...since they are the ones with the loudest voices. Overall though, I don't see much of a difference between any of them.
Maybe I'm wrong to paint them all with the same brush, but so far my experience with people who are into SETI hasn't been very productive. Whenever the subject comes up, I can't help but get the impression that I'm talking to a bunch of Mormons or Jehova's Witnesse's.
Admitedly, I have met some people who are into SETI who don't fit this mold, but they have tended to be in the minority. On that basis alone, I really don't hold out much hope that SETI projects are going to do anything except make a laughing stock out of anyone associated with it ( and by implication, anyone involved in Astronomy in general ).
As usual, a bunch of people with axes to grind have to change the subject. You don't like the Grateful Dead, Phish, MMW, String Cheese Incident, or other jam bands? Fine. Don't listen. So what? This is an intellectual property rights issue, and your opinion of the music is irrelevant; and your emotional repsonse is very psychologically revealing.
I don't get along with most Deadheads (or especially Phish fans). I find them boring. But I am a HUGE Deadhead and Phish fan myself, and I have a large number of Deadhead friends who fit no stereotype whatsoever. I listen to classical, avant jazz, trance, ambient, dub, folk, acoustic, and ska musics in addition to jam band stuff...
Please get over yourself, and pay attention to what's actually being discussed.
The last time this came up here at/., the usual response to your questions were along the line of "hey, don't worry dude, there are plenty of spare cycles out there. We can do SETI and look for space junk...".
At this point in time, that's true enough.
However, according to some of the blurbs in New Scientist magazine's "In Brief" column over the last year, there are a number of commercial companies out there who are starting to look at this technology ( largely because of all the publicity around the SETI project ).
The idea that you can have the equivelent processing power of several thousand super-computers via the internet is something that the corporate players are already looking at making money from.
Nett result - all of those spare cycles will soon be rented out to the highest bidder. At which point, you can say goodbye to the whole idea of distibuted internet processing for any public project. It will all be commercial and strictly buisness as usual.
As for your comments on "1km objects", nope, they dont' have to be anywhere near that size.
One of the theories that's currently gaining ground is that the Tunguska event was actually caused by a 40m diameter meteorite that super-heated and explosively vaporised [ ok, this still hasn't been proven, but it's what the latest bunch of simulations are indicating ].
In addition to this, some of the most recent work ( in was in an issue of Scientific America about six months back ) is starting to indicate that we will probably get Tunguska type events about once a centuary [ ie, 2,000 square kilometers flatened ].
As human population levels continue to rise, there are fewer and fewer places on the surface of the Earth where something like this can happen without wholesale loss of human life.
I'd like to think that we will be mature enough to wake up to the nature of the problem before much more time goes by, but my inate cynisism tells me that we will probably have to wait for a major city like New York or London or Tokyo to get wiped out before anyone starts paying attention.
As for running to NASA for help, not neccessarily. There are a lot more people out there who are concerned about the problem than you might think. SETI might get most of the media coverage [ because it's regarded as more newsworthy than a 40m diameter meteor ], but there are plenty of us out there.
I make reasonably good money as a programmer. If there was some kind of public group out there that was trying to get going, then I for one would join it [ and for that matter, put my money where my mouth is on the subject ]. Ditto for any distributed projects doing image processing to hunt for Earth orbit crossing meteorites. If anyone can give a URL it would be appreciated.
I'm working on an article for PauseRecord on exactly this issue. While I don't think the parallels are exact, I think the music trading community stands to learn a lot about intellectual property rights issues from the OSS community, which has obviously already thought about this a little...
The best MP3 can do is still a lossy compression with extremely noticeable audio artifacts, primarily in the loss of dynamic range and dulling of the frequency extremes. It's fine for what it is - people were really glad to have the Phil & Phriends Warfield shows up so quickly - but realistically, it's not a suitable trading medium for anyone of an even moderately audiophile persuasion.
I do download and listen to MP3s for fun at work, but I'd never burn a CDR of any of it, unless it was very cool and completely unobtainium otherwise. A few simple blind listening tests convinced me completely.
I'm interested in this discussion; tape/CDR trading and OSS culture have always seemed similar to me in many ways. For example, I'm burning at total of 350 CDRs of those April Warfield shows - 35 copies of 10 disks each - none of them for trade. My motivations are exactly the same as most OSS programmers.
bioauthentication still has one flaw. consistancy. regardless of how many "charictaristics" there are, they all still boil down to 0s and 1s. to circumvent this kind of security, you will just need to be able to produce a standard, expected responce in a predetermined format. this could be done on the front end (the retinal scanner) or on the wire on the otherside of the scanner. i don not wish to say that a gauntlet has been dropped, but it is something to think about.
>I'll stay away from the Christians, cuz I don't >wanna rain on their parade.
Yeah, but SETI claims to be *science*, not *religious faith*.
Now excuss me moron, but as I understand it, debate and critisism is supposed to be part of the process whereby which science refines a concept to either establish it's validity or to dump it in the pile with other things that have been shown to be false.
Why not just stop pretending. For people like you, SETI is *religion*. If you want to cross out "God" and write "ET" in it's place, go ahead, but don't claim that it's science unless your prepared to engage in some serious debate on the subject instead of spewing profanity at anyone who disagrees with you.
If that's your opinion, then my advice is - stick with "God" and give "ET" a miss.
The main problem with the Drake Equation isn't even that it's pure guesswork in terms of estimating the various factors.
The real problem with the Drake equation is that it's more a statement of the pre-conceptions and obsessions of the 1950's than actual science.
For example, consider the term Ll, the expected lifetime of a tecnologically advanced species. This seemed like an important factor during the height of the cold war, but today it's starting to look more and more irrelevent.
Likewise the factors Ee, the number of habitable planets around each main sequence star of the right spectral type and size. Irrelevent. Any species that develops interstellar space flight will alter this variable by re-engineering any suitable planets that they find into life supporting worlds.
The same argument also applies to many of the other terms in the *damned* Drake equation, such as the likelyhood of sentience evolving on a living planet. This is where David Brin rocked the boat a few years back with his "Uplift Series", which is based on the idea of a galactic society that artificially modifies species to intelligence.
In short, the Drake Equation is only valid for galaxies with intelligent life at infinte dilution ( ie, N ~ 1 ). Once intelligent life forms start re-engineering planets ( or stars for that matter ), it ceases to have *any* *relevence* *whatsoever*.
Not that any of these arguments seem to have much impact over at SETI. The Drake Equation has become a matter of "religious orthodoxy" amongst them, and any critisism of it is viewed as nothing short of hearesy.
Look, I'm sorry to get nasty about this, but what rock have you been living under for the last five years?
There are currently several projects in the pipe that will accomplish this, including the interferometer currently under construction down in Chile and NASA's proposed "Deep Space III" interferometer that's scheduled for launch around 2002.
Like I said, I don't want to be nasty about this, but why is it that the people at SETI keep acting as if they have a monopoly on the subject? Are you guys taking lessons from Bill Gates on "how to win friends and influence people?".
Astronomical observations are of importance to the entire scientific community. The subject of habital planets and the possible occurence of life (including intelligent life) elsewhere within the universe is of interest to the entire scientific community.
Normally, I don't have a problem with SETI, since it's now privately funded, but I really wish that you lot would stop acting as if the issues involved were your personal playground.
Sorry, but the size of the milky way galaxy is 100 thousand light years on it's major axis, not 100 million ( ya gotta watch the order of magnitude dude...).
Avici has done it. Unlike their competitors, the way you calculate total bandwith with Avici is simple. Mutliply the # of interfaces, by the bandwidth speed and you got it. It's that simple. Every port is wire speed whether you are running at OC3 or OC48. Unlike NExabit (the breakfast cereal), who calculates the bandwidth off of some derivative of backplane specification Avici over-engineered their box to be NON-BLOCKING through the use of virtual channels and dedicated buffering. And, by the way, Avici is NOT the only company that said that they to scale the system to terabits that you need to add more frames... in fact, SHOW ME ONE VENDOR WHO can scale to 5.6 terabits in a single frame - jeez.. no one can, it's physically impossible today based on today's electronics... and even if they could, it would have to be a water cooled unit to handle the heat. As for your comment on off-bus memory access - it shows that you have not had a single technical presentation on the product. If you are truly interested, i suggest you contact Avici and arrange it BEFORE you pontificate about an architecture you clearly know very little about. And besides, the Avici story works.... I've seen it. Avici is a name you will be hearing about for a long time to come.
The Nexabit team, somehow, has managed to make a name for themselves as hypemasters. They have squeeged out press releases that make outrageous claims. They even went so far as to make a press announcement using Frontier Networks name without first getting their permission. There are obvious legal problems with doing so, but even more so, they don't even have a working module in the lab at Frontier. I've talked to them all, and the only company I know of - to date - that has a working architecture, in fact, a kick ass architecture is Avici. They based their architecture on supercomputers and they stuff up to 560 modules in a single monolithic architecture that scales. They did it right. First they built hardware that performs and scales, then they built software on top of it that rocks... if you saw their operating system CLI, you'd really like it. SO, in this crazy field, I can promise you that these guys are REAL and it WORKS.
Just wanted to add my congrats to CmdrTaco, Hemos and the crew. Slashdot is a great site, and for me, it's a great resource. My FUD-spotting abilities have increased tenfold since I started reading this site. And it's a great way to see what the true hackers and techies are thinking. In other words, you make my job as a technology reporter a whole lot easier. Thanks, guys. Beers are on me if you ever get out to Seattle!
My version of Netscape (4.51) did the same exact thing you described. I just minimized the window and did a couple of other things.. Popped it up a few minutes later and it was fine. Netscape seems to have this problem on several pages I attemp to view... So maybe it's not just a MS thing. Who knows... I'd be interested in anyone with a solution to this type of problem:)
Kind of unlikely. The only change was one variable for char to signed char... Actually, I probably shouldn't have even noted that change because I believe chars default to being signed. -Myrdraal
Slashdot Mirror
Posted by FascDot Killed My Previous Use:
Great. I ruined THAT joke.
Posted by FascDot Killed My Previous Use:
Great, now we just need a way to change gold into lead.
Posted by FascDot Killed My Previous Use:
Last I heard Linus wouldn't take KGI...
Posted by el_steevo:
SDMI is close to DMSI, (Diamond Multimedia Systems, Inc)... I wonder if they chose that acronym to cheese off our friends in San Jose?
Posted by AnnoyingMouseCoward:
...since they are the ones with the loudest voices. Overall though, I don't see much of a difference between any of them.
Maybe I'm wrong to paint them all with the same brush, but so far my experience with people who are into SETI hasn't been very productive. Whenever the subject comes up, I can't help but get the impression that I'm talking to a bunch of Mormons or Jehova's Witnesse's.
Admitedly, I have met some people who are into SETI who don't fit this mold, but they have tended to be in the minority. On that basis alone, I really don't hold out much hope that SETI projects are going to do anything except make a laughing stock out of anyone associated with it ( and by implication, anyone involved in Astronomy in general ).
Posted by tyler23:
As usual, a bunch of people with axes to grind have to change the subject. You don't like the Grateful Dead, Phish, MMW, String Cheese Incident, or other jam bands? Fine. Don't listen. So what? This is an intellectual property rights issue, and your opinion of the music is irrelevant; and your emotional repsonse is very psychologically revealing.
I don't get along with most Deadheads (or especially Phish fans). I find them boring. But I am a HUGE Deadhead and Phish fan myself, and I have a large number of Deadhead friends who fit no stereotype whatsoever. I listen to classical, avant jazz, trance, ambient, dub, folk, acoustic, and ska musics in addition to jam band stuff...
Please get over yourself, and pay attention to what's actually being discussed.
Posted by AnnoyingMouseCoward:
/., the usual response to your questions were along the line of "hey, don't worry dude, there are plenty of spare cycles out there. We can do SETI and look for space junk...".
The last time this came up here at
At this point in time, that's true enough.
However, according to some of the blurbs in New Scientist magazine's "In Brief" column over the last year, there are a number of commercial companies out there who are starting to look at this technology ( largely because of all the publicity around the SETI project ).
The idea that you can have the equivelent processing power of several thousand super-computers via the internet is something that the corporate players are already looking at making money from.
Nett result - all of those spare cycles will soon be rented out to the highest bidder. At which point, you can say goodbye to the whole idea of distibuted internet processing for any public project. It will all be commercial and strictly buisness as usual.
As for your comments on "1km objects", nope, they dont' have to be anywhere near that size.
One of the theories that's currently gaining ground is that the Tunguska event was actually caused by a 40m diameter meteorite that super-heated and explosively vaporised [ ok, this still hasn't been proven, but it's what the latest bunch of simulations are indicating ].
In addition to this, some of the most recent work ( in was in an issue of Scientific America about six months back ) is starting to indicate that we will probably get Tunguska type events about once a centuary [ ie, 2,000 square kilometers flatened ].
As human population levels continue to rise, there are fewer and fewer places on the surface of the Earth where something like this can happen without wholesale loss of human life.
I'd like to think that we will be mature enough to wake up to the nature of the problem before much more time goes by, but my inate cynisism tells me that we will probably have to wait for a major city like New York or London or Tokyo to get wiped out before anyone starts paying attention.
As for running to NASA for help, not neccessarily. There are a lot more people out there who are concerned about the problem than you might think. SETI might get most of the media coverage [ because it's regarded as more newsworthy than a 40m diameter meteor ], but there are plenty of us out there.
I make reasonably good money as a programmer. If there was some kind of public group out there that was trying to get going, then I for one would join it [ and for that matter, put my money where my mouth is on the subject ]. Ditto for any distributed projects doing image processing to hunt for Earth orbit crossing meteorites. If anyone can give a URL it would be appreciated.
Just my 40m of space wandering debris gang.
Posted by tyler23:
I'm working on an article for PauseRecord on exactly this issue. While I don't think the parallels are exact, I think the music trading community stands to learn a lot about intellectual property rights issues from the OSS community, which has obviously already thought about this a little...
Posted by tyler23:
The best MP3 can do is still a lossy compression with extremely noticeable audio artifacts, primarily in the loss of dynamic range and dulling of the frequency extremes. It's fine for what it is - people were really glad to have the Phil & Phriends Warfield shows up so quickly - but realistically, it's not a suitable trading medium for anyone of an even moderately audiophile persuasion.
I do download and listen to MP3s for fun at work, but I'd never burn a CDR of any of it, unless it was very cool and completely unobtainium otherwise. A few simple blind listening tests convinced me completely.
I'm interested in this discussion; tape/CDR trading and OSS culture have always seemed similar to me in many ways. For example, I'm burning at total of 350 CDRs of those April Warfield shows - 35 copies of 10 disks each - none of them for trade. My motivations are exactly the same as most OSS programmers.
Similarly, the Mac client is at
http://setiathome.ssl.berkeley.edu/software/setiat home_mac_1_0.sit
Posted by zann:
bioauthentication still has one flaw. consistancy. regardless of how many "charictaristics" there are, they all still boil down to 0s and 1s. to circumvent this kind of security, you will just need to be able to produce a standard, expected responce in a predetermined format. this could be done on the front end (the retinal scanner) or on the wire on the otherside of the scanner. i don not wish to say that a gauntlet has been dropped, but it is something to think about.
Posted by AnnoyingMouseCoward:
You stated
>I'll stay away from the Christians, cuz I don't >wanna rain on their parade.
Yeah, but SETI claims to be *science*, not *religious faith*.
Now excuss me moron, but as I understand it, debate and critisism is supposed to be part of the process whereby which science refines a concept to either establish it's validity or to dump it in the pile with other things that have been shown to be false.
Why not just stop pretending. For people like you, SETI is *religion*. If you want to cross out "God" and write "ET" in it's place, go ahead, but don't claim that it's science unless your prepared to engage in some serious debate on the subject instead of spewing profanity at anyone who disagrees with you.
If that's your opinion, then my advice is - stick with "God" and give "ET" a miss.
Posted by AnnoyingMouseCoward:
Ah yes, that old shaggy dog story.
The main problem with the Drake Equation isn't even that it's pure guesswork in terms of estimating the various factors.
The real problem with the Drake equation is that it's more a statement of the pre-conceptions and obsessions of the 1950's than actual science.
For example, consider the term Ll, the expected lifetime of a tecnologically advanced species. This seemed like an important factor during the height of the cold war, but today it's starting to look more and more irrelevent.
Likewise the factors Ee, the number of habitable planets around each main sequence star of the right spectral type and size. Irrelevent. Any species that develops interstellar space flight will alter this variable by re-engineering any suitable planets that they find into life supporting worlds.
The same argument also applies to many of the other terms in the *damned* Drake equation, such as the likelyhood of sentience evolving on a living planet. This is where David Brin rocked the boat a few years back with his "Uplift Series", which is based on the idea of a galactic society that artificially modifies species to intelligence.
In short, the Drake Equation is only valid for galaxies with intelligent life at infinte dilution ( ie, N ~ 1 ). Once intelligent life forms start re-engineering planets ( or stars for that matter ), it ceases to have *any* *relevence* *whatsoever*.
Not that any of these arguments seem to have much impact over at SETI. The Drake Equation has become a matter of "religious orthodoxy" amongst them, and any critisism of it is viewed as nothing short of hearesy.
Just my two inquisitors worth.
Posted by AnnoyingMouseCoward:
Look, I'm sorry to get nasty about this, but what rock have you been living under for the last five years?
There are currently several projects in the pipe that will accomplish this, including the interferometer currently under construction down in Chile and NASA's proposed "Deep Space III" interferometer that's scheduled for launch around 2002.
Like I said, I don't want to be nasty about this, but why is it that the people at SETI keep acting as if they have a monopoly on the subject? Are you guys taking lessons from Bill Gates on "how to win friends and influence people?".
Astronomical observations are of importance to the entire scientific community. The subject of habital planets and the possible occurence of life (including intelligent life) elsewhere within the universe is of interest to the entire scientific community.
Normally, I don't have a problem with SETI, since it's now privately funded, but I really wish that you lot would stop acting as if the issues involved were your personal playground.
Posted by AnnoyingMouseCoward:
Sorry, but the size of the milky way galaxy is 100 thousand light years on it's major axis, not 100 million ( ya gotta watch the order of magnitude dude...).
Posted by Mister_BFR:
Avici has done it. Unlike their competitors, the way you calculate total bandwith with Avici is simple. Mutliply the # of interfaces, by the bandwidth speed and you got it. It's that simple. Every port is wire speed whether you are running at OC3 or OC48. Unlike NExabit (the breakfast cereal), who calculates the bandwidth off of some derivative of backplane specification Avici over-engineered their box to be NON-BLOCKING through the use of virtual channels and dedicated buffering. And, by the way, Avici is NOT the only company that said that they to scale the system to terabits that you need to add more frames... in fact, SHOW ME ONE VENDOR WHO can scale to 5.6 terabits in a single frame - jeez.. no one can, it's physically impossible today based on today's electronics... and even if they could, it would have to be a water cooled unit to handle the heat. As for your comment on off-bus memory access - it shows that you have not had a single technical presentation on the product. If you are truly interested, i suggest you contact Avici and arrange it BEFORE you pontificate about an architecture you clearly know very little about.
And besides, the Avici story works.... I've seen it. Avici is a name you will be hearing about for a long time to come.
Posted by Mister_BFR:
The Nexabit team, somehow, has managed to make a
name for themselves as hypemasters. They have
squeeged out press releases that make outrageous claims. They even went so far as to make a press
announcement using Frontier Networks name without first getting their permission. There are obvious legal problems with doing so, but even more so, they don't even have a working module in the lab at Frontier. I've talked to them all, and the only company I know of - to date - that has a working architecture, in fact, a kick ass architecture is
Avici. They based their architecture on supercomputers and they stuff up to 560 modules in a single monolithic architecture that scales. They did it right. First they built hardware that performs and scales, then they built software on top of it that rocks... if you saw their operating system CLI, you'd really like it. SO, in this crazy field, I can promise you that these guys are
REAL and it WORKS.
Posted by Mike@ABC:
Just wanted to add my congrats to CmdrTaco, Hemos and the crew. Slashdot is a great site, and for me, it's a great resource. My FUD-spotting abilities have increased tenfold since I started reading this site. And it's a great way to see what the true hackers and techies are thinking. In other words, you make my job as a technology reporter a whole lot easier. Thanks, guys. Beers are on me if you ever get out to Seattle!
Posted by FascDot Killed My Previous Use:
Or "SCUBA apparatus"
Posted by Open Matrix:
For more information about the technology behind this click here to go to the Sensar website.
Posted by NJViking:
Hmm.. neither of those sites appear to be working.
-= NJV =-
Posted by Nick Carraway:
I think you mean "voila." I liked the Colonel Klink explanation better...
Posted by HolyMackeralAndy:
Congrats guys, looking forward to another one hundred million. Thanks for bringing your services to us--Slashdot is my browsers start page....
Posted by essell:
:)
My version of Netscape (4.51) did the same exact thing you described. I just minimized the window and did a couple of other things.. Popped it up a few minutes later and it was fine. Netscape seems to have this problem on several pages I attemp to view... So maybe it's not just a MS thing. Who knows... I'd be interested in anyone with a solution to this type of problem
Posted by Myrdraal:
Kind of unlikely. The only change was one variable for char to signed char... Actually, I probably shouldn't have even noted that change because I believe chars default to being signed.
-Myrdraal