About 1950, A.E. van Vogt published "The Weapon Shops of Isher" in which one of the themes was the existence of a network of subversive shops, selling weapons to every 2nd Amendment nutcase, but with restrictions [only the owner, only defensive, no cops allowed].
YES -- Re: "Could this be it?" NO.
on
HIV Vaccine
·
· Score: 1
Approximately 5% of the population possess full or partial immunity to the AIDS virus, cf
A key problem area was interacting with the corporate Windows network.
How do you think Bill became the King of Office software? They required MS Office with each copy of Windows, and they broke everybody else's software at least a little. And little by little they took over the world.
Why bother, you can get a six year old RS6000 for practically free, and they run forever. Like Linux, but more interesting -- for those who REALLY love system administration AIX Just TOTALLY ROX!!!!
We like TotalView a lot [we haven't tried it on a Linux cluster yet].
From http://www.etnus.com/Products/TotalView/platforms/ index.html --
You can also use TotalView to debug programs that you have created using compilers provided by Lahey, KAI, and PGI. Gnu compilers are also supported. Your programs can be written in Fortran, C, C++, or assembler.
Parallel environments that TotalView supports include MPICH, OpenMP, PVM, and SHMEM.
This is just silly PR; but of course his colleagues say nice things, it probably helps NASA.
Another guy from JPL had a Berkeley dissertation circa 1965 on this topic; the minimum energy orbits are called Hohman transfer trajectories. They neglect the rest of the planets, but those are minor perturbations -- that's what the "tubes" are about.
There are five orbits around the Earth-moon neighborhood where the derivative vanishes, the Euler points and the Lagrange points; the forces [including momentum!] all balance out, but they aren't necessarily stable [the 60 degrees ahead/behind in the moon's orbit are, if some mass ratio condition is satisfied, cf "trojan asteroids" in Jupiter's orbit].
The guy may know something, but NASA is a big organization, and the press release writers in any such were typically English majors. The chaos theory angle is largely bullshit [but heaven forbid I should utterly squelch young spirits, as one of my professors used to say:]
If this leads someone to learn the math, great, but it's really a crock (tm).
It's correct that the GRAPE [GRAvity PipelinE] machines are not general purpose computers -- they only compute forces [the O(n^2) part of starfield calculations, for example]. We've got a GRAPE4 and two of the MDGRAPEs [Molecular Dynamics, ie more general force laws]. A 16-processor GRAPE6 is due RSN.
We're running some tests later this month, shipping data from the Tokyo GRAPE farm across TransPac to the Indianapolis HPSS silo, testing differentiated QoS [another whole thread, involving Napster and GriPhyN].
The idea is to eventually send slices of the data on to the American Museum of Natural History Planetarium in New York, linking three "specialized instruments."
There are people in fine arts who take digital media and VR seriously, cf
http://www.fa.indiana.edu/fina/fina/digital.html
and
http://strvid1.iu.edu:8080/ramgen/uits/sc2000/mdol insky.rm
Low levels of radiation can lead to mutations -- so what??? Low levels of any number of things can lead to mutations, but chance is involved, and probabilities. This has the information content of "you can kill yourself by drinking too much water."
It's been proposed before -- one guy wrote his
dissertation on a bridge between the two. He was a little ahead of his time, but he did build a nice little bridge from San Francisco to Marin County [that many said couldn't be done, an environmental catastrophe, yada yada yada].
This is just a personal opinion:) Microsoft has used "unofficial" APIs in its applications to get good performance; other vendors must reverse engineer from the shipping product to be competitive. Each new revision of the OS means a six month delay before WordPerfect [or Lotus, or Netware] would work, during which you stuck with the old version or used M$Office. Most people would go back to their preferred product, but by shifting just a few percent from the competitor each time, Office eventually also becoame dominant. Remember the old slogan, "the job's not done until Lotus won't run" [or Novell, or WordPerfect]. It was only in the past few years that MS had the clout to force PC sellers to include Office with every sale, to seal their monopoly on apps.
Van Vogt wrote big idea science fiction. He was particularly prescient in The Weapon Shops of Isher -- combining elements we've grown familiar with from Mao and the NRA [the defenseless cannot long remain free, political power grows out of the barrel of a gun] with those of the Clinton administration's latest proposal [guns that can only be fired by the owner, and indeed can only be used for defensive purposes].
Slashdot Mirror
About 1950, A.E. van Vogt published "The Weapon Shops of Isher" in which one of the themes was the existence of a network of subversive shops, selling weapons to every 2nd Amendment nutcase, but with restrictions [only the owner, only defensive, no cops allowed].
Approximately 5% of the population possess full or partial immunity to the AIDS virus, cf
2 48
http://www.sciforums.com/archive/index.php/t-38
[that's just the first google response I got to AIDS immunity "black plague"]
Check out Radiance, http://radsite.lbl.gov/radiance/
How do you think Bill became the King of Office software? They required MS Office with each copy of Windows, and they broke everybody else's software at least a little. And little by little they took over the world.
And I don't think he's about to change that.
I like Rudy Rucker, especially The Hacker and the Ants. Insightful discussion of virtual reality, and the hero saves the world because he knows C++!
Why bother, you can get a six year old RS6000 for practically free, and they run forever. Like Linux, but more interesting -- for those who REALLY love system administration AIX Just TOTALLY ROX!!!!
From http://www.etnus.com/Products/TotalView/platforms/ index.html --
You can also use TotalView to debug programs that you have created using compilers provided by Lahey, KAI, and PGI. Gnu compilers are also supported. Your programs can be written in Fortran, C, C++, or assembler.
Parallel environments that TotalView supports include MPICH, OpenMP, PVM, and SHMEM.
Another guy from JPL had a Berkeley dissertation circa 1965 on this topic; the minimum energy orbits are called Hohman transfer trajectories. They neglect the rest of the planets, but those are minor perturbations -- that's what the "tubes" are about.
There are five orbits around the Earth-moon neighborhood where the derivative vanishes, the Euler points and the Lagrange points; the forces [including momentum!] all balance out, but they aren't necessarily stable [the 60 degrees ahead/behind in the moon's orbit are, if some mass ratio condition is satisfied, cf "trojan asteroids" in Jupiter's orbit].
The guy may know something, but NASA is a big organization, and the press release writers in any such were typically English majors. The chaos theory angle is largely bullshit [but heaven forbid I should utterly squelch young spirits, as one of my professors used to say:]
If this leads someone to learn the math, great, but it's really a crock (tm).
We're running some tests later this month, shipping data from the Tokyo GRAPE farm across TransPac to the Indianapolis HPSS silo, testing differentiated QoS [another whole thread, involving Napster and GriPhyN]. The idea is to eventually send slices of the data on to the American Museum of Natural History Planetarium in New York, linking three "specialized instruments."
There are people in fine arts who take digital media and VR seriously, cf http://www.fa.indiana.edu/fina/fina/digital.html and http://strvid1.iu.edu:8080/ramgen/uits/sc2000/mdol insky.rm
Low levels of radiation can lead to mutations -- so what??? Low levels of any number of things can lead to mutations, but chance is involved, and probabilities. This has the information content of "you can kill yourself by drinking too much water."
>What if there's something they consider a basic right, which we consider immoral? Or vice-versa?
Sounds like the story of my life!:]
It's been proposed before -- one guy wrote his dissertation on a bridge between the two. He was a little ahead of his time, but he did build a nice little bridge from San Francisco to Marin County [that many said couldn't be done, an environmental catastrophe, yada yada yada].
This is just a personal opinion:) Microsoft has used "unofficial" APIs in its applications to get good performance; other vendors must reverse engineer from the shipping product to be competitive. Each new revision of the OS means a six month delay before WordPerfect [or Lotus, or Netware] would work, during which you stuck with the old version or used M$Office. Most people would go back to their preferred product, but by shifting just a few percent from the competitor each time, Office eventually also becoame dominant. Remember the old slogan, "the job's not done until Lotus won't run" [or Novell, or WordPerfect]. It was only in the past few years that MS had the clout to force PC sellers to include Office with every sale, to seal their monopoly on apps.
Van Vogt wrote big idea science fiction. He was particularly prescient in The Weapon Shops of Isher -- combining elements we've grown familiar with from Mao and the NRA [the defenseless cannot long remain free, political power grows out of the barrel of a gun] with those of the Clinton administration's latest proposal [guns that can only be fired by the owner, and indeed can only be used for defensive purposes].