I think Linuxppc is a great way to salvage that old mac. There are lots of old macs around that aren't very useful with MacOS, but become a very usable Linux box when LinuxPPC is installed.
I took an abandoned PPC 7100 which could barely run Netscape for just a few minutes without crashing, installed LinuxPPC and it became an ultra-reliable Linux box. I could use all my fave tools such as netscape, emacs, python, mutt, samba, and gcc. And it was fast enough for me, and worked as a decent X-terminal.
I liked the section in Ch. 2 on participatory networked media. Slashdot doesn't fit the bill because of the centralized control and the fact that the moderation system tends to filter out content that is slightly outside the slashdot mainstream.
However, slash-like technology could be adapted to give the type of functionality described in the IRG section (IRG means "information routing groups"). Imagine individual subscribers to slashdot being able to "pick" from among editors and moderators or use their personal scoring system for weighting the moderators' ratings. To be really cool, though, it would all have to be peer-to-peer.:)
1. Photonic band gap materials. Prof. Pendry has written several papers on this subject so I imagine this negative index work is related, i.e., it would be realized as some sort of photonic band structure material. You can think of photonic band gap materials as 3-dimensional diffraction gratings. In theory, such a material could "trap" a photon, reducing its velocity to zero.
2. Near field optics. In one incarnation, the near field microscope uses a sharp AFM tip which focuses light (which is an oscillating EM field) like how a lightning rod focuses static electric fields. The resolution of this microscope is a few nanometers or perhaps sub-nanometer. This surpasses the "diffraction barrier" by better than a factor of one hundred.
I've heard this kind of shakedown is a common Microsoft sales tactic... Quietly threaten to sue large corporation/university/government, then offer a multi-million dollar "site license" deal as the only way to ensure no future embarassing lawsuits from MS.
I believe this is behind the site licenses at many universities across the U.S. I think this sort of strong-arm sales tactic ought to be illegal (and I hope it gets taken care of in the final antitrust judgment).
Point 1: Ultraviolet radiation IS ionizing, silly. And you're right, it does cause cancer.
Point 2: I don't believe you should believe EVERY empirical result seriously. There is statistical (sampling) error and often human error. A few papers with iffy results is not enough to overturn hundreds of papers to the contrary. Do you believe the earth is flat, too, because there are a few people out there that believe that? From what I've read, NOT ONE of the results you point to has been reproduced.
OK, first of all, I'm relatively certain the magnetic fields in the papers you are talking about are MUCH higher than the earth's magnetic field or the transient magnetic field of a cell phone.
Secondly, are you siding with the quacks who are prescribing "magnetic therapy" for backaches and cancer and such?
As a laser physicist and someone who has ACTUALLY READ several research papers on both sides of the subject, I'd like to express that I agree wholeheartedly with Mr. Tackhead's post saying there is basically nil evidence for health risk from low-level, low-frequency EM radiation.
The American Cancer Society, the USFDA, and numerous government reports have reached the conclusion that EMR from cell phones is not a risk to human health.
I'm glad Mr. Tackhead's post was moderated up, this means the moderators must be getting a clue.
When microwaves are absorbed my molecules, the microwave energy is turned into heat.
While I will stop short of saying that reports implicating microwave energy as causing damage to living cells are junk science, I will say that such results have been very difficult to reproduce. We can't raise the alarm about possible risks from microwaves based on a few (IMO shoddy) research results. You have to wait until the number and quality of research results reaches a critical number. Many millions of dollars have been spent, many, many articles have been written, and the vast preponderance of data point to the conclusion that low-level microwave radiation does not pose a health risk.
I always thought the biggest mistake Sun and (formerly) DEC made was not flooding the market in the early '90s and going after the desktop, back when SPARC and Alpha were much, much, faster than Intel/486 and Motorola/680x0 and Un*x was much better, more stable than windows or macos (of course, un*x is still better, but IMO the gap is smaller). I guess they were worried about giving up their big margins on servers.
I think there is another window of opportunity here for Sun and Compaq/Alpha to strike. They are 64 bit already. Open Source is closing the applications gap and removing hardware-dependency. It would be cool if they could win by selling midrange CPU/mobo combinations at prices similar to what you see on pricewatch for midrange Athlon and PIII.
I noticed the XMPS page last updated 6/13 and the latest version of XMPS is linked against smpeg 0.10, but since then smpeg 0.40 was released. You need SDL 1.1.3 to compile. The "gtv" application that comes with smpeg is simple, but works well on all the mpeg-1 I've thrown at it, such as the Matrix South Park Trailer. Hats off to the developer(s) at Loki for their fine contributions to free software!
Well, my Mom named me Jason in '67 and there were lots of Jasons in that year. When I showed up at Kindergarten there were two other Jasons in a class of 20ish students (girls and boys). Your mom didn't know any ADULT Jasons, but if she asked around the neighborhood, she would have found dozens of toddlers named Jason. I asked around when naming my kid, so I avoided the current crop of overly common names (Megan, etc.)
Now onto topic. My buddy Jason was served with child support papers, (they tried to garnishee his wages!) but they later figured out that the Jason they wanted was of a different race. I have a doppleganger with the same name who is some right-wing christian weirdo around L.A., whereas I'm a left-wing atheist weirdo.
First they infiltrate our popular culture with Neil Young, Anne Murray, and Peter Jennings. And now they're after our top-secret hard drives!
It's scary, very scary. They look like Americans, talk like Americans (except for "eh", "zed", and better grammar), and are pretty much allowed to cross the border willy-nilly.
Meanwhile, they're driving energy prices up (they're the U.S.'s biggest petroleum supplier, if you include natural gas), and for god sakes, they have nationalized health care!
This is one of those things that pushed me and a LOT of other people away from proprietary Unix and proprietary Unix software a long time ago, wasting all that time tending to stupid license managers and expiring license files. Win/Mac users would (rightfully) point out to me that this was a big waste of time compared to the simplicity of installing shrinkwrapped win/mac software and typing in a serial number. Of course, my solution to this problem was to ditch proprietary software altogether.
There's a reason why popup boxes for administrator access are unpopular: It's too easy to make a mock popup box in order to snarf passwords. That's one reason (the only reason?) why you have to three-finger-salute in order to log in to NT, it's a bit harder for the trojan to grab the sysreq that's generated by Ctrl-Alt-Del.
IMO, the NT style login-via-sysreq would be a good feature to add to Linux. It wouldn't be too difficult to do. It's probably already in place in the more secure Linux distro's, but I haven't checked them out, since I'm not that paranoid about my co-workers putting trojan password sniffers on my box.
So IBM is fabbing alphas at 1.2 GHz, meanwhile the POWER line, which is their baby, seems to be stuck at 500 MHz or so (last time I checked). What gives?
BTW, an Alpha I purchased a few years back is STILL faster at floating point than the latest from Intel or AMD (OK, the Athlon is close).
Let's say s copy of Jumpman for the Commodore 64 was cracked in 1983 by the Berlin Cracking Service and widely distributed. I'd say the statute of limitations on the original crime is long passed, and since they (BCS) effectively destroyed any value of the original copyright, further copying at this point no longer constitutes a crime.
Very interesting ideas, Jonathan. I'm sure you'll soon be getting visits from the guys in dark suits soon.:)
I was thinking the way to distribute data over multiple servers and keep track of connectivity information, and handle all the decryption and forwarding http connections would be to have a (possibly somewhat hacked) Apache with a MySQL or other database to hold the bits of distributed data and the database of other peer/servers, along with Mod_Perl or PHP to assemble web pages and do searches and such.
Sounds kind of like slashdot, which makes me wonder if the answer to Slashdot's copyright problems is some sort of anonymous encryption-based distributed slashdot. Makes me want to take a look at Slashcode and see what I could cook up...
Sure, lots of people claim to know English. But when it comes to SPELLING and pronunciation, well, that cuts it down to MAYBE a few million people who really know English. English spelling and pronunciation rules just don't make sense. And, despite Sam Clemens' attempts, they never will.
In Spanish, spelling and pronunciation have an almost perfect 1:1 mapping, except for the occasional silent 'h' and probably a few other things I'm forgetting. Verb conjugation is a little tough, as is the widespread use of reflexive verb constructions. And most native English speakers can't roll their R's properly.
But at least if we go Spanish there will be a more intelligible written record, while, as we see every day on Slashdot, native and non-native English speakers often mangle written English so badly as to render it unintelligible.
Ack, this "microwaves cause cancer" stuff is getting moderated up!
That sounds good (lots of handwaving about dipoles and such), but these tests that proclaim an effect of microwaves on gene expression don't hold up to scrutiny. I found only one paper, from the early 90's, which claimed to measure the effects of microwaves on gene expression. And again, this is due to HEATING by INTENSE microwave pulses. Like putting a cat in a microwave oven. We're talking kilowatts, or higher, per cc.
Sure, microwaves can break very weak bonds, such as hydrogen bonds, that are broken and reformed all the time at room temperature. In any case, the best physicists and chemists can't seem to get any net, measurable, non-uniform breaking of hydrogen bonds in solution by using microwaves. The effect is identical to heating. If someone did achieve non-uniform bond breaking using microwaves, they'd make millions or billions from the idea, using it to reduce side reactions, increase yield, and so on. Of course, microwaves ARE used in chemicals processing, but for heating, not for quantum control. And there are chemists and physicists trying to develop quantum control of chemical reactions, using ultrashort pulses of near IR, visible, and UV light.
I still say the vast majority of knowledgeable chemists and physicists (such as J.D. Jackson at Berkeley, who is quite vocal on this topic) concur that there is no effect of low-level radio waves on living tissue. So you can all take off the aluminum foil hats and relax.
I'm sure the poster was well-intentioned, but you REALLY SHOULDN'T speculate about things you know nothing about and start trying to scare people. We know a lot about radio waves, LOTS of research has been done. And they aren't dangerous at these levels.
This satellite or cell phone radiation scare is one of those things that just doesn't die, no matter how many times the vast majority of scientists (plus or minus a very few crackpots) try to set things straight.
To cause damage to animal or plant tissue, electromagnetic radiation needs to either cook it by raising its temperature (lots of watts, like in a microwave or a solar reflector), or have ENOUGH ENERGY PER PHOTON to ionize it. Radio wave and microwave photons don't have enough energy to ionize or break chemical bonds in living tissue. They're less dangerous than infrared radiation (heat). UV, X-rays, and Gamma rays have enough energy per photon to ionize or break chemical bonds in living tissue.
If microwaves were so dangerous, we would have all already been killed by the cosmic background radiation left over by the big bang.
I saw in the above posting that someone is working on free video cards. That would be great because:
1. We're all sick and tired of paying $200-$300 for a glorified bit pump.
2. It has traditionally been hard to get video card specs for writing drivers. Having knowledge of how each gate is wired would solve that problem (and punish the bull-headed, short-sighted vendors!).
3. This is an area undergoing rapid development. Open/free development works well in this environment.
4. Could borrow ideas (or at least the instruction set and software driver architecture) from Mesa and related free software projects. The potential synergies are tremendous!
I read Eigler's quantum corral paper in '93 and have seen him promote this stuff at science conferences.
The quantum corral (a bunch of electronic wiggles inside a ring of atoms on a surface) was due to Cu surface states quantized by the ring boundary (a quantum size effect). Not a big deal, we've known about the existence of Cu surface states for several decades, they show up in photoemission experiments.
If you make a stadium shape instead of a circular ring, you get strange chaotic wiggles (instead of the symmetric cylindrical Bessel functions), that in the '80s were hyped as "quantum chaos".
Now it's hyped as quantum computing. Oh brother. There are more obvious, simple, and more easily engineered ways of getting information from point A to point B without wires, such as by transmitting light.
There really is very good evidence out there that Cold Fusion, of the Pons and Fleischmann variety, did NOT happen, doesn't work, and nearly all positive results can be attributed to simple error.
The fact is, some scientists are sloppy, or get a little overeager when looking at preliminary results. Or they get greedy. Scientists aren't perfect. Neither is scientific equipment. So from time to time we get an amazing "discovery" that doesn't hold water. We have to ACCEPT the overwhelming evidence that the initial claims were wrong.
One aspect of science that makes this process difficult is that there are no absolute truths in science, only evidence and a loose consensus.
For further reading on the short and interesting times of cold fusion, check out Bad Science, by Gary Taubes.
Prof. Lederman, As a Ph.D. scientist (toiling away as a postdoc), I think there's a cycle between big and small budget science. Early work on subatomic particles and much of the experimental work that gave rise to quantum mechanics was fairly low budget. Then came the bigger and bigger accelerators and articles in Phys. Rev. Lett. with a list of 50 authors.
But (in my opinion) the most important recent findings in the field of physics have happened on a tabletop or small evacuated chamber, such as scanning-tunneling microscopy, high Tc superconductivity, and Bose-Einstein condensation. Funding agencies are aggressively promoting research in "nanotechnology".
In your opinion, is the era of truly huge scientific experiments over (perhaps a one-time frenzy fueled by the cold war?), or is the process cyclical, or is it a damped oscillation, where eventually there will be a more steady flow of funding and important findings in both categories?
Slashdot Mirror
I think Linuxppc is a great way to salvage that old mac. There are lots of old macs around that aren't very useful with MacOS, but become a very usable Linux box when LinuxPPC is installed.
I took an abandoned PPC 7100 which could barely run Netscape for just a few minutes without crashing, installed LinuxPPC and it became an ultra-reliable Linux box. I could use all my fave tools such as netscape, emacs, python, mutt, samba, and gcc. And it was fast enough for me, and worked as a decent X-terminal.
I liked the section in Ch. 2 on participatory networked media. Slashdot doesn't fit the bill because of the centralized control and the fact that the moderation system tends to filter out content that is slightly outside the slashdot mainstream.
:)
However, slash-like technology could be adapted to give the type of functionality described in the IRG section (IRG means "information routing groups"). Imagine individual subscribers to slashdot being able to "pick" from among editors and moderators or use their personal scoring system for weighting the moderators' ratings. To be really cool, though, it would all have to be peer-to-peer.
1. Photonic band gap materials. Prof. Pendry has written several papers on this subject so I imagine this negative index work is related, i.e., it would be realized as some sort of photonic band structure material. You can think of photonic band gap materials as 3-dimensional diffraction gratings. In theory, such a material could "trap" a photon, reducing its velocity to zero.
2. Near field optics. In one incarnation, the near field microscope uses a sharp AFM tip which focuses light (which is an oscillating EM field) like how a lightning rod focuses static electric fields. The resolution of this microscope is a few nanometers or perhaps sub-nanometer. This surpasses the "diffraction barrier" by better than a factor of one hundred.
I've heard this kind of shakedown is a common Microsoft sales tactic... Quietly threaten to sue large corporation/university/government, then offer a multi-million dollar "site license" deal as the only way to ensure no future embarassing lawsuits from MS.
I believe this is behind the site licenses at many universities across the U.S. I think this sort of strong-arm sales tactic ought to be illegal (and I hope it gets taken care of in the final antitrust judgment).
Point 1: Ultraviolet radiation IS ionizing, silly. And you're right, it does cause cancer.
Point 2: I don't believe you should believe EVERY empirical result seriously. There is statistical (sampling) error and often human error. A few papers with iffy results is not enough to overturn hundreds of papers to the contrary. Do you believe the earth is flat, too, because there are a few people out there that believe that? From what I've read, NOT ONE of the results you point to has been reproduced.
OK, first of all, I'm relatively certain the magnetic fields in the papers you are talking about are MUCH higher than the earth's magnetic field or the transient magnetic field of a cell phone.
Secondly, are you siding with the quacks who are prescribing "magnetic therapy" for backaches and cancer and such?
As a laser physicist and someone who has ACTUALLY READ several research papers on both sides of the subject, I'd like to express that I agree wholeheartedly with Mr. Tackhead's post saying there is basically nil evidence for health risk from low-level, low-frequency EM radiation.
The American Cancer Society, the USFDA, and numerous government reports have reached the conclusion that EMR from cell phones is not a risk to human health.
I'm glad Mr. Tackhead's post was moderated up, this means the moderators must be getting a clue.
When microwaves are absorbed my molecules, the microwave energy is turned into heat.
While I will stop short of saying that reports implicating microwave energy as causing damage to living cells are junk science, I will say that such results have been very difficult to reproduce. We can't raise the alarm about possible risks from microwaves based on a few (IMO shoddy) research results. You have to wait until the number and quality of research results reaches a critical number. Many millions of dollars have been spent, many, many articles have been written, and the vast preponderance of data point to the conclusion that low-level microwave radiation does not pose a health risk.
I always thought the biggest mistake Sun and (formerly) DEC made was not flooding the market in the early '90s and going after the desktop, back when SPARC and Alpha were much, much, faster than Intel/486 and Motorola/680x0 and Un*x was much better, more stable than windows or macos (of course, un*x is still better, but IMO the gap is smaller). I guess they were worried about giving up their big margins on servers.
I think there is another window of opportunity here for Sun and Compaq/Alpha to strike. They are 64 bit already. Open Source is closing the applications gap and removing hardware-dependency. It would be cool if they could win by selling midrange CPU/mobo combinations at prices similar to what you see on pricewatch for midrange Athlon and PIII.
OK, It'll never happen, but I can dream
I noticed the XMPS page last updated 6/13 and the latest version of XMPS is linked against smpeg 0.10, but since then smpeg 0.40 was released. You need SDL 1.1.3 to compile. The "gtv" application that comes with smpeg is simple, but works well on all the mpeg-1 I've thrown at it, such as the Matrix South Park Trailer. Hats off to the developer(s) at Loki for their fine contributions to free software!
Why use .ogg as the file extension. Why not an extension based on "Vorbis": .VBS
Oh wait, that one's already taken, it means "Virus Building Script".
Well, my Mom named me Jason in '67 and there were lots of Jasons in that year. When I showed up at Kindergarten there were two other Jasons in a class of 20ish students (girls and boys). Your mom didn't know any ADULT Jasons, but if she asked around the neighborhood, she would have found dozens of toddlers named Jason. I asked around when naming my kid, so I avoided the current crop of overly common names (Megan, etc.)
Now onto topic. My buddy Jason was served with child support papers, (they tried to garnishee his wages!) but they later figured out that the Jason they wanted was of a different race. I have a doppleganger with the same name who is some right-wing christian weirdo around L.A., whereas I'm a left-wing atheist weirdo.
First they infiltrate our popular culture with Neil Young, Anne Murray, and Peter Jennings. And now they're after our top-secret hard drives!
It's scary, very scary. They look like Americans, talk like Americans (except for "eh", "zed", and better grammar), and are pretty much allowed to cross the border willy-nilly.
Meanwhile, they're driving energy prices up (they're the U.S.'s biggest petroleum supplier, if you include natural gas), and for god sakes, they have nationalized health care!
God save us!
This is one of those things that pushed me and a LOT of other people away from proprietary Unix and proprietary Unix software a long time ago, wasting all that time tending to stupid license managers and expiring license files. Win/Mac users would (rightfully) point out to me that this was a big waste of time compared to the simplicity of installing shrinkwrapped win/mac software and typing in a serial number. Of course, my solution to this problem was to ditch proprietary software altogether.
There's a reason why popup boxes for administrator access are unpopular: It's too easy to make a mock popup box in order to snarf passwords. That's one reason (the only reason?) why you have to three-finger-salute in order to log in to NT, it's a bit harder for the trojan to grab the sysreq that's generated by Ctrl-Alt-Del.
IMO, the NT style login-via-sysreq would be a good feature to add to Linux. It wouldn't be too difficult to do. It's probably already in place in the more secure Linux distro's, but I haven't checked them out, since I'm not that paranoid about my co-workers putting trojan password sniffers on my box.
So IBM is fabbing alphas at 1.2 GHz, meanwhile the POWER line, which is their baby, seems to be stuck at 500 MHz or so (last time I checked). What gives?
BTW, an Alpha I purchased a few years back is STILL faster at floating point than the latest from Intel or AMD (OK, the Athlon is close).
Let's say s copy of Jumpman for the Commodore 64 was cracked in 1983 by the Berlin Cracking Service and widely distributed. I'd say the statute of limitations on the original crime is long passed, and since they (BCS) effectively destroyed any value of the original copyright, further copying at this point no longer constitutes a crime.
Very interesting ideas, Jonathan. I'm sure you'll soon be getting visits from the guys in dark suits soon. :)
I was thinking the way to distribute data over multiple servers and keep track of connectivity information, and handle all the decryption and forwarding http connections would be to have a (possibly somewhat hacked) Apache with a MySQL or other database to hold the bits of distributed data and the database of other peer/servers, along with Mod_Perl or PHP to assemble web pages and do searches and such.
Sounds kind of like slashdot, which makes me wonder if the answer to Slashdot's copyright problems is some sort of anonymous encryption-based distributed slashdot. Makes me want to take a look at Slashcode and see what I could cook up...
Sure, lots of people claim to know English. But when it comes to SPELLING and pronunciation, well, that cuts it down to MAYBE a few million people who really know English. English spelling and pronunciation rules just don't make sense. And, despite Sam Clemens' attempts, they never will.
In Spanish, spelling and pronunciation have an almost perfect 1:1 mapping, except for the occasional silent 'h' and probably a few other things I'm forgetting. Verb conjugation is a little tough, as is the widespread use of reflexive verb constructions. And most native English speakers can't roll their R's properly.
But at least if we go Spanish there will be a more intelligible written record, while, as we see every day on Slashdot, native and non-native English speakers often mangle written English so badly as to render it unintelligible.
Ack, this "microwaves cause cancer" stuff is getting moderated up!
That sounds good (lots of handwaving about dipoles and such), but these tests that proclaim an effect of microwaves on gene expression don't hold up to scrutiny. I found only one paper, from the early 90's, which claimed to measure the effects of microwaves on gene expression. And again, this is due to HEATING by INTENSE microwave pulses. Like putting a cat in a microwave oven. We're talking kilowatts, or higher, per cc.
Sure, microwaves can break very weak bonds, such as hydrogen bonds, that are broken and reformed all the time at room temperature. In any case, the best physicists and chemists can't seem to get any net, measurable, non-uniform breaking of hydrogen bonds in solution by using microwaves. The effect is identical to heating. If someone did achieve non-uniform bond breaking using microwaves, they'd make millions or billions from the idea, using it to reduce side reactions, increase yield, and so on. Of course, microwaves ARE used in chemicals processing, but for heating, not for quantum control. And there are chemists and physicists trying to develop quantum control of chemical reactions, using ultrashort pulses of near IR, visible, and UV light.
I still say the vast majority of knowledgeable chemists and physicists (such as J.D. Jackson at Berkeley, who is quite vocal on this topic) concur that there is no effect of low-level radio waves on living tissue. So you can all take off the aluminum foil hats and relax.
I'm sure the poster was well-intentioned, but you REALLY SHOULDN'T speculate about things you know nothing about and start trying to scare people. We know a lot about radio waves, LOTS of research has been done. And they aren't dangerous at these levels.
This satellite or cell phone radiation scare is one of those things that just doesn't die, no matter how many times the vast majority of scientists (plus or minus a very few crackpots) try to set things straight.
To cause damage to animal or plant tissue, electromagnetic radiation needs to either cook it by raising its temperature (lots of watts, like in a microwave or a solar reflector), or have ENOUGH ENERGY PER PHOTON to ionize it. Radio wave and microwave photons don't have enough energy to ionize or break chemical bonds in living tissue. They're less dangerous than infrared radiation (heat). UV, X-rays, and Gamma rays have enough energy per photon to ionize or break chemical bonds in living tissue.
If microwaves were so dangerous, we would have all already been killed by the cosmic background radiation left over by the big bang.
The main feature of bezOS is that when you click anywhere, it brings up a warning dialog saying "Hey, we patented that!"
I saw in the above posting that someone is working on free video cards. That would be great because:
1. We're all sick and tired of paying $200-$300 for a glorified bit pump.
2. It has traditionally been hard to get video card specs for writing drivers. Having knowledge of how each gate is wired would solve that problem (and punish the bull-headed, short-sighted vendors!).
3. This is an area undergoing rapid development.
Open/free development works well in this environment.
4. Could borrow ideas (or at least the instruction set and software driver architecture) from Mesa and related free software projects. The potential synergies are tremendous!
I read Eigler's quantum corral paper in '93 and have seen him promote this stuff at science conferences.
The quantum corral (a bunch of electronic wiggles inside a ring of atoms on a surface) was due to Cu surface states quantized by the ring boundary (a quantum size effect). Not a big deal, we've known about the existence of Cu surface states for several decades, they show up in photoemission experiments.
If you make a stadium shape instead of a circular ring, you get strange chaotic wiggles (instead of the symmetric cylindrical Bessel functions), that in the '80s were hyped as "quantum chaos".
Now it's hyped as quantum computing. Oh brother. There are more obvious, simple, and more easily engineered ways of getting information from point A to point B without wires, such as by transmitting light.
...have we learned from it?
There really is very good evidence out there that Cold Fusion, of the Pons and Fleischmann variety, did NOT happen, doesn't work, and nearly all positive results can be attributed to simple error.
The fact is, some scientists are sloppy, or get a little overeager when looking at preliminary results. Or they get greedy. Scientists aren't perfect. Neither is scientific equipment. So from time to time we get an amazing "discovery" that doesn't hold water. We have to ACCEPT the overwhelming evidence that the initial claims were wrong.
One aspect of science that makes this process difficult is that there are no absolute truths in science, only evidence and a loose consensus.
For further reading on the short and interesting times of cold fusion, check out Bad Science, by Gary Taubes.
Prof. Lederman,
As a Ph.D. scientist (toiling away as a postdoc), I think there's a cycle between big and small budget science. Early work on subatomic particles and much of the experimental work that gave rise to quantum mechanics was fairly low budget. Then came the bigger and bigger accelerators and articles in Phys. Rev. Lett. with a list of 50 authors.
But (in my opinion) the most important recent findings in the field of physics have happened on a tabletop or small evacuated chamber, such as scanning-tunneling microscopy, high Tc superconductivity, and Bose-Einstein condensation.
Funding agencies are aggressively promoting research in "nanotechnology".
In your opinion, is the era of truly huge scientific experiments over (perhaps a one-time frenzy fueled by the cold war?), or is the process cyclical, or is it a damped oscillation, where eventually there will be a more steady flow of funding and important findings in both categories?