases of the operating system (e.g., 10.3.x -> 10.4), and so on. One small victory has been that Apple does now provide semi-detailed information about security updates, and does provide security updates for the previous major version of the OS.

However, the list of deficiencies is much longer. At WWDC, pretty much the only information we get is with regard to software development (and to be fair, that's all the original article actually refers to). We get virtually no information on hardware futures. We don't need to see pictures or know exactly what speed something will be. We want to know where Apple's headed. What form will the Intel servers take? We don't want to find out the DAY they ship. Will they use multiple cores? How many? Which architectures? Will they finally have redundant power supplies? How many drive bays will they have? How many expansion slots, and what kind of expansion? Will the Xserve RAID transition to SATA? Will Apple provide onboard video on the Xserve? Will there be an expansion beyond light-duty servers? How will they integrate into our existing management infrastructure? Will Mac OS X Server make provisions for virtualization of multiple instances of Mac OS X/Mac OS X Server? Where is Apple going with Darwin? What is the EOL schedule for Mac OS X/Mac OS X Server? (Apple still makes NO INFORMATION available about official end-of-life or end-of-support for any versions of Mac OS X or Mac OS X Server. We just have to guess that the previous major version of Mac OS X is what's supported.) How long will PowerPC be supported? This list goes on and on and on and on.

Yes, you can glean and infer some of this stuff unofficially from things happening in th

Apple has not, and still does not, get the enterprise.

While Apple has been *extremely slowly* working to provide enterprise services (Apple's enterprise-specific phone support options are extremely improved, particularly the Preferred and Alliance levels), there are other areas that are still sorely lacking. Currently, we use AppleCare Enterprise Help Desk support, and have been fairly satisfied.

Apple does now offer 24x7 and 4 hour on-site service and support plans, and matches fairly well, most of the time, with our other vendors (primarily Dell, Sun, and IBM).

Where we get killed is on any kind of roadmap or planning information.

At Macworld San Francisco 2004, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, which used to be the largest Mac site in the world, talked about what they learned integrating Macs in their enterprise. I've made the presentation available here. I recommend people take a look at it, as it covers other issues as well. Like many organizations, Apple suffered during the late 90s, when it wasn't clear what Apple's direction was, and when Apple's future seemed uncertain. This meant that LLNL went from having 14000 Macs in 1997 to having about half that in 2003. In the meantime, the Windows installed base increased commensurately. (I believe that since then, we've gone to being one of the largest Mac sites outside of Apple, with well over 10000 institutionally-owned Macs, and many Apple server and storage products both deployed centrally and around the campus. Some examples.)

What is one of LLNL's top recommendations for Apple?

Develop a working balance between Apple's needed "confidentiality" and Corporate IT's need of "roadmap" information

This balance, or lack thereof, is also listed as one of their top "difficulties" when working with Apple. And I couldn't agree more.

You touched on some other issues related to software development, integration of OSS components into the OS, acknowledgment of and tracking of bugs, bug fixes being pushed out to next major releases of the operating system (e.g., 10.3.x -> 10.4), and so on. One small victory has been that Apple does now provide semi-detailed information about security updates, and does provide security updates for the previous major version of the OS.

However, the list of deficiencies is much longer. At WWDC, pretty much the only information we get is with regard to software development (and to be fair, that's all the original article actually refers to). We get virtually no information on hardware futures. We don't need to see pictures or know exactly what speed something will be. We want to know where Apple's headed. What form will the Intel servers take? We don't want to find out the DAY they ship. Will they use multiple cores? How many? Which architectures? Will they finally have redundant power supplies? How many drive bays will they have? How many expansion slots, and what kind of expansion? Will the Xserve RAID transition to SATA? Will Apple provide onboard video on the Xserve? Will there be an expansion beyond light-duty servers? How will they integrate into our existing management infrastructure? Will Mac OS X Server make provisions for virtualization of multiple instances of Mac OS X/Mac OS X Server? Where is Apple going with Darwin? What is the EOL schedule for Mac OS X/Mac OS X Server? (Apple still makes NO INFORMATION available about official end-of-life or end-of-support for any versions of Mac OS X or Mac OS X Server. We just have to guess that the previous major version of Mac OS X is what's supported.) How long will PowerPC be supported? This list goes on and on and on and on.

Yes, you can glean and infer some of this stuff unofficially from things happening in th

un sued Microsoft for their Java support in Windows/IE. Microsoft removed (again) the support and we know where Java is today in terms of client-side browser applets. At the same time Microsoft has managed to spread wide their version of Java: .NET.

What Adobe (apparently) thinks of that may be found at http://trace.wisc.edu:8080/mailarchive/eitaac-l/we b/eitaac.9901/msg00025.html/

From the article on the web-page:

"Adobe gives copyright permission to anyone to:

- Prepare files in which the file content conforms to the Portable Document Format.

- Write drivers and applications that produce output represented in the Portable Document Format.

- Write software that accepts input in the form of the Portable Document Format and displays the results, prints the results, or otherwise interprets a file represented in the Portable Document Format.

- Copy Adobe's copyrighted list of operators and data structures, as well as the PDF sample code and PostScript language Function definitions in the written specification, to the extent necessary to use the Portable Document Format for the above purposes."

Therefore.... without expansion of the original article, we really don't know what the issue is. It's possible that Microsoft has extended PDF in some incompatible manner, or that Adobe's more recent innovations, allowing PDF to be edited, aren't being respected, or that someone panicked about The Beast implementing it's own version, and making the original irrelevant.

Basically, we have a smallish company with a few dedicated niches on one side, and a convicted, predatory, behemoth on the other, except that the behemoth looks vulnerable to EU anti-trust hunters. Years ago Jeff Danziger http://www.danzigercartoons.com/, an editorial cartoonist, summed up the New IBM with a drawing of a man at a desk, the old IBM THINK logo in the trash, and a new "BUY" logo on the desk. If updated for 2006, and for a generic tech-company, the new logo would read "SUE".

Software, with its millions of lines of code, is so complicated that experts don't know for sure that open source has fewer bugs, nor can they say with certainty that having fewer bugs makes open source more secure.

It's not, at least for the classes of bugs that can be automatically detected.

• The Fuzz test
• Coverity et. al.

We're playing with chemicals

eating toxic foods

The article can be obtained from Grigoriev's webpage itself:

PDF WARNING!!!

http://homepages.cae.wisc.edu/~alexey/PRL06_grigor iev.pdf

daveschroeder (das@doit.wisc.edu) said:

Apple is aready using the Intel Core Duo T2500 in the iMac, and the Core Duo and Core Solo in the Mac mini.

This is only fuel for the US House Subcommittee on Silicon Chip Manufacturers to continue their antitrust investigations.

GO AMD!

You are going to trust a bunch of scientists that run Windows? I can't believe anyone actually stays in the room when that reactor is plugged in. Or the laptop.

Helium-3 is a good reason to return to the moon .

It is theorized that there are over 1 million cubic tons,
with oil over $50 a barrel, and helium-3 then being worth
about 8 billion USD a ton, the total worth equalling 8,000 trillion USD .

It could smash the US deficit with 7,991 trillion USD to spare .

http://www.brillig.com/debt_clock/

Also keep in mind most of the "other" moons have this as well .

Here are some photos of the reactor at the University of Wisconsin :

http://fti.neep.wisc.edu/iec/GeneralOpPics.htm

http://fti.neep.wisc.edu/iec/GeneralOpPicsII.htm

25 tons could power the US electrical needs for a year :

http://www.space.com/scienceastronomy/helium3_0006 30.html

I don't need to tell anyone that the US is the largest user of electricity on
the planet at present, and slated for massive growth .

The current immmigration bill sets aside for 100 - 200 million new citizens .

Kulcinski adds that, if it sold for $4 billion a metric ton, helium-3 would still be a
good energy value: "That's the equivalent of paying $28 a barrel for oil."

It will be a cold day in hell before we see oil at $28 a barrel again .....

So adjust the math accordingly ...

It becomes more viable with every passing day .

If we can make solar mining robots for the moon to process the soil, and
then use a mass driver to fling a projectile canister into lunar orbit for pick up.
Then a lunar orbit robotic satellite mass driver to fire it into earth geo-sync orbit .

Then have either a new space station, shuttle, or satellite prep it for re-entry
into the ocean for pick up much like the apollo capsules .

The robotic equipment could be tested here on earth prior to deployment on the moon .

It might be possible to make robots that could build it all via remote control, but
most likely we would initially need ppl to go to the moon to build the mass driver
and support facilities .

Building some or all of the support facilities underground would protect it to some
degree versus leaving it exposed on the surface .

At some future point 3HE+3HE fusion will be achieved and it will have zero nuetron emissions
and thus be truly clean as per the following link .

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_fusion#Criter ia_and_candidates_for_terrestrial_reactions

Hope for the future ...

Ex-MislTech

Helium-3 is a good reason to return to the moon .

It is theorized that there are over 1 million cubic tons,
with oil over $50 a barrel, and helium-3 then being worth
about 8 billion USD a ton, the total worth equalling 8,000 trillion USD .

It could smash the US deficit with 7,991 trillion USD to spare .

http://www.brillig.com/debt_clock/

Also keep in mind most of the "other" moons have this as well .

Here are some photos of the reactor at the University of Wisconsin :

http://fti.neep.wisc.edu/iec/GeneralOpPics.htm

http://fti.neep.wisc.edu/iec/GeneralOpPicsII.htm

25 tons could power the US electrical needs for a year :

http://www.space.com/scienceastronomy/helium3_0006 30.html

I don't need to tell anyone that the US is the largest user of electricity on
the planet at present, and slated for massive growth .

The current immmigration bill sets aside for 100 - 200 million new citizens .

Kulcinski adds that, if it sold for $4 billion a metric ton, helium-3 would still be a
good energy value: "That's the equivalent of paying $28 a barrel for oil."

It will be a cold day in hell before we see oil at $28 a barrel again .....

So adjust the math accordingly ...

It becomes more viable with every passing day .

If we can make solar mining robots for the moon to process the soil, and
then use a mass driver to fling a projectile canister into lunar orbit for pick up.
Then a lunar orbit robotic satellite mass driver to fire it into earth geo-sync orbit .

Then have either a new space station, shuttle, or satellite prep it for re-entry
into the ocean for pick up much like the apollo capsules .

The robotic equipment could be tested here on earth prior to deployment on the moon .

It might be possible to make robots that could build it all via remote control, but
most likely we would initially need ppl to go to the moon to build the mass driver
and support facilities .

Building some or all of the support facilities underground would protect it to some
degree versus leaving it exposed on the surface .

At some future point 3HE+3HE fusion will be achieved and it will have zero nuetron emissions
and thus be truly clean as per the following link .

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_fusion#Criter ia_and_candidates_for_terrestrial_reactions

Hope for the future ...

Ex-MislTech

True and not true.

Multicast has developed to the point where there is little doubt that one service model, Single Source Multicast (SSM, explained further at the Multicast FAQ file) could serve unlimited numbers of receivers with a stream, even in the commodity Internet. And Multicast is powering most new IPTV deployments - see the U Wisconsin DATN for a cool example. BUT, content providers do not want to supply their content with global SSM multicast, and there is no strong demand yet for sourcing niche video channels. (Existing deployments use multicast to get from a local POP to the user, but do not allow multicasts in from outside.)

BTW, 3GPP MBMS and 3GPP2 BCMCS now allow for true multicast to wireless phones, but there is as yet little use of it.

The BBC is trying to change this with their Multicast trials, and I think it almost inevitable that multicast channels will be allowed into the "walled gardens," but end users are only likely to get this ability if there is strong customer demand for it.

Note, BTW, that multicast in practice won't help an ISP that has severely underprovisioned their edge circuits, at least if there is a typical distribution of channels being watched.

It's strange these companies can't afford to set up a few of their own NTP servers instead of overloading servers that don't have the bandwidth. It it's because they are clueless or they are cheap?

Last time I checked, speed of electron flow is only based on the material around it. Higher dialectric constant = lower speed of propgaition. Transmission lines aren't voodoo science, they are a property of the electrical length of the line and the rate of change of the signal on that line. It does not change the rate of propagation at all. Whether a given wire is 1" long, or 200 miles long, it will not change the speed of propagation.

I didn't say electron flow speed changes. I said signal propagtion speed changes, which is true, because if I send a "1" down a long transmission line, the receiver will get it faster than they'd get it if I send a "1" using RC-style signalling. As I tried to explain before, in a normal signalling scheme, you charge an entire line up to Vdd or Gnd, and don't detect a 1 or 0 until the signal crosses Vdd/2. Take an empty trough and start filling it up; see how long it takes the water level to reach half way up on the far side. It'll cross the half way point at the far side pretty soon after it crosses at the near side, but actually filling and emptying it will still take a while. With transmission line signalling, however, you never actually charge/discharge the whole line, but send a wave down it instead. Take a trough of water and make a ripple, then on the receiving side observe the ripple. If you want to read a proposal for on-chip transmission lines, read this.

There are a lot of issues involved with using transmission lines (for example, wires have to be long before transmission-line signalling becomes better, and you have to do impedance matching at the receiver to avoid reflections, and based on the paper I linked to, your wires need to be wide and thick), but they do offer some very cool properties.

Not to be cheeky, but it's quite easy to change a sine wave into a square wave: Schmidt trigger. While I can't rule this out entirely, I would imagine that if it was more economical to produce an LRC resonator, it would be built into devices already. These circuits have been around for decades. It's very difficult to beat quartz crystals in terms of stability, ease of use, and power consumption.

I didn't say it was a flawless idea, and I also didn't say it was a stupid idea. I DID say you have to design your circuits differently (i.e. your flip flops do schmitt-trigger-like things to compensate for the slow slew rates). I brought it up because it was an example of charge recovery that works in the real world. It does have downsides, but every option has downsides (be it power, skew, manufacturability, whatever). Based on the presentation I saw, the downsides of that particular clocking method are enough to keep it out of mass-produced designs for a while, but that doesn't mean somebody else might not have found a way to make charge-recovering clocks more realistic. It's worthwhile research (meaning it might not be in the CPU you buy tomorrow, it might not be in any mass produced CPU ever, but it might also lead to a design that IS mass produced in the future, based on the knowledge gained from this research).

Wrong. The clock drives into a high impedance node. (The CMOS receivers on the other side of the clock line). CMOS drivers do have the problem of connecting to ground temporarily during switching - more akin to spilling some of the water out of the bucket as you pour it, not pouring it entirely on the ground. This can be overcome using clocks that are 90deg out of phase.

That's not what I was talking about. Short-circuit current is not a big deal as long as your signal slew rates are good.

And if the cap that you're talking about is the 10pF or so that is on the gate of the reciever CMOS - there are larger fish to fry power wise than this minimal capacitance.

I mentioned only gate cap on the clock receivers to simplify things. Since you're goin

Are you seriously suggesting that Windows NT was around before Unix? You do realize that Unix dates back to 1971, don't you?

Some people like to point out that Windows NT inherited a lot of its concepts from VMS, which did predate Unix. However, while NT on paper took a lot of concepts from VMS, in implementation it tended to sacrifice them in the interests of perceived at-keyboard performance.

And even that said, VMS was first seen on the VAX in 1977, and its first non-beta release was in 1978.

Other, older OSes did have different multi-user paradigms, but they were far, far more baroque than the simple file/directory ownership one that most modern OSes inherited from Unix and tended to be based more on volume ownership than file ownership (because they in turn tended to look at the world as a series of mounted tapes rather than random access hard drives).

All kidding aside, there is no such thing as a weeder class. If your school's equivalent of CS 302: Intro to programming is too hard for you, take the hint. Same thing goes for your school's equivalent of CS 367: Intro to data structures. While those are considered our "CS weed out" courses, if you cannot breeze through them, how in the ever loving fuck do you plan on surviving any 400 or 500 level CS course?

I'm dead serious here. A CS major is not for everyone. If you can't earn an A in those two courses while maintaining an aggressive schedule of extra-curricular binge drinking, what makes you think that you can pass CS 536: Compilers, where you get to write a compiler? Or CS 537: Operating Systems, where you get to implement an operating system? If it takes all the academic strength you can muster to pass the intro classes, the upper-level undregrad courses will kill you. You will fail. And you will fail hard.

By the way, if UM is anything like UW, you have to take like 1 course that is crosslisted with ECE. The only thing difficult about that course was getting out of bed for an 7:50a lecture while still drunk from partying the night before. So quit your bitching about having to take engineering courses while you're not in the engineering school.

Seriously, why do you want to major in CS in the first place? You don't seem to enjoy it, and it doesn't seem to come naturally to you.

All kidding aside, there is no such thing as a weeder class. If your school's equivalent of CS 302: Intro to programming is too hard for you, take the hint. Same thing goes for your school's equivalent of CS 367: Intro to data structures. While those are considered our "CS weed out" courses, if you cannot breeze through them, how in the ever loving fuck do you plan on surviving any 400 or 500 level CS course?

I'm dead serious here. A CS major is not for everyone. If you can't earn an A in those two courses while maintaining an aggressive schedule of extra-curricular binge drinking, what makes you think that you can pass CS 536: Compilers, where you get to write a compiler? Or CS 537: Operating Systems, where you get to implement an operating system? If it takes all the academic strength you can muster to pass the intro classes, the upper-level undregrad courses will kill you. You will fail. And you will fail hard.

By the way, if UM is anything like UW, you have to take like 1 course that is crosslisted with ECE. The only thing difficult about that course was getting out of bed for an 7:50a lecture while still drunk from partying the night before. So quit your bitching about having to take engineering courses while you're not in the engineering school.

Seriously, why do you want to major in CS in the first place? You don't seem to enjoy it, and it doesn't seem to come naturally to you.

All kidding aside, there is no such thing as a weeder class. If your school's equivalent of CS 302: Intro to programming is too hard for you, take the hint. Same thing goes for your school's equivalent of CS 367: Intro to data structures. While those are considered our "CS weed out" courses, if you cannot breeze through them, how in the ever loving fuck do you plan on surviving any 400 or 500 level CS course?

I'm dead serious here. A CS major is not for everyone. If you can't earn an A in those two courses while maintaining an aggressive schedule of extra-curricular binge drinking, what makes you think that you can pass CS 536: Compilers, where you get to write a compiler? Or CS 537: Operating Systems, where you get to implement an operating system? If it takes all the academic strength you can muster to pass the intro classes, the upper-level undregrad courses will kill you. You will fail. And you will fail hard.

By the way, if UM is anything like UW, you have to take like 1 course that is crosslisted with ECE. The only thing difficult about that course was getting out of bed for an 7:50a lecture while still drunk from partying the night before. So quit your bitching about having to take engineering courses while you're not in the engineering school.

Seriously, why do you want to major in CS in the first place? You don't seem to enjoy it, and it doesn't seem to come naturally to you.

All kidding aside, there is no such thing as a weeder class. If your school's equivalent of CS 302: Intro to programming is too hard for you, take the hint. Same thing goes for your school's equivalent of CS 367: Intro to data structures. While those are considered our "CS weed out" courses, if you cannot breeze through them, how in the ever loving fuck do you plan on surviving any 400 or 500 level CS course?

I'm dead serious here. A CS major is not for everyone. If you can't earn an A in those two courses while maintaining an aggressive schedule of extra-curricular binge drinking, what makes you think that you can pass CS 536: Compilers, where you get to write a compiler? Or CS 537: Operating Systems, where you get to implement an operating system? If it takes all the academic strength you can muster to pass the intro classes, the upper-level undregrad courses will kill you. You will fail. And you will fail hard.

By the way, if UM is anything like UW, you have to take like 1 course that is crosslisted with ECE. The only thing difficult about that course was getting out of bed for an 7:50a lecture while still drunk from partying the night before. So quit your bitching about having to take engineering courses while you're not in the engineering school.

Seriously, why do you want to major in CS in the first place? You don't seem to enjoy it, and it doesn't seem to come naturally to you.

All kidding aside, there is no such thing as a weeder class. If your school's equivalent of CS 302: Intro to programming is too hard for you, take the hint. Same thing goes for your school's equivalent of CS 367: Intro to data structures. While those are considered our "CS weed out" courses, if you cannot breeze through them, how in the ever loving fuck do you plan on surviving any 400 or 500 level CS course?

I'm dead serious here. A CS major is not for everyone. If you can't earn an A in those two courses while maintaining an aggressive schedule of extra-curricular binge drinking, what makes you think that you can pass CS 536: Compilers, where you get to write a compiler? Or CS 537: Operating Systems, where you get to implement an operating system? If it takes all the academic strength you can muster to pass the intro classes, the upper-level undregrad courses will kill you. You will fail. And you will fail hard.

By the way, if UM is anything like UW, you have to take like 1 course that is crosslisted with ECE. The only thing difficult about that course was getting out of bed for an 7:50a lecture while still drunk from partying the night before. So quit your bitching about having to take engineering courses while you're not in the engineering school.

Seriously, why do you want to major in CS in the first place? You don't seem to enjoy it, and it doesn't seem to come naturally to you.

All kidding aside, there is no such thing as a weeder class. If your school's equivalent of CS 302: Intro to programming is too hard for you, take the hint. Same thing goes for your school's equivalent of CS 367: Intro to data structures. While those are considered our "CS weed out" courses, if you cannot breeze through them, how in the ever loving fuck do you plan on surviving any 400 or 500 level CS course?

I'm dead serious here. A CS major is not for everyone. If you can't earn an A in those two courses while maintaining an aggressive schedule of extra-curricular binge drinking, what makes you think that you can pass CS 536: Compilers, where you get to write a compiler? Or CS 537: Operating Systems, where you get to implement an operating system? If it takes all the academic strength you can muster to pass the intro classes, the upper-level undregrad courses will kill you. You will fail. And you will fail hard.

By the way, if UM is anything like UW, you have to take like 1 course that is crosslisted with ECE. The only thing difficult about that course was getting out of bed for an 7:50a lecture while still drunk from partying the night before. So quit your bitching about having to take engineering courses while you're not in the engineering school.

Seriously, why do you want to major in CS in the first place? You don't seem to enjoy it, and it doesn't seem to come naturally to you.

You think that's sick? That's nothing!

Now, this is really perverted.

the windmills in CA. killed over 6000 birds in one year.

So? "Nationwide, rural cats probably kill over a billion small mammals and hundreds of millions of birds each year." http://wildlife.wisc.edu/extension/catfly3.htm

I say we burn the cats for fuel, or as a cleaner alternative, round them up and throw 'em on a big ass treadmill.

Tom, quit being an armchair architect. Read this paper:

ftp://ftp.cs.wisc.edu/sohi/papers/1995/isca.multis calar.pdf

BTW-- RC delay is causing on-chip wires to get pretty slow, but nowhere near "hundreds of cycles".

You don't have to wait for OLED to be widely available. You can experiment with them now: http://mrsec.wisc.edu/Edetc/nanolab/oLED/index.htm l -CF

And so we kept the British legal traditions in this country, except in Louisiana, where they use French legal traditions at the State level.

New York, the most important economic area of the young republic, based its legal traditions on the Roman-Dutch law of the Dutch republic. The influence of the Republic of the United Netherlands on American institutions is quite obvious, if only because of the federal structure and explicit self-delegation of legislative power in an explicit constitution. The very notion of having an explicit constitution is antithesis of British legal traditions. Even the Declaration of Independence is modeled on the Dutch Act of Abjuration of 1581 (together with the Union of Utrecht considered the constitution of the Dutch Republic), which was standard fare for legal practitioners in the US in those days.

Only in the course of the 19th century British common law became the dominant jurisprudence, arguably for the sake of consistency in dealing with things like property, and - more importantly - because the US gradually became a monolingual country and using foreign language jurisprudence is inefficient.

Perhaps they should have read this Slashdot story, which was about Netgear routers DoS-ing innocent time servers.

I'm sure that BBC picked the Thomas quote for the same reason that I chose to include it in the post - it provides a reasonably concise answer to the "why do I care about this?" question for most people. And I haven't seen anybody yet describe the various caveats of the Standard Model and its extensions in one sentence.

Perhaps the closest is a recent Why Files story, which gives a good summary of Big Bang cosmology, updated from the recent microwave background measurements. You're right, that up to 3/4 of the mass is in dark energy, whatever that might be. You're also correct that there are a lot more neutrinos (and photons) than atoms (or protons). And apparently, because of the large numbers of neutrinos, their masses could matter if they were heavy enough. According to Wikipedia, for example, "If the total energy of all three types of neutrinos exceeded an average of 50 electron volts per neutrino, there would be so much mass in the universe that it would collapse." The fact the Universe does not collapse is actually used to determine limits on possible neutrino masses (0.3 eV).

Neutrino masses also affect the fine-tuning of the Standard Model (SM), so any new experimental results will make a generation of graduate students and theorists happy, as the current problem is finding significant enough discrepancies in the SM to provide direction for fixing it in the future. Having results from several different experiments, which effectively look for oscillations on different length-scales (Earth-to-Sun vs. 10s or 100s of miles), provides additional constraints in that search.

Neutrino astronomy is something that requires much larger detectors, such as Ice Cube. At the moment, the models of neutrino production in the Sun were actually used to look for flavor oscillations, not the other way around, so neutrino astronomy is primarily intended for cosmological measurements. And hard as it is to detect neutrinos, we still have not been able to detect any gravitational waves, so the two are not competitors as astronomy methods, and won't be for a while. Perhaps you were thinking of solar quakes being used to probe the interior of the Sun?

http://www.astro.wisc.edu/~dolan/constellations/ex tra/nearest.html Nearest sun: Proxima Centauri, distance 4.2 lightyears http://www.google.com/search?hs=37y&hl=en&lr=&rls= en&q=4.2+lightyear+in+AU&btnG=Search 4.2 lightyear = 265 606.621 Astronomical Units

You:
The grenade would fall faster than the person, but not because of density - density doesn't play into it. It's because of less air resistance, which may have a little to do with the density, but a lot more to do with the shape.

Reply:

A grenade made of aerojel will fall much slower than one made of steel with an explosive core. Sure, shape is a factor. So is density. Gravity dosen't give a squat about density. Unfortunately the ability of a projectile to penetrate a fluid (like air) does depend greatly upon density (as well as shape.) This is why heavy bullets have a greater balistic coefeccient than lighter bullets of the same shape. They have more mass, therefore more interta, and will tend to penetrate a fluid with less loss of energy than a less dense bullet.

But, as far as the game goes . . . unless the player is considerably denser than the grenade there is a problem with the realism of the physics engine (assuming that when one "drops" a grenade it's not actualy THROWN [IE: given a velocity vector that is diffrent from the player who "drops" the grenade])

Why wouldn't a mid- to large-sized organization use something like Condor? Just install it on everyone's (linux or win2k/xp) server/workstation, maybe set some prioritization scripts so that it would use more resources after-hours (when most people are out of the office, but have their systems on anyway), & save themselves $$ instead of paying to have their data on someone else's remote system?

Liblit. There's an off-by-one-error in your count of L's. (It doesn't matter what they say about you, as long as they spell your name right.)

Yeah, that's me along with a truly fantastic team of collaborators. And there's more where that came from.

However, asking us to read 170-odd pages of your dissertation is a little much.

Hey, it's a real page-turner. Well, it has pages and they turn, at least.

The other questions you ask are all good ones, but a bit much to address in a Slashdot comment. Please see the project home page for more information. The "Learn More" page may answer some of your questions, and there are additional drill-down pages from there with even more technical material on selected topics.

Please understand that I don't mean to brush off your insightful questions. They are just questions for which satisfactory answers are hard to give in a sentence or two.

However, asking us to read 170-odd pages of your dissertation is a little much.

Hey, it's a real page-turner. Well, it has pages and they turn, at least.

The other questions you ask are all good ones, but a bit much to address in a Slashdot comment. Please see the project home page for more information. The "Learn More" page may answer some of your questions, and there are additional drill-down pages from there with even more technical material on selected topics.

Please understand that I don't mean to brush off your insightful questions. They are just questions for which satisfactory answers are hard to give in a sentence or two.