Not - necessarily. I can speculate but. I dont know the exact details about the emulation but I can guess what is happening. Over the past few years, dynamic compilation, optimization and dynamic execution layer interface projects and papers have been doing the rounds in academic community. For example dynamo where a dynamic optimizer (which takes code and performs run time optimization on it - not emulation or translation) showed that the apps in fact ran *faster* even counting the overhead of optimization. This idea spawned DELI or dynamic execution layer interface which can dynamically translate instructions *as well as* perform optimizations on them using run time information. Researchers claim that execution is *faster* than running the same app on the native machine. All these are somewhat software equivalent of transmeta.
Now the interesting thing, both dynamo and DELI are from HP labs. So was HPL-PD an architecture that is the superset of itanium, invented and evaluated by HP waaaaaaay back (itanium is in fact based on HPL-PD). Now can the dynamic execution layer emulating x86 be based on DELI ? that is a speculation.
But Worth reading anyway.... 500 Internal Server Error
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I gotta agree and disagree - not fun reading at all. But is it really worth reading:P ? Ducks.
Of the laser gun is Po-210. A milligram of Polonium 210 emits as much alpha radiation as 5g of radium.
To quote LANL Polonium-210 is very dangerous to handle in even milligram or microgram amounts, and special equipment and strict control is necessary. Damage arises from the complete absorption of the energy of the alpha particle into tissue.
The maximum permissible body burden for ingested polonium is only 0.03 microcuries, which represents a particle weighing only 6.8 x 10-12 g. Weight for weight it is about 2.5 x 1011 times as toxic as hydrocyanic acid. The maximum allowable concentration for soluble polonium compounds in air is about 2 x 10-11 microcuries/cm3.
Also polonium 210 is very rare in nature. It is usually produced by bombarding Bismuth 209 with neutrons (typically in a nuclear reactor). In the current form, this weapon is an invitation for radioactive contamination disaster.
Not necessarily. We just need massive amount of research for innovative techniques to store and transport hydrogen. Look at this Idea. Basically sodium hydride is pellitized and coated with polythene. Very stable, can be stored for months under water. Once the pellet is crushed, it reacts with water producing hydrogen instantly. No explosions, no pressurized tanks, no transportation problem and yes - no exploding cars. While this might not be a perfect solution, I am mentioning this to illustrate that there might be scores of innovative solutions to the problems of today. We just need the time, effort and money to look for it.
From the article Or one household might see a commercial for a luxury car while another sees a pitch for an economy model. "Increase the effectiveness of advertising by sending different ads to different homes," the demonstration promises.
This cannot be achieved till the networks collect personal information, spending habits, viewing habits and the like. We all loathed realplayer and windows media player for calling up home about the clips we watch. This is far bigger and more ugly.
A Nokia color phone should get so much mention at slashdot. Samsung S105 with color screen (65k colors) has been around for sometime, with polyphonic ringtones, java et. al. And Sonyericcson t68i has bluetooth on top of color screen. Motorola T720i has all these + a color cam. Put simply - nokia isnt the first with color screen. Nokia isnt the first with java or cam. There are phones with all these features + bluetooth out there (for a long time now). Why mention Nokia on slashdot ?
Standard disclaimer - I am not trolling nor do I work for any cell phone company.
Why Unix and C ofcourse ! Its really amazing that the creativity of one man (oh well, two men) is still going strong now (granted it had many overhauls). The entire concept of operating system has been influenced by Unix. We think processes and files. The beautiful simplicity and elegance! As far as C is concerned, the syntax and the semantics is elegant. (So elegant that I place semicolons at the end of sentences rather than a period).
A more humorous aricle, the Carl Sagan's baloney detection kit can be found here. It basically tells the same stuff, in a lot more humorous way. Also checkout the section where he points out subtle flaws in arguments that everybody uses (and falls for).
You think there is no legitimate usage ? Are you serious ? This is a godsend ! Gnutella + broadband + 3D monitors + swedish pr0n. Think of the possibilities ! mmmmm.... goes into a deep thought;)
This site is for searching CS publications based on citations and other criteria. There are numerous papers on quantum computing many of which provide an excellent introduction. Ofcourse the webpage of faculty and their lecture notes ( here and here ) provide an excellent introduction. I would recomment going through the lecture slides before attacking a few of the more readable and fundamental papers.
To understand all the hype, here is an article about how DNA computing works. DNA Computing, interestingly, was first proposed by Prof. Len Adleman (of RSA fame), who used it to solve the famous travelling salesman problem for seven cities. He encoded the cities in DNA such that only valid tours could react and form longer strands. The reaction was instant and presto - he had a solution (pun unintended;)) in a gazillionth of a second.
Here is the bad news. The solution to the problems might be instant, but programmability and reading the output are still headaches. It is interesting to note that it took Adleman several days to read the answer even though the DNA computer "figured out" the answer in no time. But its a promising technology that would be refined in future no doubt.
There is the old discussion about if Linux is truly cheaper to operate in the long run. Is Linux a legitimate solution to school districts facing a financial crunch?
I dont know about schools in US. In India, an entire undergraduate programming intro lab (where we were taught Unix, C, C++, Shell Scripting and Perl) were 30-40 386 boxen used as dumb terminals for a behemoth running Linux. Contrary to what you would believe the machine was fast enough to support 35 students programming (in text mode) vi, emacs and running gcc.
The lab was cheap, the 386 boxen had a new lease of life we ended up being great C, C++ programmers. More importantly, learned to love Unix. Was Linux cheap for introducing C, C++, Perl and Unix ? Surely !
The rate at which the Moore's law is quoted in lectures and articles doubles every 18 months
Re:Conservative/Liberal take on it
on
Fooled by Randomness
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
People break down into two groups when the experience something lucky. Group number one sees it as more than luck, more than coincidence. They see it as a sign, evidence, that there is someone up there, watching over them. Group number two sees it as just pure luck. Just happy chance. And surely, the people in Group number two are looking at those fourteen lights in very suspicious way. For them, the situation is fifty-fifty. Could be bad, Could be good. But deep down, they feel that whatever happens, they're on their own. And that fills them with fear. Yeah, there are those people. But there's a whole lot of people in the Group number one. When they see those fourteen lights, they're looking at a miracle. And deep down, they feel that whatever's going to happen, there will be someone their to help them. And that fills them with hope. So what you have to ask yourself is what kind of person are you: are you the kind that sees signs, sees miracles? Or do you believe that people just get lucky? Or, look at the question this way: Is it possible that there are no coincidences?
Huh ? this seems to be a perfect plot for a movie. Wait - nevermind;)
The infinitude of random factors that may cause market fluctuations makes prediction completely (probably?) intractable. In CS lingo, it would appear to be NP-Complete.;)
Okay I am a CS theory puritan and a troll. But here is the deal.
Rant #1: Intractable problems are unsolvable problems. Even if you have infinitely powerful machines. Because our logic (the foundation of our math) has "holes" that prevent it from solving them. Halting problem (can you write a program that will verify if a program is correct)is an example. It simply cant be done.
Rant #2: NP hard problems are hard to solve. You just need lots of time. Throw in a trillion years and a very powerful computer and heck - you have a solution. Quantum computing *may* solve these NP hard problems in polynomial time. Still Quantum computing cannot solve intractable problems.
Rand #3: NP problems are not the most difficult to solve problems (among the solvable problems). In fact they are the easiest. There is something called polynomial hierachy of harder and harder problems and NP is at the very bottom.
Rant #4: Only problems that have a one bit solution (yes or no, true or false) can be NP complete. Others are "hard".
Further references to be directed at "computational complexity" by papadimitrou.
"On the day I attended, one feature group had four of its bugs punted to Longhorn because they had failed to shown up for War Room. When someone argued that they should be given another day, Wanke simply said, "F#$% 'em. If it was that important, they would have been here. It's in Longhorn. Next bug."
Did one feature group have its *feature* postponed to longhorn or the *bug-fixes* postponed to longhorn ? hmmmmmm interesting.
The translation of his trademark savant talents, ubiquitous technology, idiosyncratic artists and post-modern robber barons to a recognizable present-day reality is hit-and-miss. OMG!!!!
Suddenly I much more sympathetic towards the non-geeks writhing in pain when they hear something like "The remote X11 ssh-tunnels through the firewall and gets NATed to a xwin32 client"
DAMMIT!!! Just tell me if I should read the book or not!
i'm surprised by this, why can't the crypto whizzes put together a few lines of math.h and networking code to be a proof of concept? crypto is very much an applied field, so the theorists should include example source in their papers.
Well, There is nothing to be surprised about. Many theoretically secure encryption schemes have been broken in practice because the implementation is very difficult. One common pitfall: in theory, often, we assume the existance of a perfect source of random bits. Practically it is very very very difficult to ensure this (remember that part from cryptonomicon - where the encryption is broken because the keys were not perfectly random and there was a slight statistical anomaly ?).
Also in theory, some schemes are secure only if the keys have some mathematical property. In practice, someone who does not understand this subtle point might make a horrendous implementation. (I dont want to go into the gory details about the field from which the keys should be chosen in the diffie-hellman scheme).
Even with a perfect implementation, the user is also a very weak link in the chain.There is this famous incident of the more secure german naval enigma getting broken because some ship tranmitted using the new enigma scheme and the same message using the old enigma scheme (which was already broken).
"The only way you could prove that that issue would always cause a loss is if you could prove that an impossible to place series _necessarily must_ occur"
See that is the difference between conventional thinking and mathematical algorithm analysis. Consider an algorithm A that sorts numbers. Let us assume it can correctly sort all possible permutations of the numbers except one. Mathematically the algorithm is wrong. By extension, if no algorithm in the world can sort a particular permutation correctly, we can claim that an algorithm for sorting does not exist. Similarly here. If there exists a condition where you cant play indefinitely, no algorithm exists to play indefinitely.
...I understand that there would be problems with international spam, but stopping domestic spam would be a huge boon to everyone...
Unfortunately, that is not a solution. It would take the slimy spammer worms one microsecond to evolve.
1 - Rent a computer and a T1 line (online ?) in XXX country
2 - Telnet/Run X desktop/Run XP remote desktop
3 - Click mouse and send spam
The only way to prevent this actively is by penalizing ISP's for open relays, prosecuting spammers based on their physical location. The best way for passively fighting it is to use spamassasin or razor and letting the companies know that any spam and users would abandon their products en masse.
Slashdot Mirror
Not - necessarily. I can speculate but. I dont know the exact details about the emulation but I can guess what is happening. Over the past few years, dynamic compilation, optimization and dynamic execution layer interface projects and papers have been doing the rounds in academic community. For example dynamo where a dynamic optimizer (which takes code and performs run time optimization on it - not emulation or translation) showed that the apps in fact ran *faster* even counting the overhead of optimization. This idea spawned DELI or dynamic execution layer interface which can dynamically translate instructions *as well as* perform optimizations on them using run time information. Researchers claim that execution is *faster* than running the same app on the native machine. All these are somewhat software equivalent of transmeta.
Now the interesting thing, both dynamo and DELI are from HP labs. So was HPL-PD an architecture that is the superset of itanium, invented and evaluated by HP waaaaaaay back (itanium is in fact based on HPL-PD). Now can the dynamic execution layer emulating x86 be based on DELI ? that is a speculation.
But Worth reading anyway....
500 Internal Server Error
Internal Server Error
The server encountered an internal error or
misconfiguration and was unable to complete
your request.
Please contact the server administrator,
webmaster@devworld.com and inform them of the time the error occurred,
and anything you might have done that may have
caused the error.
More information about this error may be available
in the server error log.
I gotta agree and disagree - not fun reading at all. But is it really worth reading
Of the laser gun is Po-210. A milligram of Polonium 210 emits as much alpha radiation as 5g of radium.
To quote LANL Polonium-210 is very dangerous to handle in even milligram or microgram amounts, and special equipment and strict control is necessary. Damage arises from the complete absorption of the energy of the alpha particle into tissue.
The maximum permissible body burden for ingested polonium is only 0.03 microcuries, which represents a particle weighing only 6.8 x 10-12 g. Weight for weight it is about 2.5 x 1011 times as toxic as hydrocyanic acid. The maximum allowable concentration for soluble polonium compounds in air is about 2 x 10-11 microcuries/cm3.
Also polonium 210 is very rare in nature. It is usually produced by bombarding Bismuth 209 with neutrons (typically in a nuclear reactor). In the current form, this weapon is an invitation for radioactive contamination disaster.
Japan has sued the peoples republic of china for 10 trillion dollars - the chineese government says that they were just pursuing japaneese ad makers
periodic table
;)
with rhythm of haiku
I remember
ducks
Not necessarily. We just need massive amount of research for innovative techniques to store and transport hydrogen. Look at this Idea. Basically sodium hydride is pellitized and coated with polythene. Very stable, can be stored for months under water. Once the pellet is crushed, it reacts with water producing hydrogen instantly. No explosions, no pressurized tanks, no transportation problem and yes - no exploding cars. While this might not be a perfect solution, I am mentioning this to illustrate that there might be scores of innovative solutions to the problems of today. We just need the time, effort and money to look for it.
From the article Or one household might see a commercial for a luxury car while another sees a pitch for an economy model. "Increase the effectiveness of advertising by sending different ads to different homes," the demonstration promises.
This cannot be achieved till the networks collect personal information, spending habits, viewing habits and the like. We all loathed realplayer and windows media player for calling up home about the clips we watch. This is far bigger and more ugly.
A Nokia color phone should get so much mention at slashdot. Samsung S105 with color screen (65k colors) has been around for sometime, with polyphonic ringtones, java et. al. And Sonyericcson t68i has bluetooth on top of color screen. Motorola T720i has all these + a color cam. Put simply - nokia isnt the first with color screen. Nokia isnt the first with java or cam. There are phones with all these features + bluetooth out there (for a long time now). Why mention Nokia on slashdot ?
Standard disclaimer - I am not trolling nor do I work for any cell phone company.
I thought I could instruct slashdot readers on how actually the patenting process works . Good luck ;)
Why Unix and C ofcourse ! Its really amazing that the creativity of one man (oh well, two men) is still going strong now (granted it had many overhauls). The entire concept of operating system has been influenced by Unix. We think processes and files. The beautiful simplicity and elegance! As far as C is concerned, the syntax and the semantics is elegant. (So elegant that I place semicolons at the end of sentences rather than a period).
A more humorous aricle, the Carl Sagan's baloney detection kit can be found here. It basically tells the same stuff, in a lot more humorous way. Also checkout the section where he points out subtle flaws in arguments that everybody uses (and falls for).
You think there is no legitimate usage ? Are you serious ? This is a godsend ! Gnutella + broadband + 3D monitors + swedish pr0n. Think of the possibilities ! mmmmm.... goes into a deep thought ;)
This site is for searching CS publications based on citations and other criteria. There are numerous papers on quantum computing many of which provide an excellent introduction. Ofcourse the webpage of faculty and their lecture notes ( here and here ) provide an excellent introduction. I would recomment going through the lecture slides before attacking a few of the more readable and fundamental papers.
Their site has been hosted on one!!!
;)
Already slashdotted
...I made the snow gun, but unfortunately ran out of stuff to make snow out of. Any volunteers ?
To understand all the hype, here is an article about how DNA computing works. DNA Computing, interestingly, was first proposed by Prof. Len Adleman (of RSA fame), who used it to solve the famous travelling salesman problem for seven cities. He encoded the cities in DNA such that only valid tours could react and form longer strands. The reaction was instant and presto - he had a solution (pun unintended ;)) in a gazillionth of a second.
Here is the bad news. The solution to the problems might be instant, but programmability and reading the output are still headaches. It is interesting to note that it took Adleman several days to read the answer even though the DNA computer "figured out" the answer in no time. But its a promising technology that would be refined in future no doubt.
-Dracken
There is the old discussion about if Linux is truly cheaper to operate in the long run. Is Linux a legitimate solution to school districts facing a financial crunch?
I dont know about schools in US. In India, an entire undergraduate programming intro lab (where we were taught Unix, C, C++, Shell Scripting and Perl) were 30-40 386 boxen used as dumb terminals for a behemoth running Linux. Contrary to what you would believe the machine was fast enough to support 35 students programming (in text mode) vi, emacs and running gcc.
The lab was cheap, the 386 boxen had a new lease of life we ended up being great C, C++ programmers. More importantly, learned to love Unix. Was Linux cheap for introducing C, C++, Perl and Unix ? Surely !
The rate at which the Moore's law is quoted in lectures and articles doubles every 18 months
People break down into two groups when the experience something lucky. Group number one sees it as more than luck, more than coincidence. They see it as a sign, evidence, that there is someone up there, watching over them. Group number two sees it as just pure luck. Just happy chance. And surely, the people in Group number two are looking at those fourteen lights in very suspicious way. For them, the situation is fifty-fifty. Could be bad, Could be good. But deep down, they feel that whatever happens, they're on their own. And that fills them with fear. Yeah, there are those people. But there's a whole lot of people in the Group number one. When they see those fourteen lights, they're looking at a miracle. And deep down, they feel that whatever's going to happen, there will be someone their to help them. And that fills them with hope. So what you have to ask yourself is what kind of person are you: are you the kind that sees signs, sees miracles? Or do you believe that people just get lucky? Or, look at the question this way: Is it possible that there are no coincidences?
;)
Huh ? this seems to be a perfect plot for a movie. Wait - nevermind
The infinitude of random factors that may cause market fluctuations makes prediction completely (probably?) intractable. In CS lingo, it would appear to be NP-Complete.
Okay I am a CS theory puritan and a troll. But here is the deal.
Rant #1: Intractable problems are unsolvable problems. Even if you have infinitely powerful machines. Because our logic (the foundation of our math) has "holes" that prevent it from solving them. Halting problem (can you write a program that will verify if a program is correct)is an example. It simply cant be done.
Rant #2: NP hard problems are hard to solve. You just need lots of time. Throw in a trillion years and a very powerful computer and heck - you have a solution. Quantum computing *may* solve these NP hard problems in polynomial time. Still Quantum computing cannot solve intractable problems.
Rand #3: NP problems are not the most difficult to solve problems (among the solvable problems). In fact they are the easiest. There is something called polynomial hierachy of harder and harder problems and NP is at the very bottom.
Rant #4: Only problems that have a one bit solution (yes or no, true or false) can be NP complete. Others are "hard".
Further references to be directed at "computational complexity" by papadimitrou.
Sorry but had to take it out on someone
"On the day I attended, one feature group had four of its bugs punted to Longhorn because they had failed to shown up for War Room. When someone argued that they should be given another day, Wanke simply said, "F#$% 'em. If it was that important, they would have been here. It's in Longhorn. Next bug."
Did one feature group have its *feature* postponed to longhorn or the *bug-fixes* postponed to longhorn ? hmmmmmm interesting.
The translation of his trademark savant talents, ubiquitous technology, idiosyncratic artists and post-modern robber barons to a recognizable present-day reality is hit-and-miss. OMG!!!!
Suddenly I much more sympathetic towards the non-geeks writhing in pain when they hear something like "The remote X11 ssh-tunnels through the firewall and gets NATed to a xwin32 client"
DAMMIT!!! Just tell me if I should read the book or not!
i'm surprised by this, why can't the crypto whizzes put together a few lines of math.h and networking code to be a proof of concept? crypto is very much an applied field, so the theorists should include example source in their papers.
Well, There is nothing to be surprised about. Many theoretically secure encryption schemes have been broken in practice because the implementation is very difficult. One common pitfall: in theory, often, we assume the existance of a perfect source of random bits. Practically it is very very very difficult to ensure this (remember that part from cryptonomicon - where the encryption is broken because the keys were not perfectly random and there was a slight statistical anomaly ?).
Also in theory, some schemes are secure only if the keys have some mathematical property. In practice, someone who does not understand this subtle point might make a horrendous implementation. (I dont want to go into the gory details about the field from which the keys should be chosen in the diffie-hellman scheme).
Even with a perfect implementation, the user is also a very weak link in the chain.There is this famous incident of the more secure german naval enigma getting broken because some ship tranmitted using the new enigma scheme and the same message using the old enigma scheme (which was already broken).
"The only way you could prove that that issue would always cause a loss is if you could prove that an impossible to place series _necessarily must_ occur"
See that is the difference between conventional thinking and mathematical algorithm analysis. Consider an algorithm A that sorts numbers. Let us assume it can correctly sort all possible permutations of the numbers except one. Mathematically the algorithm is wrong. By extension, if no algorithm in the world can sort a particular permutation correctly, we can claim that an algorithm for sorting does not exist. Similarly here. If there exists a condition where you cant play indefinitely, no algorithm exists to play indefinitely.
Unfortunately, that is not a solution. It would take the slimy spammer worms one microsecond to evolve.
1 - Rent a computer and a T1 line (online ?) in XXX country
2 - Telnet/Run X desktop/Run XP remote desktop
3 - Click mouse and send spam
The only way to prevent this actively is by penalizing ISP's for open relays, prosecuting spammers based on their physical location. The best way for passively fighting it is to use spamassasin or razor and letting the companies know that any spam and users would abandon their products en masse.