Actually the Bostream prices varu quite a lot depending on wether you purchase a conenction individually or for many appartments at once. In the building where I live we pay 75 kronor, about 10US$, a month for 10Mb/s
It's in the middle of the night here and I'm ill. My head has been clearer:) However as posted by others in another part of this thread one ussually doesn't get the full 4Gb capacity.
One very good reason for 64-bit processors which is often overlooked is that one needs processors with more than 32-bits in order to use more than 2Gb of RAM. With only 32-bits one is not able to adress a larger RAM. Aplications using large amounts of RAM ar getting more common by the day so unless we get low price(!) 64-bit processors on the market soon there will be an annoying ceiling for many applications.
There is a very good reason for the ban on weapons which intentionally blind soldiers and it is exactly as you say in your joke-it IS a humane ban. This kind of bans originally stem from the horrible scenes during the gas attacks during the first world war. During this time chlorine and mustard gas were used in and attempt to break the stalemate in the trench war. As a result large numbers of soliders who survived became crippled or blinded. A number of these solider had to stay blinded and with severe skin and lung damage among the dead in the battlefield before being found, many starved to death before they were found. Being blinded and left alone in a battlefield filled with enemy soliders, landmines, razorwire and many other threats will often be a death sentence. Compared to being killed instantly by a bomb being blinded without immediate rescue will often be the equivalent of a quick execution compared to torture followed by a random or slow death. All in all intientionally blinding weapons are not something a civlised society should use even on the few occasions when it is forced into war. Whether tihs affects the mentioned airplane is another matter.
As pointed out above the communication bottleneck is no problem at all for many of the most CPU-intenstive parallel computations. Monte Carlo-simulations for example can often be done with just about no communication at all. The same is true for many of the really hard computational tasks where we just don't have any algorthims that can make use of intensive communication among the processors.
I think the swedish word carries more of a value judgement than the word moderate. In swedsih lagom has also carried a positive tone, things not being lagom not being desirable.
A bit hard to put your finger on really.
Well you could always use a second massdriver to launch a dummy weight in the opposite direction at the same time. However this doubles the amount of energy used. Doing the launch at the correct orbital position would save the earth from being bombarded by dummy weights.
This is correct. Atmosperic distortion, turbulence mainly, has been the major problem for large telescopes on the ground. However using adaptive optics we can now compensate for much of this distortion. The basic idea is to use either a known reference star close to the observed object, or an artificical reference point created by shining a laser at a particular layer in the atmosphere, to find out what the "shape" of the distrotion is.
This is done continously and the information is fed into a computer which caluclates how to deform the mirror, or mirrors, in order to get an undistorted light beam to the detectors in the telescope.
Using this kind of technology the European VLT will be able to create better pictures from the ground than the Hubble do from space. The current belief is that the limit for adaptive otpics will be reach with telescopes of a radius of 130-150 meter.
However space based telescope are still the only way to observe at wavelengths which are aborbed by the earths atmosphere.
The swedish navy also has a steralth ship. This link shows some data for the ship. the ship actually began trials earlier than stated in the linked page.
Here are some drawing of the ship as well cruising, using airdefence missiles
So this kind of technology will probably be seen in many navies in the future. I can tell you that watching a ship this size come at you at 35 knots while your radar shows nothing is rather unnerving.
The thing that helps out here is the wieght of the ice above the detector. The pressure from the ice above the ice in the detector changes the normally opaque ice into a very clear form of ice. The small gaspockets that make ice opaque is forced into the ice crystal structure making it even clearer. Thanks to this you can have a sight of well above 20 meters.
There is already one neutrione detector using the antarctic ice, the European/American collaboration AMANDA.
http://amanda.berkeley.edu/amanda/amanda.html
"As long as big companies can buy laws to support their monopolies, they can legislate their way out of any situation where normal capitalist forces would stop them."
Well one thing working against this is that now some of the big companies are begining to use their money and influence to favour open software. IBM, SGI...
"Massive optimization. Remember all those NP-complete problems you learned in comp. sci. ? No more simmulated annealing, genetic algorithm, guesstimation methods. Qubits can find the optimal solution instantly."
This is actually not quite true. So far no one has found a quantum computer algorithm which solves an NP-complete problem in polynomial time. This is perhaps one of the things that tend to get people overly exicted about quantum computers. They will most likely be built and become more or less practical, depending on the amount of technological progress, but they are not magic. So far most problems for which there are fast quantum algortihms are problems which can be solved in less than exponential time on an ordinary computer. There are a few exceptions like simulating a quntum system, but these problems are not NP-complete.
However there is no mathematical proof that a polynomial time quantum algorithm for an NP-complete problem could not be found, but the same is true for a classical algortihm for NP-complete problems.
Well we have do to something to compensate for having just three to four hours of daylight in the middle of the winter:)
Let's hope it keeps on spreading, and getting faster.
Nope not kidding at all. Apparently Umeå is the best connected town in the world. The university started it by giving the rooms where the students live acces to ethernet and then it began to spread. I've had an ethernet conection at home since 1996.
Here in Umeå, northern sweden, about 45% of all households have either 10Mbps ethernet or cable modems.
In the house where I live we have a 100Mbps connection for about 5$/month, no installation cost for newcommers.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually the Bostream prices varu quite a lot depending on wether you purchase a conenction individually or for many appartments at once. In the building where I live we pay 75 kronor, about 10US$, a month for 10Mb/s
It's in the middle of the night here and I'm ill. My head has been clearer :)
However as posted by others in another part of this thread one ussually doesn't get the full 4Gb capacity.
One very good reason for 64-bit processors which is often overlooked is that one needs processors with more than 32-bits in order to use more than 2Gb of RAM. With only 32-bits one is not able to adress a larger RAM.
Aplications using large amounts of RAM ar getting more common by the day so unless we get low price(!) 64-bit processors on the market soon there will be an annoying ceiling for many applications.
There is a very good reason for the ban on weapons which intentionally blind soldiers and it is exactly as you say in your joke-it IS a humane ban.
This kind of bans originally stem from the horrible scenes during the gas attacks during the first world war. During this time chlorine and mustard gas were used in and attempt to break the stalemate in the trench war. As a result large numbers of soliders who survived became crippled or blinded. A number of these solider had to stay blinded and with severe skin and lung damage among the dead in the battlefield before being found, many starved to death before they were found.
Being blinded and left alone in a battlefield filled with enemy soliders, landmines, razorwire and many other threats will often be a death sentence. Compared to being killed instantly by a bomb being blinded without immediate rescue will often be the equivalent of a quick execution compared to torture followed by a random or slow death.
All in all intientionally blinding weapons are not something a civlised society should use even on the few occasions when it is forced into war.
Whether tihs affects the mentioned airplane is another matter.
As pointed out above the communication bottleneck is no problem at all for many of the most CPU-intenstive parallel computations. Monte Carlo-simulations for example can often be done with just about no communication at all. The same is true for many of the really hard computational tasks where we just don't have any algorthims that can make use of intensive communication among the processors.
I think the swedish word carries more of a value judgement than the word moderate. In swedsih lagom has also carried a positive tone, things not being lagom not being desirable.
A bit hard to put your finger on really.
Well you could always use a second massdriver to launch a dummy weight in the opposite direction at the same time. However this doubles the amount of energy used. Doing the launch at the correct orbital position would save the earth from being bombarded by dummy weights.
This is correct. Atmosperic distortion, turbulence mainly, has been the major problem for large telescopes on the ground. However using adaptive optics we can now compensate for much of this distortion. The basic idea is to use either a known reference star close to the observed object, or an artificical reference point created by shining a laser at a particular layer in the atmosphere, to find out what the "shape" of the distrotion is.
This is done continously and the information is fed into a computer which caluclates how to deform the mirror, or mirrors, in order to get an undistorted light beam to the detectors in the telescope.
Using this kind of technology the European VLT will be able to create better pictures from the ground than the Hubble do from space. The current belief is that the limit for adaptive otpics will be reach with telescopes of a radius of 130-150 meter.
However space based telescope are still the only way to observe at wavelengths which are aborbed by the earths atmosphere.
The swedish navy also has a steralth ship. This link shows some data for the ship. the ship actually began trials earlier than stated in the linked page. Here are some drawing of the ship as well cruising, using airdefence missiles
So this kind of technology will probably be seen in many navies in the future. I can tell you that watching a ship this size come at you at 35 knots while your radar shows nothing is rather unnerving.
The thing that helps out here is the wieght of the ice above the detector. The pressure from the ice above the ice in the detector changes the normally opaque ice into a very clear form of ice. The small gaspockets that make ice opaque is forced into the ice crystal structure making it even clearer. Thanks to this you can have a sight of well above 20 meters. There is already one neutrione detector using the antarctic ice, the European/American collaboration AMANDA. http://amanda.berkeley.edu/amanda/amanda.html
"As long as big companies can buy laws to support their monopolies, they can legislate their way out of any situation where normal capitalist forces would stop them."
Well one thing working against this is that now some of the big companies are begining to use their money and influence to favour open software. IBM, SGI...
"Massive optimization. Remember all those NP-complete problems you learned in comp. sci. ? No more simmulated annealing, genetic algorithm, guesstimation methods. Qubits can find the optimal solution instantly."
This is actually not quite true. So far no one has found a quantum computer algorithm which solves an NP-complete problem in polynomial time. This is perhaps one of the things that tend to get people overly exicted about quantum computers. They will most likely be built and become more or less practical, depending on the amount of technological progress, but they are not magic. So far most problems for which there are fast quantum algortihms are problems which can be solved in less than exponential time on an ordinary computer. There are a few exceptions like simulating a quntum system, but these problems are not NP-complete.
However there is no mathematical proof that a polynomial time quantum algorithm for an NP-complete problem could not be found, but the same is true for a classical algortihm for NP-complete problems.
Well we have do to something to compensate for having just three to four hours of daylight in the middle of the winter :)
Let's hope it keeps on spreading, and getting faster.
Nope not kidding at all. Apparently Umeå is the best connected town in the world. The university started it by giving the rooms where the students live acces to ethernet and then it began to spread. I've had an ethernet conection at home since 1996.
Here in Umeå, northern sweden, about 45% of all households have either 10Mbps ethernet or cable modems. In the house where I live we have a 100Mbps connection for about 5$/month, no installation cost for newcommers.