Steve Piner wrote a text display and editing program called Expensive Typewriter (For a while, "expensive" was a favorite adjective for naming various PDP-1 routines that imitated the functions of more mundane devices. Among them was Peter Samson's E. Planetarium, as we shall see.)
So that's what the 'E' in all those e-businesses stands for. I would've done better in the NASDAQ if someone had told me sooner.
Weeklong weather forecasts are generally reliable.
Do you agree with this? I hardly trust the weather forcast for tomorrow, much less next weekend. The two sites I usually check are
The Weather Channel
and
Weather Underground
.
They often directly contradict each other, differing by up to 15 degrees F and 50% chance of rain.
Are there any studies tracking the accuracy of various forecasters? If the weatherman predicts rain for three days from now, should I cancel my picnic or just figure that an average July day is 65-85 degrees with a 30% chance of rain? Maybe the weather here in Michigan is more variable than other regions. Do you guys actually trust the predictions in your town?
Sometimes speed is still king. I recently bought a computer for running floating point intensive simulations. A large part of the cost in my research isn't the expense of the hardware but the expense of my time. So I got the fastest system I could put together. I wanted dual processors and preferred a Dell machine so I was already stuck with Intel CPU's. The only question was whether to go with P-III's or spend $1,000 more for dual P4's. All of my searching on the Web showed that P4's are no better than P-III's for floating point calculations, so I went with the dual P-III system. Intel would now be $1,000 richer if I were aware that the P4 really could perform much faster.
By the way, I run Linux and compile with g++. Does anybody know if the GNU compiler does a good job of processor-specific optimizations?
There are more uses for computers than playing games and reading Slashdot.;-)
Performing 5 * 10^50 operations per second with 1 kg of computer is so far beyond anything we have today. What would we use that speed for?
I was thinking about the same subject from the other direction recently. For my
research
I am trying to simulate the growth of silicon germanium crystals. The usual way of approaching a physics problem like this is to make simplified approximations of what actually happens. For example, hard-to-model processes like diffusion are measured by experiment or found from standard relations. But these simplifications can yield a model which is subtly wrong and fails to predict unexpected behavior.
What I really want to do is model the entire crystal growth from the most fundamental physics (quantum mechanics or something like string theory). That way the simulation is not just an approximation of reality but is indistinguishable from reality! How fast of a computer do I need for this full-detail simulation?
Well, that depends on the size of the system I'm trying to simulate. How big of a computer do I need to model a 1g chunk of matter? Logically, it seems that at least 1g of computer would be required to model 1g of arbitrary material in real time. (Otherwise, I could simply model a 1g computer with a 0.5g one, which in turn is actually simulated on a 0.25g computer and so on.)
So, perfectly simulating a 10g crystal would take 10g of "ultimate laptop" processing. But if, like the article mentions, the laptop uses ordinary matter rather than plasma then the computation rate is 10^40 ops/second rather than 10^51 ops/second. This implies that my 1kg super laptop would need 31.7 years to simulate 1 second of growth for a 10g crytal! How much computation would be required to mimic The Matrix? To perfectly simulate life on Earth would require a computer at least as large as the Earth itself!
So, although 2 GHz processors sound fast and the ultimate laptop in this article seems unfathomable, we have many applications today that can take all the computation speed available. A near future application for ultracomputing is the modelling of protein folding for drug design. There, the amount of matter being simulated is small fractions of a gram and the leveraging of computer weight and time is worthwhile.
The basic idea is just-in-time reforming of gasoline to hydrogen in the car, converting hydrogen to electricity in a fuel cell, and then propelling the car with an electric motor. This scheme has several advantages:
Refueling is with a liquid (gasoline or perhaps methanol), eliminating the hazards of transferring compressed hydrogen.
The liquid fuel can come from sources other than fossil fuels. Methanol can be synthesized from solar, hydroelectric, or nuclear power. Think of it as a convenient, portable, and transferable battery rather than a non-renewable resource.
Hydrogen gas is not stored on board the vehicle. It's simply extracted from the liquid fuel as needed. Startup can be accomplished with a small bank of batteries.
Electric motors use energy more efficiently than combustion engines.
Since electric motors are already included, regenerative braking is practical.
There are many companies and universities hard at work on adapting fuel cells for cars. The focus right now is getting the size and cost of all the components down to be practical for consumer vehicles.
As a graduate student, I do most of my Microsoft Office work in the computer labs at school. I can't permanently change the software settings because they are reset every time I log in. So now, whenever I sit down at a lab computer to start working, I have to first go through five minutes of:
Open Word and tell Clippy to hide
Turn off Menu Hiding (necessary to proceed to step 3)
Turn off Autoformat
Deselect "When selecting, automatically select entire word" (all I want to do is change arsenic to arsenide, not replace the whole word)
Turn off "Checking spelling and grammar as you type" (I already know that gallium arsenide is not in the dictionary)
Open Powerpoint and say "no, I don't need help creating a new presentation; please just load an existing one"
Repeat twice a day and you'll see why I hate Clippy.
Judging from the responses to the Guess the Splashdown Time contest, I expected a few clear spikes in the histogram. There's one on March 14th which is Pi Day (3-14). Another, sharper spike occurs later on April Fools' Day. My guess was the Ides of March on the 15th but it's drowned out by the major peak on the 17th. Anyone know what this corresponds to? Was it two weeks after the news article said "Mir will go down in about 2 weeks"?
Any general audience newspaper is likely to have many errors and omissions when discussing a technical topic.
Has Rabin's scheme been published in a scientific journal? I didn't see any mention in the NYT article and couldn't find anything in a brief literature search. That would be the proper source to critique. And, I think many in the Slashdot audience have the background to review it intelligently.
Just because he says he has a proof doesn't mean that it's right. Nobody is infallible, and in my experience every scientific paper has at least one error. Peer review is a key feature of open source software, so it shouldn't be surprising that this article is getting so much constructive criticism here.
So much for being clever. Looks like half of us guessed the Ides of March, pi, April Fools' Day, or March 2000. Thus we've all diminished each other's winning interval compared to if we'd just guessed randomly. (Like on The Price is Right when you bid $750 and the next contestant bids $751. Grrrrr!)
Hey michael, I'd be interested to see a histogram showing our distribution of guesses when this is all over.
Okay, Ides of March = 03-15
Shakespeare wrote Julius Caesar in 1599 and Caesar died in 44 BC = 15:59:44 (had to convert 99 to 0.99 * 60 s)
So my guess is 2001-03-15 15:59:44
Sorry. I thought I was just being sarcastic too. That's what the ":-p" at the end of my message was meant to indicate.
Speaking of the election, there is growing friction between small towns and big cities. Gore was clearly favored in high population areas and Bush in rural areas. I think Slashdotters need to be reminded that not everybody has the same high-tech amenities. I used to live in a town (population 18,000) with no local dial-up ISP's. I hate to think how long it'll be until they get cable modems and DSL.
By the way, I've spent half my life as a "city boy" and half as a "country boy", so I don't use either term in a truly derogatory way. Just sticking up for the under-represented country boys in this case.
Ann Arbor, Michigan. Home of the Big House, our football stadium with a record-holding 111,000+ capacity. Almost as much as the population of the city itself, but not quite! Dialing 10 digits seems like overkill when everyone in the county has the same area code. Even Detroit, just 30 miles away, has 7-digit dialing within each of its 4 area codes. Try spending some time in the *real* backwaters of the rural Midwest, you arrogant city boy, where even calls within the area code can cross half the state and be long-distance.:-p
I am a graduate student studying quantum dot formation for my doctoral thesis. As someone else pointed out, the current application of quantum dot self-assembly is for devices like lasers and photodetectors, not quantum computation. So, development of high quality "quantum dots" should not be confused with the practical production of "quantum computers". Still, I think the ability to engineer these structures is a great step in that direction.
For anyone who's interested in the physics of quantum dot self-assembly, I've posted some papers and presentations on
my website. My recent
research proposal deals with a physical simulation of quantum dot growth. I try to write without jargon, so they should be understandable to anyone with a science or engineering background.
Rick Wagner
Department of Chemical Engineering
University of Michigan
As some others have pointed out, the receptor is sensitive to a wavelength between red and green. But that might not be as boring as it sounds.
Recall how TV screens work. In nature, the light from an object spans a whole range of wavelengths. The profile of this light would be a complex curve (a spectrogram, like some telescopes measure) on which red, green, and blue are just individual points. But our eyes don't sense the entire curve, they just sample it at the red, green, and blue (RGB) wavelengths. A TV takes advantage of our 3-point sampling by producing light at only those points. It doesn't reproduce the whole spectrum, but we trichromats can't tell the difference.
Having a fourth color receptor provides another sampling point. That's bad news for TV manufacturers. A tetrachromat mutant or another species without our eye structure won't be fooled by the RGB image -- they'll sense a color missing just as we would if all the blue phosphors were out. Or, they could see color variation where we see none. A tetrachromat could read "invisible" ink which reflects only at the fourth wavelength. That'd be cool for richer color coding or secret messages.
My understanding is that quantum computer simulators allow one to mimic the output of a quantum computer, but without the time speed-up that real quantum hardware would provide. So algorithms can be tested out, slowly, even before powerful quantum hardware is developed. I suspect some problems can also be better expressed in a quantum computing language and would therefore be solved more easily even on classical hardware.
On the subject of simulating quantum physics on classical hardware, in the book The Feynman Processor and in Feynman's own papers it is stated that a classical computer can never perfectly simulate quantum physics. But from the evidence they give it seems merely impractical, not impossible. There can be a huge penalty in the number of steps and time required but no clear reason why a simple quantum physics system could not be perfectly simulated on a powerful classical computer. Anyone have any insight on this problem?
Mac OS X now misses two key purchasing deadlines. [start of the academic school year and Christmas]
I don't understand why anyone thinks shipping software before Christmas is such a huge deal. January 2001 is after Christmas 2000 but still before Christmas 2001. Until the end of civilization there will be a continuous succession of holidays and school openings. Do what's right for the software, ignore the calendar.
It seems this software would make driver portability a thing of the past. They even have a free 30-day trial.
I've been wondering how long it would take before somebody advertised their products in a Slashdot comment. It's distressing so see such an ad right in an article. But perhaps it's not surprising considering the terrible anti-gravity article posted a couple weeks ago. Seems that Slashdot's screening process is only about 90% crap-proof. (A heck of a lot better than most other news sources, though.) At least the discussion in response was worthwhile.
If I see one more banner ad, piece of spam, or e-commerce propoganda today I'm gonna unplug my computer (and burn my copy of Wired). Grrr.
I agree that the Zip-InstallShield method in Windows makes installing software easy. But the pain of ever uninstalling software is tremendous. Never once have I seen a package uninstall itself without leaving dangling references in the Start menu, leaving partially empty folders, breaking another package's installation, or simply complaining "Unable to uninstall" and leaving me to delete the files manually (and hoping I don't break another package in the process). My favorite features of RPM are its treatment of uninstallation, upgrading, and tracking down a package's configuration files.
"Why would you possibly want to control computers directly from your brain if you can do it by moving your hand, your fingers? I think some people use their imaginations a bit too much." - Dr. Kennedy, from the article
Interacting with a computer via the brain-hand-mouse-computer route seems rather inefficient. Add in the constant mouse-to-keyboard, keyboard-to-mouse switching and the problem is even worse. Imagine how effectively we could communicate through direct brain-computer connections. I suspect our brains have an untapped capacity to control more than just our muscles.
Thought some people might be interested in learning more about self-assembled electronic structures. My doctorate research topic is self-assembled quantum dots. I recently gave an introductory presentation on the topic. Get it directly in PDF format or browse through my chemical engineering page.
Rick Wagner U of Mich - Dept of Chem Eng
Formatting advice but hardware problems
on
WinLinux 2000
·
· Score: 1
I recently installed Red Hat 5.2 and the book was clear about what size to make each partition. I think it was in the chapter before the instructions for how to make partitions, so that may have been a little confusing.
The bigger problem I had was getting X to work. It still isn't. My Compaq Presario has built-in video hardware (which is non-operational since I have a better video card in a PCI slot) that gets detected during configuration instead of the desired video card.
I can't imagine any OS being easy to install due to the enormous variability in hardware between vendors/models/revisions/upgrades. The only truly easy way to get Linux is to buy it preinstalled. Do any major manufacturers offer dual-boot systems?
Here at the University of Michigan, a software deal with Microsoft was just announced. Their software will be offered to student and faculty at a deep discount, better than typical educational discounts -- something like 75% off the standard price. I haven't heard details about the deal yet. Is Microsoft being granted exclusivity in any area? Will Metrowerks Codewarrior be taken off the lab computers in favor of Microsoft Visual Studio?
Students Are Poor (duh) This is a great strategy for getting to the academicians. Students make even more financially-limited decisions than their employed peers. For example, a local grocery store chain just switched from having lots of good weekly sale items (which made it popular with the students) to having a membership-card based discount. Now, to get the sale price, I have to let them link every purchase to my identity. Me and my intellectual schoolmates have moral objections to this new system, but $5 a week in savings is probably enough to make us fall in line. A few bucks is a good way to counteract the ideality common in ivory towers.
Role of $$$ in the Death of Amiga Back in the glory days of Amiga, when Windows and Mac were slow and clunky (slower and clunkier?), Amiga had a nice, smooth, multitasking operating system. Plus, it cost less than a PC or Mac! When PC prices crashed, Amiga lost a major selling point.
What happens when you can pay $25 for Win2K vs. $80 for Red Hat Linux?
Death by Unforseen Cultural Shifts I believe that the Internet played a major role in extinguishing the Amiga. As the Web and e-mail became mainstream around 1995, Internet software became the killer app. Development of Amiga browsers lagged far behind that on the PC due to smaller numbers of users and developers. Inadequate browsers (as well as home-office software) drove people away. As we grow comfortable with the not-quite-so-new Internet, I wonder what changes are coming in the next 5 years.
Slashdot Mirror
So that's what the 'E' in all those e-businesses stands for. I would've done better in the NASDAQ if someone had told me sooner.
AlpineR
It's not much good for the latest 3-D games, but perfect for progamming, writing papers, and accessing the Web.
AlpineR
Do you agree with this? I hardly trust the weather forcast for tomorrow, much less next weekend. The two sites I usually check are The Weather Channel and Weather Underground . They often directly contradict each other, differing by up to 15 degrees F and 50% chance of rain.
Are there any studies tracking the accuracy of various forecasters? If the weatherman predicts rain for three days from now, should I cancel my picnic or just figure that an average July day is 65-85 degrees with a 30% chance of rain? Maybe the weather here in Michigan is more variable than other regions. Do you guys actually trust the predictions in your town?
AlpineR
By the way, I run Linux and compile with g++. Does anybody know if the GNU compiler does a good job of processor-specific optimizations?
There are more uses for computers than playing games and reading Slashdot. ;-)
AlpineR
I was thinking about the same subject from the other direction recently. For my research I am trying to simulate the growth of silicon germanium crystals. The usual way of approaching a physics problem like this is to make simplified approximations of what actually happens. For example, hard-to-model processes like diffusion are measured by experiment or found from standard relations. But these simplifications can yield a model which is subtly wrong and fails to predict unexpected behavior.
What I really want to do is model the entire crystal growth from the most fundamental physics (quantum mechanics or something like string theory). That way the simulation is not just an approximation of reality but is indistinguishable from reality! How fast of a computer do I need for this full-detail simulation?
Well, that depends on the size of the system I'm trying to simulate. How big of a computer do I need to model a 1g chunk of matter? Logically, it seems that at least 1g of computer would be required to model 1g of arbitrary material in real time. (Otherwise, I could simply model a 1g computer with a 0.5g one, which in turn is actually simulated on a 0.25g computer and so on.) So, perfectly simulating a 10g crystal would take 10g of "ultimate laptop" processing. But if, like the article mentions, the laptop uses ordinary matter rather than plasma then the computation rate is 10^40 ops/second rather than 10^51 ops/second. This implies that my 1kg super laptop would need 31.7 years to simulate 1 second of growth for a 10g crytal! How much computation would be required to mimic The Matrix? To perfectly simulate life on Earth would require a computer at least as large as the Earth itself!
So, although 2 GHz processors sound fast and the ultimate laptop in this article seems unfathomable, we have many applications today that can take all the computation speed available. A near future application for ultracomputing is the modelling of protein folding for drug design. There, the amount of matter being simulated is small fractions of a gram and the leveraging of computer weight and time is worthwhile.
AlpineR
There are many companies and universities hard at work on adapting fuel cells for cars. The focus right now is getting the size and cost of all the components down to be practical for consumer vehicles.
AlpineR
- Open Word and tell Clippy to hide
- Turn off Menu Hiding (necessary to proceed to step 3)
- Turn off Autoformat
- Deselect "When selecting, automatically select entire word" (all I want to do is change arsenic to arsenide, not replace the whole word)
- Turn off "Checking spelling and grammar as you type" (I already know that gallium arsenide is not in the dictionary)
- Open Powerpoint and say "no, I don't need help creating a new presentation; please just load an existing one"
Repeat twice a day and you'll see why I hate Clippy.AlpineR
Has Rabin's scheme been published in a scientific journal? I didn't see any mention in the NYT article and couldn't find anything in a brief literature search. That would be the proper source to critique. And, I think many in the Slashdot audience have the background to review it intelligently.
Just because he says he has a proof doesn't mean that it's right. Nobody is infallible, and in my experience every scientific paper has at least one error. Peer review is a key feature of open source software, so it shouldn't be surprising that this article is getting so much constructive criticism here.
AlpineR
Hey michael, I'd be interested to see a histogram showing our distribution of guesses when this is all over.
AlpineR
Shakespeare wrote Julius Caesar in 1599 and Caesar died in 44 BC = 15:59:44 (had to convert 99 to 0.99 * 60 s)
So my guess is 2001-03-15 15:59:44
AlpineR
Speaking of the election, there is growing friction between small towns and big cities. Gore was clearly favored in high population areas and Bush in rural areas. I think Slashdotters need to be reminded that not everybody has the same high-tech amenities. I used to live in a town (population 18,000) with no local dial-up ISP's. I hate to think how long it'll be until they get cable modems and DSL.
By the way, I've spent half my life as a "city boy" and half as a "country boy", so I don't use either term in a truly derogatory way. Just sticking up for the under-represented country boys in this case.
AlpineR
Ann Arbor, Michigan. Home of the Big House, our football stadium with a record-holding 111,000+ capacity. Almost as much as the population of the city itself, but not quite! Dialing 10 digits seems like overkill when everyone in the county has the same area code. Even Detroit, just 30 miles away, has 7-digit dialing within each of its 4 area codes. Try spending some time in the *real* backwaters of the rural Midwest, you arrogant city boy, where even calls within the area code can cross half the state and be long-distance. :-p
For anyone who's interested in the physics of quantum dot self-assembly, I've posted some papers and presentations on my website. My recent research proposal deals with a physical simulation of quantum dot growth. I try to write without jargon, so they should be understandable to anyone with a science or engineering background.
Rick Wagner
Department of Chemical Engineering
University of Michigan
Recall how TV screens work. In nature, the light from an object spans a whole range of wavelengths. The profile of this light would be a complex curve (a spectrogram, like some telescopes measure) on which red, green, and blue are just individual points. But our eyes don't sense the entire curve, they just sample it at the red, green, and blue (RGB) wavelengths. A TV takes advantage of our 3-point sampling by producing light at only those points. It doesn't reproduce the whole spectrum, but we trichromats can't tell the difference.
Having a fourth color receptor provides another sampling point. That's bad news for TV manufacturers. A tetrachromat mutant or another species without our eye structure won't be fooled by the RGB image -- they'll sense a color missing just as we would if all the blue phosphors were out. Or, they could see color variation where we see none. A tetrachromat could read "invisible" ink which reflects only at the fourth wavelength. That'd be cool for richer color coding or secret messages.
Mutants of the world unite!
AlpineR
...was the headline in the campus newspaper for our own local anime festival. The article is good for many laughs.
A Programming Language for Quantum Computers
There is also a good, comprehensive website at
OpenQubit
but it seems to be in need of a new maintainer.
My understanding is that quantum computer simulators allow one to mimic the output of a quantum computer, but without the time speed-up that real quantum hardware would provide. So algorithms can be tested out, slowly, even before powerful quantum hardware is developed. I suspect some problems can also be better expressed in a quantum computing language and would therefore be solved more easily even on classical hardware.
On the subject of simulating quantum physics on classical hardware, in the book The Feynman Processor and in Feynman's own papers it is stated that a classical computer can never perfectly simulate quantum physics. But from the evidence they give it seems merely impractical, not impossible. There can be a huge penalty in the number of steps and time required but no clear reason why a simple quantum physics system could not be perfectly simulated on a powerful classical computer. Anyone have any insight on this problem?
AlpineR
All they need to do is send every user an e-mail that will exploit the bug to automatically install the patch. That's quite a convenient feature! ;-)
I don't understand why anyone thinks shipping software before Christmas is such a huge deal. January 2001 is after Christmas 2000 but still before Christmas 2001. Until the end of civilization there will be a continuous succession of holidays and school openings. Do what's right for the software, ignore the calendar.
I've been wondering how long it would take before somebody advertised their products in a Slashdot comment. It's distressing so see such an ad right in an article. But perhaps it's not surprising considering the terrible anti-gravity article posted a couple weeks ago. Seems that Slashdot's screening process is only about 90% crap-proof. (A heck of a lot better than most other news sources, though.) At least the discussion in response was worthwhile.
If I see one more banner ad, piece of spam, or e-commerce propoganda today I'm gonna unplug my computer (and burn my copy of Wired). Grrr.
I agree that the Zip-InstallShield method in Windows makes installing software easy. But the pain of ever uninstalling software is tremendous. Never once have I seen a package uninstall itself without leaving dangling references in the Start menu, leaving partially empty folders, breaking another package's installation, or simply complaining "Unable to uninstall" and leaving me to delete the files manually (and hoping I don't break another package in the process). My favorite features of RPM are its treatment of uninstallation, upgrading, and tracking down a package's configuration files.
Interacting with a computer via the brain-hand-mouse-computer route seems rather inefficient. Add in the constant mouse-to-keyboard, keyboard-to-mouse switching and the problem is even worse. Imagine how effectively we could communicate through direct brain-computer connections. I suspect our brains have an untapped capacity to control more than just our muscles.
Rick Wagner
U of Mich - Dept of Chem Eng
I recently installed Red Hat 5.2 and the book was clear about what size to make each partition. I think it was in the chapter before the instructions for how to make partitions, so that may have been a little confusing.
The bigger problem I had was getting X to work. It still isn't. My Compaq Presario has built-in video hardware (which is non-operational since I have a better video card in a PCI slot) that gets detected during configuration instead of the desired video card.
I can't imagine any OS being easy to install due to the enormous variability in hardware between vendors/models/revisions/upgrades. The only truly easy way to get Linux is to buy it preinstalled. Do any major manufacturers offer dual-boot systems?
Here at the University of Michigan, a software deal with Microsoft was just announced. Their software will be offered to student and faculty at a deep discount, better than typical educational discounts -- something like 75% off the standard price. I haven't heard details about the deal yet. Is Microsoft being granted exclusivity in any area? Will Metrowerks Codewarrior be taken off the lab computers in favor of Microsoft Visual Studio?
Students Are Poor (duh)
This is a great strategy for getting to the academicians. Students make even more financially-limited decisions than their employed peers. For example, a local grocery store chain just switched from having lots of good weekly sale items (which made it popular with the students) to having a membership-card based discount. Now, to get the sale price, I have to let them link every purchase to my identity. Me and my intellectual schoolmates have moral objections to this new system, but $5 a week in savings is probably enough to make us fall in line. A few bucks is a good way to counteract the ideality common in ivory towers.
Role of $$$ in the Death of Amiga
Back in the glory days of Amiga, when Windows and Mac were slow and clunky (slower and clunkier?), Amiga had a nice, smooth, multitasking operating system. Plus, it cost less than a PC or Mac! When PC prices crashed, Amiga lost a major selling point.
What happens when you can pay $25 for Win2K vs. $80 for Red Hat Linux?
Death by Unforseen Cultural Shifts
I believe that the Internet played a major role in extinguishing the Amiga. As the Web and e-mail became mainstream around 1995, Internet software became the killer app. Development of Amiga browsers lagged far behind that on the PC due to smaller numbers of users and developers. Inadequate browsers (as well as home-office software) drove people away. As we grow comfortable with the not-quite-so-new Internet, I wonder what changes are coming in the next 5 years.