Peter Guilfoyle had almost the same optical technology
twenty years ago, albeit slower, but a couple orders
of magnitude faster than the silicon of the day.
The military had been using these for decades for analog image processing, but Guilfoyle integrated a digital protocol.
During the early 1980s Guilfoyle attempted to commercialize this device, but failed.
Engineers designed a computer around it, but realized it was more economic and reliable to implement it in silicon ASICs (custom gate arrays) than as an optical processor. The venture capitalists sided with the engineers and kicked Guilfoyle out.
The company was named "Saxpy" after the name of fundamental matrix primitive used in array processors of era.
A couple of prototypes were built, but never really sold.
The 1980s were the golden age of the custom supercomputers and there were dozens built and died by the 1990s.
Custom super computers could not keep up with the economics of commodity clusters (Beuwolfs).
Custom machines took 3-5 years to develop a new
generation, whereas commodity CPUs became 10-100
times faster & cheaper during the same time span. The only way for sustom computers to keep ahead of commodity computers is to be at least 10,000 times faster than commodity computers to avoid the catch-up problem.
(I bought supers in the 1980s and Saxpy was on the vendors list.)
Bose-Einstein matter was predicted decades ago.
But the experimental cleverness to reach absolute
zero and this state was only reached a few years
ago. The prize is for this cleverness.
Second, not all othe the phenomena of this state were predicted by the theory, so new things were learned.
Would you eat those funny packages they've pushing out of the planes? First, they are nothing like you've ever seen before. Second, how do you know if the enemy who just bombed you isn't trying to poison you?
I have been involved with e-publishing efforts of several professional societies. The result is so far is e-journals cost almost as much as their paper counterparts because it is not cheap to properly maintain web servers, both hardware and labor costs. In fact, the cost increase if one tries to maintain a dual web & print presence. Some societies are dividing the chores- heavy duty papers in print and lightweight news and proceedings abstracts in electrons.
If the cost-of-entry was really greatly reduced by e-publishing, you'd expect to see a number of "alternative professional societies" competing on basis of greatly reduced cost. For examples, journal subscriptions for $10 a year instead of $100s; low-cost web meetings instead of thousand dollar conventions. But we've seen little of this. Its not like the entire science world is in the chains of an evil publishing conspiracy. Almost everyone would like to see the cost of science cut, so they could focus on doing science.
A positive aspect of electronic communications seems to speed up the time it takes to get to print, dropping many of the former snailmail stages. Also, e-publishing has broadened the audience somewhat to students and third world scientists who wouldn't have as easy access otherwise.
The media onslaught is just like the "number" movies '1984' or 'Fahrenheit 451'. The media brags about some high-tech onslaught against some evil external threat. You see very little diverse opinion in the media, and the people who have offered some have paid (e.g. Bill Maher). Ironically, Orwell and Bradbury predicted that a dictatorial state would be necessary to impose such a uniform view, whereas in the present case the "silo-vision" seems to be emerging from all levels- the viewers, the media providers and the government.
On the other hand, the beauty of the net is that I can see the analysis almost totally absent from US media by reading European and Asian web papers.
Eventually the masses will interact with computers
by speech and video. Text and keybords will be secondary. Current computers cant quite do this yet, but how much is software versus hardware?
A "bleeding plague" is
torturing Afganistan refugees today. Three years of drought, twenty years of civil war, and the anticpiated US retailer have caused dreadful living conditions.
They are frequent plague outbreaks in Colorado prarie dogs, California rats and rabbits. One suspected case earlier this year turned out to be another kind of pneumonia. The victim had lived next to an infected prarie dog population. In California they close the San Jacinto parks now and then because of rodent plague.
I recall the Russians had a couple of successful lunar rock retrievals in the early 1970s.
When they felt they couldn't get men to the moon first, they tried to beat Americans to rock samples, but lost that race too.
Perhaps there are lessons from the Russian lunar missions.
The practical courses- the ones tracking hot computer technology, e.g. 370 assembler, APL- are almost all obsolete. The lasting material are the deeper principles behind it all.
PayPal is featured in the PBS special "Electric
Money" on PBS next Wednesday. This special looks
at the recent history of money as it mostly now
exists as electronic transactions.
The series was made by Mark Stephens who made the
two PBS "Revenge of the Nerds" series and writes
the Cringely column on the PBS web site.
Like the world trade center collapse,
the Kurusk explosions were well recorded by
seimometers around northern European.
The sounds suggest two explosions: (1) a smaller
sub-disabling explosion and (2) a larger explosion
of a torpedo going off while inside the sub.
These systems will do little to find people who
aren't in the databases anyways. And there is
certain fraction of the US population that makes
a considerable effort to stay as undocumented as possible.
Some examples of "undocumented people":
(1) The 2000 Census couldn't count about 4% because
people intentionally avoided it.
(2) 10% of the SS# on North Carolina's drivers
licenses are bogus (todays LA Times).
(3) 14% of the accidents in southern CA involve
people without valid car registration or drivers
licenses,
and so on.
Microsoft and Oracle anticipated this have had
terabyte video raid disks around for years. The stored TV market isn't quite there yet, so they have a demo on web that serves satellite images.
Once there is a market, MicroSoft will be there.
I figure I have about two hours a day for watching
TV.
At the most I'd time-shift up to seven days,
but not be too interested in stuff more than a week old.
So that would make about bulk 14 hours.
Right now I find seven four-hour VCR tapes to be adequate
and maybe view a quarter to a half of it.
Random access disk video would allow me to browse 20-30 hours of TV in my 14 hours of viewing. So that would be enough for my needs.
The press release says 52 hours is 40 GB.
(Most DVCR users would recommend 2GB / hour.)
Even so, the disk cost should be $80 at current
commodity disk prices.
The Star Trek universe is the reflection of our
universe, with science fiction props to
illuminate understanding of ourselves. The 35 years
of shows- more like 45 if you include the initial
scripts and lifetime of the fifth series- span at
least three cultural generations of Americans:
The pre-boomers, the baby boomer yuppies, and now
the GenX. The show has always focused on 30-something
adults of the era it was filmed.
The orignal trek series was like "Combat in Space"
or the generation of the baby boomers. They even
made fun of boomer culture like hippies and
peacniks in some of the episodes. The pre-boomers
were conventional, pro-establishment types.
The second and third series, New Generation and
Deep Space Nine, were "Yuppies in Space" or pure
baby boomer. The main characters were educated,
priviledged and aloof. The fourth series, Voyager, was
transitional with late-boomer officers and a GenX junior crew.
The independence of the latter was a source of conflict in the show.
Andromeda is the first all-GenX sci-fi show.
GenX'ers are more creative and independent and
fully tech savy. I presume the fifth Trek series
will be another GenX series.
Slashdot Mirror
Poke around course notes and prof home pages.
Some of these are better than print versions-
being more up to date and cheaper.
The Mellon and Hewitt foundations directly. MS gave a big chunk to improve computing infrastructure.
Peter Guilfoyle had almost the same optical technology twenty years ago, albeit slower, but a couple orders of magnitude faster than the silicon of the day. The military had been using these for decades for analog image processing, but Guilfoyle integrated a digital protocol.
During the early 1980s Guilfoyle attempted to commercialize this device, but failed. Engineers designed a computer around it, but realized it was more economic and reliable to implement it in silicon ASICs (custom gate arrays) than as an optical processor. The venture capitalists sided with the engineers and kicked Guilfoyle out. The company was named "Saxpy" after the name of fundamental matrix primitive used in array processors of era. A couple of prototypes were built, but never really sold.
The 1980s were the golden age of the custom supercomputers and there were dozens built and died by the 1990s. Custom super computers could not keep up with the economics of commodity clusters (Beuwolfs). Custom machines took 3-5 years to develop a new generation, whereas commodity CPUs became 10-100 times faster & cheaper during the same time span. The only way for sustom computers to keep ahead of commodity computers is to be at least 10,000 times faster than commodity computers to avoid the catch-up problem.
(I bought supers in the 1980s and Saxpy was on the vendors list.)
It sounds like one of the theorists (B)
and it looks like other (E).
It behaves very strangely compared to other matter.
Bose-Einstein matter was predicted decades ago. But the experimental cleverness to reach absolute zero and this state was only reached a few years ago. The prize is for this cleverness.
Second, not all othe the phenomena of this state were predicted by the theory, so new things were learned.
Would you eat those funny packages they've pushing out of the planes? First, they are nothing like you've ever seen before. Second, how do you know if the enemy who just bombed you isn't trying to poison you?
I have been involved with e-publishing efforts of several professional societies. The result is so far is e-journals cost almost as much as their paper counterparts because it is not cheap to properly maintain web servers, both hardware and labor costs. In fact, the cost increase if one tries to maintain a dual web & print presence. Some societies are dividing the chores- heavy duty papers in print and lightweight news and proceedings abstracts in electrons.
If the cost-of-entry was really greatly reduced by e-publishing, you'd expect to see a number of "alternative professional societies" competing on basis of greatly reduced cost. For examples, journal subscriptions for $10 a year instead of $100s; low-cost web meetings instead of thousand dollar conventions. But we've seen little of this. Its not like the entire science world is in the chains of an evil publishing conspiracy. Almost everyone would like to see the cost of science cut, so they could focus on doing science.
A positive aspect of electronic communications seems to speed up the time it takes to get to print, dropping many of the former snailmail stages. Also, e-publishing has broadened the audience somewhat to students and third world scientists who wouldn't have as easy access otherwise.
The media onslaught is just like the "number" movies '1984' or 'Fahrenheit 451'. The media brags about some high-tech onslaught against some evil external threat. You see very little diverse opinion in the media, and the people who have offered some have paid (e.g. Bill Maher). Ironically, Orwell and Bradbury predicted that a dictatorial state would be necessary to impose such a uniform view, whereas in the present case the "silo-vision" seems to be emerging from all levels- the viewers, the media providers and the government.
On the other hand, the beauty of the net is that I can see the analysis almost totally absent from US media by reading European and Asian web papers.
Eventually the masses will interact with computers by speech and video. Text and keybords will be secondary. Current computers cant quite do this yet, but how much is software versus hardware?
A "bleeding plague" is torturing Afganistan refugees today. Three years of drought, twenty years of civil war, and the anticpiated US retailer have caused dreadful living conditions.
They are frequent plague outbreaks in Colorado prarie dogs, California rats and rabbits. One suspected case earlier this year turned out to be another kind of pneumonia. The victim had lived next to an infected prarie dog population. In California they close the San Jacinto parks now and then because of rodent plague.
Weren't yahoos petty government officials in Gulliver's Travels? I think Swift was paradying British officialdom at the time.
1974 at MITAI.
However, my 1976 account STILL WORKS,
although you have to attach a domain to it.
I recall the Russians had a couple of successful lunar rock retrievals in the early 1970s. When they felt they couldn't get men to the moon first, they tried to beat Americans to rock samples, but lost that race too.
Perhaps there are lessons from the Russian lunar missions.
The practical courses- the ones tracking hot computer technology, e.g. 370 assembler, APL- are almost all obsolete. The lasting material are the deeper principles behind it all.
PayPal is featured in the PBS special "Electric Money" on PBS next Wednesday. This special looks at the recent history of money as it mostly now exists as electronic transactions. The series was made by Mark Stephens who made the two PBS "Revenge of the Nerds" series and writes the Cringely column on the PBS web site.
Like the world trade center collapse,
the Kurusk explosions were well recorded by
seimometers around northern European.
The sounds suggest two explosions: (1) a smaller
sub-disabling explosion and (2) a larger explosion
of a torpedo going off while inside the sub.
In the new series, Erath does not yet have a prime
directive. However, Vulcan may have, which the
reason for their reticence.
These systems will do little to find people who
aren't in the databases anyways. And there is
certain fraction of the US population that makes
a considerable effort to stay as undocumented as possible.
Some examples of "undocumented people":
(1) The 2000 Census couldn't count about 4% because
people intentionally avoided it.
(2) 10% of the SS# on North Carolina's drivers
licenses are bogus (todays LA Times).
(3) 14% of the accidents in southern CA involve
people without valid car registration or drivers
licenses,
and so on.
Microsoft and Oracle anticipated this have had terabyte video raid disks around for years. The stored TV market isn't quite there yet, so they have a demo on web that serves satellite images. Once there is a market, MicroSoft will be there.
I figure I have about two hours a day for watching TV. At the most I'd time-shift up to seven days, but not be too interested in stuff more than a week old. So that would make about bulk 14 hours. Right now I find seven four-hour VCR tapes to be adequate and maybe view a quarter to a half of it. Random access disk video would allow me to browse 20-30 hours of TV in my 14 hours of viewing. So that would be enough for my needs.
Warp 4.5 = 4.5^3c = 91.c OK
30,000,000 miles per second = 100.c OK
1 light year = 88 hours at 100.c
Rigel is 15 light years (1000 in reality)
15 light years = almost 8 weeks.
Eta Erdani (Vulcan) is 8 light years = 4 weeks.
The press release says 52 hours is 40 GB.
(Most DVCR users would recommend 2GB / hour.)
Even so, the disk cost should be $80 at current
commodity disk prices.
The Star Trek universe is the reflection of our
universe, with science fiction props to
illuminate understanding of ourselves. The 35 years
of shows- more like 45 if you include the initial
scripts and lifetime of the fifth series- span at
least three cultural generations of Americans:
The pre-boomers, the baby boomer yuppies, and now
the GenX. The show has always focused on 30-something
adults of the era it was filmed.
The orignal trek series was like "Combat in Space"
or the generation of the baby boomers. They even
made fun of boomer culture like hippies and
peacniks in some of the episodes. The pre-boomers
were conventional, pro-establishment types.
The second and third series, New Generation and
Deep Space Nine, were "Yuppies in Space" or pure
baby boomer. The main characters were educated,
priviledged and aloof. The fourth series, Voyager, was
transitional with late-boomer officers and a GenX junior crew.
The independence of the latter was a source of conflict in the show.
Andromeda is the first all-GenX sci-fi show.
GenX'ers are more creative and independent and
fully tech savy. I presume the fifth Trek series
will be another GenX series.
In those recent Gateway TV commercial a cow has
been telling the Gateway CEO how to run his business.