Is it really worth your time, your professor's time, or the government grant's time to spend your quantum research dollar in overhead costs as you bang your head away in frustration trying to cludge together some string of 0.2 beta versions of open source data collection programs?
And what about when you leave? Does the next grad student have to spend 3 years learning your absolutely unique software setup instead of learning physics?
In the Big Name(TM) physics lab I work in, grad students cost about $200 a day (to the grant), and postdocs cost about $500 a day. If I need a program that would take me a month to write or costs $2,000 to buy today, it's my job do know to just buy the program.
We used to use LabWindows (call it C++) and VisualBasic, but the last person who know LabWindows left and now looking at the code when things go wrong is a nightmare.
So, anything new is being done in LabView. (Disclaimer - I don't work for National Instruments) Sure, it costs $2K for the good suite, but I guarantee you will make up for it in productivity. Plus, debugging LabView code as a beginner is waaaaay easier than debugging someone's crazy spaghetti C code. With the high turnover rate of a research university, it's very important to retain the chain of knowledge. Otherwise things progress into the realm of Black Boxes.
My opinion is not to waste your valuable research time worrying about software. Especially in quantum computing where you will be left in the dust if you fart around worrying about open source too long.
The first who level you meet zero enemies until the very last room. The whole game had a great, creepy tension. Incredible lighting and sounds stright from the movie Aliens made it so I coudn't play the game for more than half an hour without taknig a break and going out into the sunlight...
Is the precise timing required by the whole system. You see the vertical wheel with the notch? That notch has to pass the little wings on the rotor exactly on two sliding surfaces.
Those tight fit parts that absolutely fly by each other have to meet, slide, and keep a pretty good seal. Each time the timing chain is a little off, say to increase or decrease in power, they will miss a little, bonk, and get worn. Hot exhaust gasses slipping through will probably cause preignition in the little transfer tube. Nasty.
Also notice how much physical distance the compression arms of the rotor have to move each cycle. Can you imagine the heat from friction and the lubrication required? And the kinds of seals that you would need? I guess you could get decent lubrication by using the rotor as some sort of centrifugal oil pump, but still the wear would be nasty.
Consider as well that it's basically a 2 cylinder 4-stroke engine. It's gotta be a pretty good size and run at a pretty high RPM to get enough power to be really useful.
Did you guys check the specs on this thing? They propose to use a big cylinder of Polonium 210 as a power source in the back half of the laser rifle.
Could you imagine? And you're supposed to put your head next to it to aim it?
What if your rifle takes a bullet and the Po210 is pulverized and you breathe it in?
And quite frankly, if anyone develops a man portable power source that has enough energy density to run a necessarily multi-kilowatt laser, then we probably have better things to do than send in ground troops with rifles. Robots, anyone?
one of the hardest things about making a "Fermi-Degenerate Gas" is that collisions with the background gas heat the "condenstate" greatly.
In a Bose Einstein Condensate, when some particle comes flying in fron the vacuum and smacks an atom in the condensate, they both go flying out. You have one less atom in your condensate now, but it's about the same temperature.
You can imagine the temperature of a Fermi Gas as the apparent neatness of an upside down pyramid of blocks. At high (room) temperatures, the blocks are all jumbling around in a mess. At zero temperature, they are perfectly fitting on top of each other, filling the energy levels of the trap.
Now a hot atom comes flying in from the vacuum and takes out a block in the middle. Now the whole thing above the hole is messed up! As the atoms shuffle around to fill up the hole, this is expressed as heating.
So the fact that thy have been able to cool these atoms is a testament to their experimental rigor, especially with their vacuum system.
You seem to have misunderstood Moore's Law. Moore simply stated that the processing capability per dollar _seemed_ to double every 18 months.
Moore's Law is NOT a law of physics. It seems to current be a natural result of research and current technology.
On a side note, in 1991 I bought a 40 megabyte hard drive because it was affordable (~$100). Now in 2002 I just bought an 80 Gigabyte hard drive for about $100. That's a factor of 2000 increase in storage power -> 2^11.
Now 11 * 18 months = 17 years. 1991 + 17 years = 2008! We're way ahead of schedule! Unlesss you revise Moore's law for storage and say that it doubles every 12 months, then the fit is almost perfect.
So if you compare these, each year it takes your $100 CPU longer and longer to process everything on your $100 hard drive. Eventually, hard drives will be so large that they contain more data that your CPU can process!
the problem with evaporative cooling is the increased hardening of the water. you would indeed lose lots of heat to evaporation, and the CPU would run super cool, but as more of the water evaporates and leaves behind all of its minerals, the think would start to get really crusty.
then you would have to clean out the whole thing with CLR or some crap, and it would be a huge pain. and good system should be as closed as possible while still allowing for some thermal expansion of trapped air.
the trick is to find a good radiator, CHEAP. or free. maybe a heater core from a car from a junkyard? maybe the heat exchanger from a junked air conditioner?
the hard part is not getting the heat from the CPU to the water, but getting the heat from the water into the air.
I believe tachometers work by getting a 12v pulse from the distributor every time cylinder 1 fires. So all you need to do is up the voltage from the serial port a little and send bits at a frequency proportional to the CPU usage.
I have a spare tachometer in my closet actually, so maybe I will give it a try myself...
In the lab where I work I only get to name three machines.
ChickenParmesan SpicyThaiTofu SuperBurrito
Note that chickenparmesan is the maximum length for a WFW filesharing system (I think, don't flame me.). Humor always has a place. Cartoon characters too.... Hmmmmm Voltron.
this is not a "hack" or even a "security exploit". it only lets people see what files you have already specifically already shared!
just HTTP to the person's port 1214 and morpheus (or Kazaa or whatever FastTrack client i suppose) gives you a list of shared files.
THERE IS NO DANGER FROM THIS "EXPLOIT"
i think that someone creative should write a really short perl script to scan IP netblocks on port 1214, connect to HTTP and list the shared files, then create an index. you could also add port 139 to scan WFW shares while you are at it. you could create your own FastTrack "supernode" with this method, if you were really inclined.
when i read the story header i thought that it meant that any file on my hard drive was accessible via some nimda/codeRed type exploit. this is not the case.
If you are a bored teenager and not too interested in being filthy rich, by his standard you could make playing Everquest a fairly profitable summer job.
No serving food, no dealing with customers, no cleaning. Just playing computer all day.
I'm sure that there are plenty of people who would rather spend 14 hours/day playing Everyquest than work 8 hours per day at McDonalds or something. And if you focused on the most profitable items, you could probably make more.
And what if the server crashes? Can you sue Sony for lost wages?
First, you connect the three car batteries (12V each) to the machine for an "initial power source". Those of you who have read "Stone Soup" might know where I'm going with this.
Then you power three 100W light bulbs for an hour. That's only 0.3kWh, or probably close to $0.05 worth of electricity.
Upon demonstration to the reporters, the three batteries on the outside are left with an "increased charge". The machine put out more than it took in*.
The secret: Four car batteries are in the box. It's self repleneshing! Demonstrate this to enough reporters, using nwe external batteries each time, and it will run forever!!!
Sigh.
*Editor's Note: If only more women were like that.
I just got a Diva 3032 MP3 Player that does all that for a fraction of the price.
It's half the size of a deck of cards, it runs for about ten hours on one AA battery, and it acts as a USB removeable drive just like your $239 unit.
The only difference is the price. I got mine here for $70 plus $5 shipping.
Add a 256mb flash card from Pricewatch for $80 and that brings the total to a measly $150 for a 256 MB mp3 player with zero copy protection, tiny size, and great sound.
Another kind of flashdrive MP3 player is the MelloMP3 unit. It's a little bigger and uses 2xAA batteries, but i got one for $60 for my brother for christmas.
Possibly the most interesting thing here is the compatibility of CompactFlash and IDE. If you do the wiring right you can stick a CF card straight onto an IDE cable with no other translation and it will work. So my idea for everyone, stick a hard drive under the seat of your car with a small power supply, then just hook the MP3 player to the car stereo via a Line In jack, and presto, you have a 30GB Car MP3 player for less than $200, plus you can take it with you.
Black Hawk Down is a political movie about what happens when dumbass politicians and an ignorant citizenry send people off to die for no good reason anybody can think of (unlike Afghanistan).
You mean that an international effort to bring drought relief and order to a country in the midst of self destruction is "no good reason"?
The special forces in Mogadishu were sent on that particular mission to arrest the henchmen of a notorious criminal who was stealing food from his own people to buy guns to steal more food from his own people. When it comes to war, it doesn't get much clearer than that.
My person favorite quote from Mr. Katz here is: ignorant citizenry
I suppose that he means the entire world, given the number of nations involved in that particular relief effort.
Next time there is a crisis in another country where starving people need help, we can ask Jon Jatz for his opinion and we can let them all starve to death instead.
As probably most people here realize, the advent of sufficiently strong quantum computers renders obsolete every encryption scheme. Except, of course, then Verdam cypher or One Time Pad.
At JPL, among, there is a group working on quantum key distribution. The aim is to have entanged photons distributed at the same rate (or almost the same rate) as the data, and to use this as a crypto key that is totally unbreakable. Untappable, unbreakable, impervious.
Doesn't it strike anyone as strange and cool that quantum computers and quantum key distribution are coming to fruition at almost exactly the same time?
over at mapquest you can click on "aerial view" of any US street map and see a ~1-2m resolution photo. of anywhere by street address!!! for free.
so i decided to check out Groom Lake in nevada. and indeed you can see the groom lake AFB, runways, hangars and all. unfortunately, over this particular area they limit the resolution to 5-10m.
but still pretty freakin cool. i want to know when the pictures are taken so i can make signs. or at least pose provocatively.
muerte
A Great MP3 Player...
on
Review: SliMP3
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
I realize that this article is about a home MP3 system, so this may be slightly off topic, but I just bought an awesome MP3 player.
It's the Diva3032 MP3 player. I got it for $69 with 32 megs built in. But the best part is that it takes CompactFlash, up to 2 Gigs (!!!). And when you plug it in (under win2k, maybe linux?) it automatically mounts as an additional drive letter so you can drag and drop MP3's on (and off) it.
So I got a 128 MB CF card off of pricewatch for $48 and now I have a 160MB player for $120.
It's about _half_ the size of a deck of cards, and runs for (supposedly) 10 hours on a single battery. The digital display is pretty lacking, but who cares if it's in your pocket? The sound quality is good, and the volume goes high enough to hurt my ears.
I went to this after bad experiences with a JazzPiper/Cabo, and even worse experiences with the Toshiba MEA-110. The Cabo's parallel connection just plain stopped working, and the Toshiba uses a "library manager" so draconian it makes me want to die.
My current idea is this - I have seen a CompactFlash to PCMCIA adapter. Heck I have even seen a CF to IDE adapter (the wrong way though). So why not plug a freakin hard drive in it when you are in the car? I think all you need is 5V. Does anyone have any experience with this?
I promise I am not the guy selling these, but the main page is at www.mydivaplayer.com and the place i got it for $69 is at www.mydigitaldiscount.com. Shamless plugging, I know, please keep the flames to a low broil.
So it's been said that these things are 20% efficient at transferring heat into electrical energy.
Too bad that the conversion of mechanical energy into electrical approaches 100% in efficent generator design. Sure you lose some in the transfer of heat to mechanical, but it's way better than 20%.
The best application of this is probably in the very small scale. How about a small, silent generator for your camper that runs on propane? How about nuclear thermal batteries (ala Galileo) that are twice as efficient?
There is also some issue of scale for these devices. If you need a 1 inch square TEC to cool your processor with about 40 Watts of cooling power, if you want 4KW of electricity for you car that's et least 100 of these things plastered around the catalytic converter. Sounds expen$ive.
Sure, the thing weighs gigatons, but as it falls it is subject to the coriolis force. so the thing would wrap itself around the earth. it doesn't just plop down to one spot, and it takes a while to do so (more than 45 minutes).
sure, everyone around the equator is kinda disappointed, but what a show!
why not embed small nuclear (or since we are daydreaming, antimatter) charges to blow it up into tiny pieces if it starts to fall.
and what about the jackass who pushes all the buttons just before he gets off?
why they even allow connections to the firmware from the external modem port is beyond me. there should just be a switch that physically prevents external IP's from talking to the command hardware.
Ever think of hiring physics grad students? At my university, all physics majors were required to take a computational simulation type class, and at the graduate level pretty much _everyone_ I know has a great deal of experience and talent in writing scientific code.
I myself just recently applied toa simulated annealing algorythm to make a solenoid whose axial magnetic field varied as the square of the distance along the z-axis . . . without any bumps. If you think that's easy, try slapping solenoids together and see how it looks.
Your best bet are physicists in the Nuclear, Plasma and Astrophysics fields, as almost all they do is intensive computer simulations.
You might find some motivated BS to do your fun work for around $35K, but a high end PhD might end up wanting between $65 - $120.
Your ideal target is people with "Masters" in physics, who dropped out of PhD programs because they realized that grad schoool sucks.
You shouldn't have a hard time finding people wanting to do what you need - I find your job offer quite interesting myself, especially in the face of a possible career in academia.
Slashdot Mirror
Is it really worth your time, your professor's time, or the government grant's time to spend your quantum research dollar in overhead costs as you bang your head away in frustration trying to cludge together some string of 0.2 beta versions of open source data collection programs?
And what about when you leave? Does the next grad student have to spend 3 years learning your absolutely unique software setup instead of learning physics?
In the Big Name(TM) physics lab I work in, grad students cost about $200 a day (to the grant), and postdocs cost about $500 a day. If I need a program that would take me a month to write or costs $2,000 to buy today, it's my job do know to just buy the program.
We used to use LabWindows (call it C++) and VisualBasic, but the last person who know LabWindows left and now looking at the code when things go wrong is a nightmare.
So, anything new is being done in LabView. (Disclaimer - I don't work for National Instruments) Sure, it costs $2K for the good suite, but I guarantee you will make up for it in productivity. Plus, debugging LabView code as a beginner is waaaaay easier than debugging someone's crazy spaghetti C code. With the high turnover rate of a research university, it's very important to retain the chain of knowledge. Otherwise things progress into the realm of Black Boxes.
My opinion is not to waste your valuable research time worrying about software. Especially in quantum computing where you will be left in the dust if you fart around worrying about open source too long.
Best of luck,
Muerte
:)
thanks for explaining my joke. it's sad when people flame from ignorance...
muerte
If that rate continues, some day hard drives will become so large that processesors will not have the power to process it all....
I will know that day has arrived when the length of my winamp playlist rolls over into negative integers. :)
Muerte
AVP2 wasn't so bad either.
muerte
Those tight fit parts that absolutely fly by each other have to meet, slide, and keep a pretty good seal. Each time the timing chain is a little off, say to increase or decrease in power, they will miss a little, bonk, and get worn. Hot exhaust gasses slipping through will probably cause preignition in the little transfer tube. Nasty.
Also notice how much physical distance the compression arms of the rotor have to move each cycle. Can you imagine the heat from friction and the lubrication required? And the kinds of seals that you would need? I guess you could get decent lubrication by using the rotor as some sort of centrifugal oil pump, but still the wear would be nasty.
Consider as well that it's basically a 2 cylinder 4-stroke engine. It's gotta be a pretty good size and run at a pretty high RPM to get enough power to be really useful.
Don't count on this one.
Did you guys check the specs on this thing? They propose to use a big cylinder of Polonium 210 as a power source in the back half of the laser rifle.
Could you imagine? And you're supposed to put your head next to it to aim it?
What if your rifle takes a bullet and the Po210 is pulverized and you breathe it in?
And quite frankly, if anyone develops a man portable power source that has enough energy density to run a necessarily multi-kilowatt laser, then we probably have better things to do than send in ground troops with rifles. Robots, anyone?
dupe...
tripe...
qupe...
QUIPE!!!
Now that she's stepped down, maybe she's available for a Slashdot Interview?
But then again, maybe not. I can see the questions now...
In a Bose Einstein Condensate, when some particle comes flying in fron the vacuum and smacks an atom in the condensate, they both go flying out. You have one less atom in your condensate now, but it's about the same temperature.
You can imagine the temperature of a Fermi Gas as the apparent neatness of an upside down pyramid of blocks. At high (room) temperatures, the blocks are all jumbling around in a mess. At zero temperature, they are perfectly fitting on top of each other, filling the energy levels of the trap.
Now a hot atom comes flying in from the vacuum and takes out a block in the middle. Now the whole thing above the hole is messed up! As the atoms shuffle around to fill up the hole, this is expressed as heating.
So the fact that thy have been able to cool these atoms is a testament to their experimental rigor, especially with their vacuum system.
Just thought I would offer some insight.
Muerte
On a side note, in 1991 I bought a 40 megabyte hard drive because it was affordable (~$100). Now in 2002 I just bought an 80 Gigabyte hard drive for about $100. That's a factor of 2000 increase in storage power -> 2^11.
Now 11 * 18 months = 17 years. 1991 + 17 years = 2008! We're way ahead of schedule! Unlesss you revise Moore's law for storage and say that it doubles every 12 months, then the fit is almost perfect.
So if you compare these, each year it takes your $100 CPU longer and longer to process everything on your $100 hard drive. Eventually, hard drives will be so large that they contain more data that your CPU can process!
Just a diversion.
Muerte
then you would have to clean out the whole thing with CLR or some crap, and it would be a huge pain. and good system should be as closed as possible while still allowing for some thermal expansion of trapped air.
the trick is to find a good radiator, CHEAP. or free. maybe a heater core from a car from a junkyard? maybe the heat exchanger from a junked air conditioner?
the hard part is not getting the heat from the CPU to the water, but getting the heat from the water into the air.
muerte
I have a spare tachometer in my closet actually, so maybe I will give it a try myself...
Muerte
ChickenParmesan
SpicyThaiTofu
SuperBurrito
Note that chickenparmesan is the maximum length for a WFW filesharing system (I think, don't flame me.). Humor always has a place. Cartoon characters too.... Hmmmmm Voltron.
Anyways, just being a troll.
Muerte
just HTTP to the person's port 1214 and morpheus (or Kazaa or whatever FastTrack client i suppose) gives you a list of shared files.
THERE IS NO DANGER FROM THIS "EXPLOIT"
i think that someone creative should write a really short perl script to scan IP netblocks on port 1214, connect to HTTP and list the shared files, then create an index. you could also add port 139 to scan WFW shares while you are at it. you could create your own FastTrack "supernode" with this method, if you were really inclined.
when i read the story header i thought that it meant that any file on my hard drive was accessible via some nimda/codeRed type exploit. this is not the case.
VERDICT: story not worth posting.
Muerte
No serving food, no dealing with customers, no cleaning. Just playing computer all day.
I'm sure that there are plenty of people who would rather spend 14 hours/day playing Everyquest than work 8 hours per day at McDonalds or something. And if you focused on the most profitable items, you could probably make more.
And what if the server crashes? Can you sue Sony for lost wages?
Muerte
Then you power three 100W light bulbs for an hour. That's only 0.3kWh, or probably close to $0.05 worth of electricity.
Upon demonstration to the reporters, the three batteries on the outside are left with an "increased charge". The machine put out more than it took in *.
The secret: Four car batteries are in the box. It's self repleneshing! Demonstrate this to enough reporters, using nwe external batteries each time, and it will run forever!!!
Sigh.
*Editor's Note: If only more women were like that.
It's half the size of a deck of cards, it runs for about ten hours on one AA battery, and it acts as a USB removeable drive just like your $239 unit.
The only difference is the price. I got mine here for $70 plus $5 shipping.
Add a 256mb flash card from Pricewatch for $80 and that brings the total to a measly $150 for a 256 MB mp3 player with zero copy protection, tiny size, and great sound.
Another kind of flashdrive MP3 player is the MelloMP3 unit. It's a little bigger and uses 2xAA batteries, but i got one for $60 for my brother for christmas.
Possibly the most interesting thing here is the compatibility of CompactFlash and IDE. If you do the wiring right you can stick a CF card straight onto an IDE cable with no other translation and it will work. So my idea for everyone, stick a hard drive under the seat of your car with a small power supply, then just hook the MP3 player to the car stereo via a Line In jack, and presto, you have a 30GB Car MP3 player for less than $200, plus you can take it with you.
Anyways, I hope someone finds this useful.
Muerte
You mean that an international effort to bring drought relief and order to a country in the midst of self destruction is "no good reason"?
The special forces in Mogadishu were sent on that particular mission to arrest the henchmen of a notorious criminal who was stealing food from his own people to buy guns to steal more food from his own people. When it comes to war, it doesn't get much clearer than that.
My person favorite quote from Mr. Katz here is:
ignorant citizenry
I suppose that he means the entire world, given the number of nations involved in that particular relief effort.
Next time there is a crisis in another country where starving people need help, we can ask Jon Jatz for his opinion and we can let them all starve to death instead.
Muerte
At JPL, among, there is a group working on quantum key distribution. The aim is to have entanged photons distributed at the same rate (or almost the same rate) as the data, and to use this as a crypto key that is totally unbreakable. Untappable, unbreakable, impervious.
Doesn't it strike anyone as strange and cool that quantum computers and quantum key distribution are coming to fruition at almost exactly the same time?
muerte
so i decided to check out Groom Lake in nevada. and indeed you can see the groom lake AFB, runways, hangars and all. unfortunately, over this particular area they limit the resolution to 5-10m.
but still pretty freakin cool. i want to know when the pictures are taken so i can make signs. or at least pose provocatively.
muerte
I realize that this article is about a home MP3 system, so this may be slightly off topic, but I just bought an awesome MP3 player.
It's the Diva3032 MP3 player. I got it for $69 with 32 megs built in. But the best part is that it takes CompactFlash, up to 2 Gigs (!!!). And when you plug it in (under win2k, maybe linux?) it automatically mounts as an additional drive letter so you can drag and drop MP3's on (and off) it.
So I got a 128 MB CF card off of pricewatch for $48 and now I have a 160MB player for $120.
It's about _half_ the size of a deck of cards, and runs for (supposedly) 10 hours on a single battery. The digital display is pretty lacking, but who cares if it's in your pocket? The sound quality is good, and the volume goes high enough to hurt my ears.
I went to this after bad experiences with a JazzPiper/Cabo, and even worse experiences with the Toshiba MEA-110. The Cabo's parallel connection just plain stopped working, and the Toshiba uses a "library manager" so draconian it makes me want to die.
My current idea is this - I have seen a CompactFlash to PCMCIA adapter. Heck I have even seen a CF to IDE adapter (the wrong way though). So why not plug a freakin hard drive in it when you are in the car? I think all you need is 5V. Does anyone have any experience with this?
I promise I am not the guy selling these, but the main page is at www.mydivaplayer.com and the place i got it for $69 is at www.mydigitaldiscount.com. Shamless plugging, I know, please keep the flames to a low broil.
Just my 2 cents.
muerte
So it's been said that these things are 20% efficient at transferring heat into electrical energy.
Too bad that the conversion of mechanical energy into electrical approaches 100% in efficent generator design. Sure you lose some in the transfer of heat to mechanical, but it's way better than 20%.
The best application of this is probably in the very small scale. How about a small, silent generator for your camper that runs on propane? How about nuclear thermal batteries (ala Galileo) that are twice as efficient?
There is also some issue of scale for these devices. If you need a 1 inch square TEC to cool your processor with about 40 Watts of cooling power, if you want 4KW of electricity for you car that's et least 100 of these things plastered around the catalytic converter. Sounds expen$ive.
Not revolutionary, but neat.
Muerte
sure, everyone around the equator is kinda disappointed, but what a show!
why not embed small nuclear (or since we are daydreaming, antimatter) charges to blow it up into tiny pieces if it starts to fall.
and what about the jackass who pushes all the buttons just before he gets off?
/m
what were they thinking?
/m
I myself just recently applied toa simulated annealing algorythm to make a solenoid whose axial magnetic field varied as the square of the distance along the z-axis . . . without any bumps. If you think that's easy, try slapping solenoids together and see how it looks.
Your best bet are physicists in the Nuclear, Plasma and Astrophysics fields, as almost all they do is intensive computer simulations.
You might find some motivated BS to do your fun work for around $35K, but a high end PhD might end up wanting between $65 - $120.
Your ideal target is people with "Masters" in physics, who dropped out of PhD programs because they realized that grad schoool sucks.
You shouldn't have a hard time finding people wanting to do what you need - I find your job offer quite interesting myself, especially in the face of a possible career in academia.
Muerte
ps. what's it pay? :)