seriously now...this sounds kind of neat. cellular WiFi in a sense.
i wonder what kind of interference it would cause to other devices on the same frequency (other WiFI devices not associated with their network, cordless phones, etc).
and wouldn't this make drive by hacking easier? heck, you don't even need to drive by.
I wonder how bandwidth changes with distance from the transmitters.
FORTRAN is still very much in use by people I know that do lots of Monte Carlo simulations. Lots of people also write most of their code in C, but end up linking to FORTRAN libraries that contain routines that do the computations.
EGS (Electron Gamma Shower) in particular uses it's own variant called MORTRAN, which gets interpreted and converted to FORTRAN code for execution. MORTRAN is basically a high level set of routines that encapsulates the routines that do all the work.
Darnit. Either I didn't wait long enough or nobody bothered to show up for the Charleston meetup.
Showed up at the appointed place about 10 minutes before the appointed time. Waited around for a while, but didn't see anyone claiming any affiliation to the meetup. nobody with signs or anything. checked with the hostess, and she hadn't seen anybody there for the meetup. left to check out the bookstore, came back 15 minutes later and still nobody. by then, the wait for a table was about 40 minutes according to the hostess, so i decided to bag it and go do other things.
unfortunate, because i was looking forward to meeting other/.ers in the area and see how geeky these people were. oh well, maybe next month.
There as a show on the Discovery Channel last night (17Jun02) that was talking about efforts to recover the contents of the erased tape. It was quite interesting. Not quite sure what the show was called, because I missed the first 10 minutes of it.
There was a very informative interview with somebody from one of the companies competing for the project. They used some pretty sophisticated computer processing and filtering algorithms on other tapes and actually could recover intelligible conversations.
The companies competing for the project are going to have to prove they are capable of recovering an erased tape by using a demo tape that was erased with the same tape recorder used by Nixon.
The guy they interviewed was talking about building a specialized unit with a bunch of read heads that would be used to digitize audio from the erased tape (reading the tape in DLT fashion it seemed).
these things aren't meant for emergency deliveries of drugs or anything. they deliver supplies on a routine schedule to *replenish* the stocks on hand in the units. Drugs that are needed on an emergent basis, then they're usually kept on the unit and replenished before the stock runs out. And if there's something that's needed that isn't in stock, the nurse will just call the pharmacy and have someone deliver it.
we have a couple of these in our hospital that deliver blood products to the OR. watching them maneouver using their sonar is pretty interesting sometimes.
These things save a tremendous amount of manpower and free up time and personnel that would otherwise be used to ferry stuff back and forth.
Numerical Recipies I think would also be a good addition to a game programmer's library wanting to introduce more realistic physics. It covers a good deal of numerical computing algorithms from integration to simulation.
Physics texts cover the physics behind the action, but a book like Numerical Recipies goes over the implementation and would be a very good complementary book.
The other thing to keep in mind is that the more accurate the physics gets, the more computationally intensive the game becomes, so a game may not be able to achieve those 150 fps everybody seems to want when doing accurate physics simulations.
I was watching about an hour outside Charleston SC with a few astro profs and other students from one of the local colleges. Fantastic show. Started off with some meteors from Taurus, then around 1 EST, saw some spectacular earthgrazers. Long bright green trails that stretched across half the sky. At the peak, I was easily seeing meteors every few seconds, and sometimes 3 or 4 at once. As someone else said, most of the more spectacular ones were seen at zenith or towards the horizon rather than from the radiant. This will be one show I'll remember for quite some time.
Jupiter and the Andromeda galaxy also provided some nice viewing while we were waiting for the main show to start.
It think it is slightly premature to hail this as the cure for cancer. The problem is without a subscrition we can't even get to the Science magazine [sciencemag.org] website. I'd love to peruse the article but i think it needs registration, and the free version seems to only give abstracts. We don't have proper figures on their tests so there's no way we can individually verify what the article is saying.
Just take a trip over to your library. Just about any public library worth its spit ought to have a subscription to Science. If not, trip on over to the local university library. They at least ought to have one.
Nanogenerators?? good grief. The scientists involved seem to be taking quite a bit of license to make it appealing to the general public. The radioactive atom doesn't 'power' anything.
Radiation therapy (along with chemotherapy) is really a brute force method for dealing with cancer. You use radiation or chemicals to kill cells. It just happens that the cancer cells get killed off faster than normal cells.
The principle of radioimmunotherapy (tagging antibodies with radiactive elements) has been around for quite some time now. The only new and revolutionary part of this particular project seems to be that the radioactivity is encased in a buckyball which is tagged to the antibody. I suspect this is to help keep the activity attached to the antibody. One of the major problems with existing tags is that the radioactive decay breaks the bonds attaching the atoms to the antibody so you end up with a bunch of free radioactivity floating around the body instead of attached to the antibody.
My only gripe about the N cells is that HP built the 28S to use 3 of them. I used to be able to get them individually at the university bookstore, but now I can only find them packaged in pairs, so unless you've got another device that only uses one N cell, the other one ends up getting wasted because by the time the batteries need to be changed again, the lone N cell from the last batch is dead.
oh well.:)
still won't trade in my 28S for anything. it was my very first PDA in fact. There was a simple address book program I found, and even a clock program. Now if only I could find my manuals...
If you write to HP, they'll send you a new battery cover. Mine broke off when I accidently dropped it, so I wrote them and to my surprise they mailed me a new battery door cover.
The 28S is the only calculator I've seen that uses N cells.
My 28S was the very first purchase I made on the first credit card I got back in university. Lots of money to shell out for someone fresh out of high school (back in 1988), but after an engineer friend of mine showed me his, I had to have one.
It's been the only calculator I've ever needed ever since, and still serves me faithfully, although I don't have the occasion to use it quite as often as I used to. I've heard people complain about the clamshell form factor, but it's the toughest and most durable calculator I've ever seen. I had a bit of a scare a few years back when I pulled it out and discovered the batteries had leaked all over it. Thankfully, cleaning off the battery contacts brought it back to life.
My brother got himself a 48GX a few years ago, and was bragging about it, but I could still calculate circles around him with my 28S.:)
BTW, the 28S currently exists as a financial calculator in the HP line.
There are plenty of uses. I work in a radiology department where all our images are acquired digitally instead of on film. We acquire an estimated 4-5 TB worth of images each year. Our current archives (optical disk) will only hold about 1 months worth of data online before patient images get taken offline and put on a shelf. The ability to have a cheap TB online archive would mean significantly faster image retrievals when radiologists want to compare a patient's images with a previous study. Especially important when hospitals are cutting budgets back in a big way, but workloads keep going up.
My first encounter with a slide rule was after a high school math exam (back in 1987). I finished the exam, and walked back to hand it in to my teacher and saw him using one to calculate percentages with one. Intrigued, I asked him about it and he showed me how it worked based on logarithms. I thought it was really cool and asked him where I could get one. He reached into one of his desk drawers, which was full of them, pulled one out and gave it to me. Thrilled, my next stop was to the library to find any books I could get my hands on about how to use one. Taught myself the basics of using a slide rule. I was even using it to do some of my physics homework when I got into university. I hadn't gotten very fast at it, but i could get the right answers. Then I got myself an HP-28S, and the slide rule now sits on my shelf with my collection of artifacts. I still pull it out now and then to play with it and show it to the occasional person that asks about it.
With this latest shot in the MHz war, I often find myself wondering if there's some other way to increase processing power other than cranking up the clock frequency. RISC systems offer reasonably comparable computing power for usually less than half the clock frequency of Intel/AMD chips (look at Sun's UltraSPARC chips now). Are there other ways of getting the same horsepower for lower speeds?
It would seem off hand that an immediate benefit of this would be lower power requirements and significantly less cooling needs. OC'ers routinely chill their CPUs to get to even higher speeds, but at this rate how soon will it be before CPU chilling becomes standard or required?
stop the madness!!!
:)
Re:Besides cardboard characters, inconsistent too.
on
Dune: House Harkonnen
·
· Score: 2
Seeing the Dune movie on SciFi a little while ago and reading Dune: House Atreides prompted me to start reading the entire series once again (much to the chagrin of my fiancee), and I don't recall reading anything about Alia getting fat. There was mention about her maintaining a youthful appearance, which made people think she had become Abomination, but nothing about being fat. Towards the end she also took on numerous willing lovers (most of which ended up dead eventually), which seems somewhat inconsistent if she had become fat and lazy.
Maybe I need to read it again. I'm half way through Chapterhouse:Dune, which I've always thought of as Herbert going off on some kind of strange religious episode or something and not at all in the same vein as the rest of the series.
I also had a problem with House Harkonen inventing the first no-ship in Dune: House Atreides. Completely against what was said in Heretics about the discovery of Leto II's archives in the first primitive no-chamber.
I think I'll wait until this latest installment appears in the local library before checking it out.
I happen to have a copy of the 2nd edition (the red book), and have found it immensely useful and valuable. Well worth the price, especially if you're in a job where you deal with a number of unix systems, or want to be a more accomplished sysadmin. Next to O'Reilly's Unix Power Tools, this book was probably one of the best investments I ever made.
I recall seeing somewhere a floppy disk adaptor for the sony memory sticks. Think it was in a PC Connection catalog. I saw them in connection with the Sony digital cameras that still use floppies for storage. You just pop the memory stick into this floppy like adaptor, stick it in and go. Seems like something like that would work perfectly.
Another barrier, particularly for software written for diagnostic or therapeutic applications is that the FDA requires 501(k) clearance before the software can be used on patients, and this requires ex(t/p)ensive testing and trials.
Recently, one piece of software commonly used to calculate radiation doses to patients from nuclear medicine procedures was yanked because it could potentially be used in determining doses for therapeutic treatments.
This is a generalization that doesn't necessarily apply to all of Canada. The high school curriculum is set by the provincial education department. In Alberta, introductory calculus is covered by Math 31, which is one of the more advanced courses most university-bound students end up taking. It covered enough calculus to give you a reasonable grounding for a first year university calculus course. At least that was the case when I went through about 10 years ago. Things may have changed since then. Math 10/20/30 utterly bored me, and it wasn't until I got to Math 31 where it got somewhat interesting. Not everyone went the Math 31 route though.
On the other hand, a friend of mine went to UMaryland to do a PhD in Physics, and early on he was telling me that his first year PhD course work pretty much replicated what we had studied in our 4th year honours undergrad. Having had a chance to look at the undergrad physics programs of a few US universities, it seems that most of the programs run a year behind what I went through at University of Alberta.
Slashdot Mirror
and don't forget the big honkin' UPS to keep these things going long enough to shut down if power goes out. UPS' this size don't come cheap.
what kind of unit is a sq/km?
seriously now...this sounds kind of neat. cellular WiFi in a sense.
i wonder what kind of interference it would cause to other devices on the same frequency (other WiFI devices not associated with their network, cordless phones, etc).
and wouldn't this make drive by hacking easier? heck, you don't even need to drive by.
I wonder how bandwidth changes with distance from the transmitters.
I think Saving Private Ryan would be cool in Imax format. Especially the opening scene of the D-Day invasion.
FORTRAN is still very much in use by people I know that do lots of Monte Carlo simulations. Lots of people also write most of their code in C, but end up linking to FORTRAN libraries that contain routines that do the computations.
EGS (Electron Gamma Shower) in particular uses it's own variant called MORTRAN, which gets interpreted and converted to FORTRAN code for execution. MORTRAN is basically a high level set of routines that encapsulates the routines that do all the work.
Darnit. Either I didn't wait long enough or nobody bothered to show up for the Charleston meetup.
/.ers in the area and see how geeky these people were. oh well, maybe next month.
Showed up at the appointed place about 10 minutes before the appointed time. Waited around for a while, but didn't see anyone claiming any affiliation to the meetup. nobody with signs or anything. checked with the hostess, and she hadn't seen anybody there for the meetup. left to check out the bookstore, came back 15 minutes later and still nobody. by then, the wait for a table was about 40 minutes according to the hostess, so i decided to bag it and go do other things.
unfortunate, because i was looking forward to meeting other
There as a show on the Discovery Channel last night (17Jun02) that was talking about efforts to recover the contents of the erased tape. It was quite interesting. Not quite sure what the show was called, because I missed the first 10 minutes of it.
There was a very informative interview with somebody from one of the companies competing for the project. They used some pretty sophisticated computer processing and filtering algorithms on other tapes and actually could recover intelligible conversations.
The companies competing for the project are going to have to prove they are capable of recovering an erased tape by using a demo tape that was erased with the same tape recorder used by Nixon.
The guy they interviewed was talking about building a specialized unit with a bunch of read heads that would be used to digitize audio from the erased tape (reading the tape in DLT fashion it seemed).
these things aren't meant for emergency deliveries of drugs or anything. they deliver supplies on a routine schedule to *replenish* the stocks on hand in the units. Drugs that are needed on an emergent basis, then they're usually kept on the unit and replenished before the stock runs out. And if there's something that's needed that isn't in stock, the nurse will just call the pharmacy and have someone deliver it.
we have a couple of these in our hospital that deliver blood products to the OR. watching them maneouver using their sonar is pretty interesting sometimes.
These things save a tremendous amount of manpower and free up time and personnel that would otherwise be used to ferry stuff back and forth.
Windows Compact Edition
WinCE
From Webster's dictionary
wince: To shrink or start involuntarily, as in pain or distress
WinCE: to shrink back involuntarily (as from pain) : FLINCH
Numerical Recipes in C : The Art of Scientific Computing
Comes in a variety of flavours including C++ and Fortran.
Numerical Recipies I think would also be a good addition to a game programmer's library wanting to introduce more realistic physics. It covers a good deal of numerical computing algorithms from integration to simulation.
Physics texts cover the physics behind the action, but a book like Numerical Recipies goes over the implementation and would be a very good complementary book.
The other thing to keep in mind is that the more accurate the physics gets, the more computationally intensive the game becomes, so a game may not be able to achieve those 150 fps everybody seems to want when doing accurate physics simulations.
I was watching about an hour outside Charleston SC with a few astro profs and other students from one of the local colleges. Fantastic show. Started off with some meteors from Taurus, then around 1 EST, saw some spectacular earthgrazers. Long bright green trails that stretched across half the sky. At the peak, I was easily seeing meteors every few seconds, and sometimes 3 or 4 at once. As someone else said, most of the more spectacular ones were seen at zenith or towards the horizon rather than from the radiant. This will be one show I'll remember for quite some time.
Jupiter and the Andromeda galaxy also provided some nice viewing while we were waiting for the main show to start.
It think it is slightly premature to hail this as the cure for cancer. The problem is without a subscrition we can't even get to the Science magazine [sciencemag.org] website. I'd love to peruse the article but i think it needs registration, and the free version seems to only give abstracts. We don't have proper figures on their tests so there's no way we can individually verify what the article is saying.
Just take a trip over to your library. Just about any public library worth its spit ought to have a subscription to Science. If not, trip on over to the local university library. They at least ought to have one.
Nanogenerators?? good grief. The scientists involved seem to be taking quite a bit of license to make it appealing to the general public. The radioactive atom doesn't 'power' anything.
Radiation therapy (along with chemotherapy) is really a brute force method for dealing with cancer. You use radiation or chemicals to kill cells. It just happens that the cancer cells get killed off faster than normal cells.
The principle of radioimmunotherapy (tagging antibodies with radiactive elements) has been around for quite some time now. The only new and revolutionary part of this particular project seems to be that the radioactivity is encased in a buckyball which is tagged to the antibody. I suspect this is to help keep the activity attached to the antibody. One of the major problems with existing tags is that the radioactive decay breaks the bonds attaching the atoms to the antibody so you end up with a bunch of free radioactivity floating around the body instead of attached to the antibody.
My only gripe about the N cells is that HP built the 28S to use 3 of them. I used to be able to get them individually at the university bookstore, but now I can only find them packaged in pairs, so unless you've got another device that only uses one N cell, the other one ends up getting wasted because by the time the batteries need to be changed again, the lone N cell from the last batch is dead.
:)
oh well.
still won't trade in my 28S for anything. it was my very first PDA in fact. There was a simple address book program I found, and even a clock program. Now if only I could find my manuals...
If you write to HP, they'll send you a new battery cover. Mine broke off when I accidently dropped it, so I wrote them and to my surprise they mailed me a new battery door cover.
The 28S is the only calculator I've seen that uses N cells.
:)
My 28S was the very first purchase I made on the first credit card I got back in university. Lots of money to shell out for someone fresh out of high school (back in 1988), but after an engineer friend of mine showed me his, I had to have one.
It's been the only calculator I've ever needed ever since, and still serves me faithfully, although I don't have the occasion to use it quite as often as I used to. I've heard people complain about the clamshell form factor, but it's the toughest and most durable calculator I've ever seen. I had a bit of a scare a few years back when I pulled it out and discovered the batteries had leaked all over it. Thankfully, cleaning off the battery contacts brought it back to life.
My brother got himself a 48GX a few years ago, and was bragging about it, but I could still calculate circles around him with my 28S.
BTW, the 28S currently exists as a financial calculator in the HP line.
There are plenty of uses. I work in a radiology department where all our images are acquired digitally instead of on film. We acquire an estimated 4-5 TB worth of images each year. Our current archives (optical disk) will only hold about 1 months worth of data online before patient images get taken offline and put on a shelf. The ability to have a cheap TB online archive would mean significantly faster image retrievals when radiologists want to compare a patient's images with a previous study. Especially important when hospitals are cutting budgets back in a big way, but workloads keep going up.
My first encounter with a slide rule was after a high school math exam (back in 1987). I finished the exam, and walked back to hand it in to my teacher and saw him using one to calculate percentages with one. Intrigued, I asked him about it and he showed me how it worked based on logarithms. I thought it was really cool and asked him where I could get one. He reached into one of his desk drawers, which was full of them, pulled one out and gave it to me. Thrilled, my next stop was to the library to find any books I could get my hands on about how to use one. Taught myself the basics of using a slide rule. I was even using it to do some of my physics homework when I got into university. I hadn't gotten very fast at it, but i could get the right answers. Then I got myself an HP-28S, and the slide rule now sits on my shelf with my collection of artifacts. I still pull it out now and then to play with it and show it to the occasional person that asks about it.
With this latest shot in the MHz war, I often find myself wondering if there's some other way to increase processing power other than cranking up the clock frequency. RISC systems offer reasonably comparable computing power for usually less than half the clock frequency of Intel/AMD chips (look at Sun's UltraSPARC chips now). Are there other ways of getting the same horsepower for lower speeds?
It would seem off hand that an immediate benefit of this would be lower power requirements and significantly less cooling needs. OC'ers routinely chill their CPUs to get to even higher speeds, but at this rate how soon will it be before CPU chilling becomes standard or required?
stop the madness!!!
:)
Seeing the Dune movie on SciFi a little while ago and reading Dune: House Atreides prompted me to start reading the entire series once again (much to the chagrin of my fiancee), and I don't recall reading anything about Alia getting fat. There was mention about her maintaining a youthful appearance, which made people think she had become Abomination, but nothing about being fat. Towards the end she also took on numerous willing lovers (most of which ended up dead eventually), which seems somewhat inconsistent if she had become fat and lazy.
Maybe I need to read it again. I'm half way through Chapterhouse:Dune, which I've always thought of as Herbert going off on some kind of strange religious episode or something and not at all in the same vein as the rest of the series.
I also had a problem with House Harkonen inventing the first no-ship in Dune: House Atreides. Completely against what was said in Heretics about the discovery of Leto II's archives in the first primitive no-chamber.
I think I'll wait until this latest installment appears in the local library before checking it out.
I happen to have a copy of the 2nd edition (the red book), and have found it immensely useful and valuable. Well worth the price, especially if you're in a job where you deal with a number of unix systems, or want to be a more accomplished sysadmin. Next to O'Reilly's Unix Power Tools, this book was probably one of the best investments I ever made.
imabug
I recall seeing somewhere a floppy disk adaptor for the sony memory sticks. Think it was in a PC Connection catalog. I saw them in connection with the Sony digital cameras that still use floppies for storage. You just pop the memory stick into this floppy like adaptor, stick it in and go. Seems like something like that would work perfectly.
Another barrier, particularly for software written for diagnostic or therapeutic applications is that the FDA requires 501(k) clearance before the software can be used on patients, and this requires ex(t/p)ensive testing and trials.
Recently, one piece of software commonly used to calculate radiation doses to patients from nuclear medicine procedures was yanked because it could potentially be used in determining doses for therapeutic treatments.
Imabug
This is a generalization that doesn't necessarily apply to all of Canada. The high school curriculum is set by the provincial education department. In Alberta, introductory calculus is covered by Math 31, which is one of the more advanced courses most university-bound students end up taking. It covered enough calculus to give you a reasonable grounding for a first year university calculus course. At least that was the case when I went through about 10 years ago. Things may have changed since then. Math 10/20/30 utterly bored me, and it wasn't until I got to Math 31 where it got somewhat interesting. Not everyone went the Math 31 route though.
On the other hand, a friend of mine went to UMaryland to do a PhD in Physics, and early on he was telling me that his first year PhD course work pretty much replicated what we had studied in our 4th year honours undergrad. Having had a chance to look at the undergrad physics programs of a few US universities, it seems that most of the programs run a year behind what I went through at University of Alberta.
But now I ramble...
imabug