Amazon reported net income of $5.1 million, or a penny a diluted share, compared with a net loss of $545.1 million, or $1.53 a basic share, a year earlier.
"We feel strongly that the law does not allow for parody to be a defense to a pornographic use of someone else's intellectual property, especially when that use is directed to children."
Of course. Always invoke the children. That justifies any measure.
The next step is to use a more intense beam and an enclosure mirrored on all sides (the energy resolution improves the longer the neutrons spend in the device). An energy resolution as sharp as 10-18 eV is expected
The Internet engineering community has run into a significant technical
hurdle in the development of an industry standard to support instant messages
with multimedia attachments, such as audio or video clips.
If leading instant messaging service providers such as AOL and Microsoft
offer multimedia instant messaging services to their millions of users, Internet
communications could ground to a halt. Service providers now support only
text-based instant messages.
The Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), which identified the multimedia
instant messaging problem, is soliciting potential fixes from its participants
and plans to debate these fixes at its meeting in March.
IETF leaders say protocols being
developed to support text-based instant messaging won't handle multimedia
instant messaging attachments. They say a new communications protocol is
needed to transport those files. This new protocol must provide congestion-control
mechanisms to prevent instant messaging users from overwhelming the Internet's
backbone with MP3 music files, photos or voice clips.
"There would be a potential for an AOL usage [of multimedia instant messaging]
to either swamp out the rest of the Internet or to require major engineering
to stop what we call a congestion collapse, where you cannot send new traffic
into the network," says Allison Mankin, co-chair of the IETF's transport
area. "This is a big enough problem to need urgent attention."
Demand for multimedia instant messaging is expected to be strong. Text-based
instant messaging is popular on the Internet and private, corporate intranets.
With multimedia instant messaging, users could send attachments along with
chat sessions.
"Our researchers would love to have voice chat integrated with instant
messaging, mainly to kill the international long-distance calls," says Ross
McKenzie, director of IS at Johns Hopkins University. "Our dean has a research
center in Nepal. I know that if I offered that service, he'd be on it tomorrow."
Johns Hopkins began offering regular instant messaging services to 4,000
faculty and staff members in August. Today, instant messaging is the most
popular application on the university's Web portal, with more than 1,500
users racking up 60,000 minutes of instant messaging messages per month.
"If we offered [instant messaging] attachments, our faculty would be exchanging
chapters out of books. But what they'd really like is voice," McKenzie says.
"Our researchers want ad hoc, integrated voice and chat. They want it in
Katmandu, at home, at Starbucks or wherever."
Today's instant messaging services use what's called a paging mode, where
the signaling information that initiates the chat session is carried along
with the text of the chat session using a single protocol.
After four years of effort, the IETF is finalizing a protocol dubbed
SIMPLE
(SIP for Instant Messaging and Presence Leveraging Extensions) that will
let the paging mode work across different instant messaging service providers'
offerings. Once deployed, SIMPLE will let AOL users exchange text-based instant
messages with users of rival instant messaging services from Microsoft, Yahoo
and others. Both AOL and Microsoft have vowed to support SIMPLE.
SIMPLE uses Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) to initiate an instant message
and to transport it on a hop-by-hop basis across the Internet. While SIMPLE
can handle short, text-based messages of up to 1,000 characters, IETF participants
have discovered that it cannot carry attachments to instant messaging sessions.
This is because of an inherent problem in SIP, which runs on TCP or User
Datagram Protocol (UDP). While TCP features built-in congestion controls,
UDP does not.
So UDP should not be used for sending large files. And SIP can't be adjusted
to eliminate the possibility that large files would be sent over UDP. That
scenario would be catastrophic, Mankin says. "Imagine the after-school surge,
with millions of teenagers online and sending MP3s to each other," she says.
"We're talking about volumes of traffic that may be half of the backbone."
Mankin says even if AOL were to offer multimedia instant messaging attachments
only to its own users, that could still cause congestion problems across
the Internet if this issue isn't resolved.
"We can't tell AOL what to do, but they use all the major backbone providers,"
she says. "If UDP could be used by their [multimedia instant messaging] service,
that would be a serious problem."
The IETF is working on a solution that will use SIMPLE to initiate multimedia
instant messaging sessions but will rely on a different protocol with built-in
congestion control to transport attachments. So far, the IETF has identified
several options for that transport protocol, which will use what's called
a session mode rather than a paging mode.
The co-chairs of the IETF's SIMPLE working group are asking participants
to submit additional proposals for the session-mode transport protocol this
month. The group hopes to select one of the proposals by June.
Jon Peterson, co-chair of the SIMPLE working group and a senior technical
industry liaison with NeuStar, says the new transport protocol will scale
better to carry large volumes of instant messages and multimedia attachments.
"If the No. 1 and No. 2 [instant messaging] providers were going to interconnect,
this would be really useful to handle the high volumes of messages," he says.
Meanwhile, government regulators could prevent AOL - the largest instant
messaging service provider - from offering multimedia instant messaging services
until this technical glitch is resolved. To get approval for its merger with
Time Warner, AOL agreed to delay the release of multimedia instant messaging
services until it opens its instant messaging system to rival services.
AOL failed to return multiple calls seeking clarification of its multimedia
instant messaging plans. But AOL vowed last summer to use SIMPLE to provide
interoperability with other instant messaging service providers.
The rest of the instant messaging industry is expected to adopt SIMPLE
too, with Microsoft already shipping SIP support in the latest release of
its MSN Messenger software.
In related news, the SIMPLE working group. plans to submit documents that
detail how the paging mode works to the IETF leadership for approval in the
next few weeks. A draft standard could be approved by March.
The multimedia instant messaging hurdle "is not a show stopper" for SIMPLE,
says Robert Sparks, co-chair of the IETF's SIMPLE working group and a senior
software architect with Dynamicsoft. "It's new functionality that a lot of
people really, really want. But the [SIMPLE] method is sufficient to replicate
the [instant messaging] services we have right now."
This was the system I benchmarked the P4 on. I used 128MB of Micron PC1600 (200MHz) ECC DDR Memory.
The latest, preproduction, Intel CPU, and he only springs for 128 MB of ram? Why bottleneck the thing? No one is going to production ship it like that. I will likely go out the door with 512 or so.
Helicopters aren't fuel efficient, nor are their rotor "wings" good for lifting in a one percent atmosphere. A plane like the U-2 would be the obvious choice, except for the horrendous storms on Mars.
Don't stop maintaining the old code code until the new code is on solid ground. No matter how sure you are that you can do it, the new code might never come through.
n science's great chain of being, the particle physicists place themselves with the angels, looking down from the heavenly spheres on the chemists, biologists, geologists, meteorologists -- those who are applying, not discovering, nature's most fundamental laws. Everything, after all, is made from subatomic particles. Once you have a concise theory explaining how they work, the rest should just be filigree.
Even the kindred discipline of solid-state physics, which is concerned with the mass behavior of particles -- what metals, crystals, semiconductors, whole lumps of matter do -- is often considered a lesser pursuit. "Squalid state physics," Murray Gell-Mann, discoverer of the quark, dubbed it. Others dismiss it as "dirt physics."
Recently there have been rumblings from the muck. In a clash of scientific cultures, some prominent squalid-staters have been challenging the particle purists as arbiters of ultimate truth.
"The stakes here are very high," said Dr. Robert B. Laughlin, a Stanford University theorist who shared a Nobel Prize in 1998 for discoveries in solid-state physics. "At issue is a deep epistemological matter having to do with what physics is."
Last year Dr. Laughlin and Dr. David Pines, a theorist at the University of Illinois and Los Alamos National Laboratory, published a manifesto declaring that the "science of the past," which seeks to distill the richness of reality into a few simple equations governing subatomic particles, was coming to an impasse.
Many complex systems -- the very ones the solid-staters study -- appear to be irreducible. Made of many interlocking parts, they display a kind of synergy, obeying "higher organizing principles" that cannot be further simplified no matter how hard you try.
Carrying the idea even further, some solid-state physicists are trying to show that the laws of relativity, long considered part of the very bedrock of the physical world, are not platonic truths that have existed since time began.
They may have emerged from the roiling of the vacuum of space, much as supply-and-demand and other "laws" of economics emerge from the bustle of the marketplace. If so, then solid-state physics, which specializes in how emergent phenomena occur, may be the most fundamental science of them all.
"We're in the midst of a paradigm change," Dr. Pines said. "Ours is not the prevailing view, but I think it will turn out to be the one that lasts." Working in this vein, one of Dr. Laughlin's Stanford colleagues, Dr. Shoucheng Zhang, recently was co- author of a paper suggesting that elementary particles like photons and gravitons, the carriers of electromagnetism and gravity, might not be so elementary after all -- they might emerge as ripples in the vacuum of space, bubbling up from the quagmire in a way that can best be explained in terms of solid-state physics.
"The idea is of course crazy, thought provoking, and somewhat anti-establishment," Dr. Zhang said. "The main idea is to apply concepts from solid-state physics to answer some big questions of the universe."
The particle physicists insist that there is plenty of mileage left in their own approach. "I strongly believe that the fundamental laws of nature are not emergent phenomena," said Dr. David Gross, director of the Institute for Theoretical Physics at the University of California at Santa Barbara. "Bob Laughlin and I have violent arguments about this."
After hearing Dr. Zhang describe his theory at a seminar last month, Dr. Gross deemed it "an interesting piece of work." He said he found the mathematics "beautiful and intriguing, and perhaps of use somewhere."
That may sound like faint praise, but the particle physicists have reason to be wary. The squalid-staters are challenging them in a debate over how the universe is made and how science should be done.
Following the method of Plato, the particle physicists are inclined to see nature as crystallized mathematics. In the beginning was a single superforce, the embodiment of an elegant set of equations they call, only a bit facetiously, the theory of everything. Then along came the Big Bang to ruin it all.
The universe cooled and expanded, the single force splintering into the four very different forces observed today: electromagnetism and the weak and strong nuclear forces, which work inside atoms, are described by quantum mechanics and special relativity. The fourth force, gravity, is described by an entirely different theory, general relativity.
The particle physicists' ultimate goal is "grand unification" -- recovering the primordial symmetry in the form of a single law -- a few concise equations, it is often said, that could be silk-screened onto a T- shirt.
This approach, in which the most complex phenomena are boiled down to a unique underlying theory, is called reductionism.
The problem, the solid-staters say, is that many forms of matter -- ranging from the exotic like superconductors and superfluids to the mundane like crystals and metals -- cannot be described in terms of fundamental particle interactions. When systems become very complex, completely new and independent laws emerge. "More is different," as the Nobel laureate Philip W. Anderson put it in a landmark paper in 1972. To the solid-staters, it would take something the size of a circus tent to hold all the equations capturing the unruliness of the physical world.
Like Aristotle, they lean toward the notion that it is the equations that flow from nature instead of the other way around. Mathematics is just a tool for making sense of it all.
"For at least some fundamental things in nature, the theory of everything is irrelevant," declared Dr. Laughlin and Dr. Pines in the Jan. 4, 2000 issue of The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. "The central task of theoretical physics in our time is no longer to write down the ultimate equations but rather to catalog and understand emergent behavior in its many guises, including potentially life itself."
There may not be a theory of everything, they say, just a lot of theories of things. This is exactly the kind of squalor the particle physicists abhor.
Dr. Grigori E. Volovik, a solid- state physicist at the Helsinki University of Technology in Finland, champions an idea he calls "anti- grand unification." In a review article last year (xxx.lanl.gov/abs/gr-qc/0104046), he ventured that the universe may have begun not in a state of pristine symmetry but in one of lawlessness. The laws of relativity and perhaps quantum mechanics itself would have emerged only later on.
The notion of emergent laws is not radical in itself. A flask of gas consists of trillions of molecules randomly colliding with one another. From this disorder, qualities like temperature and pressure emerge, along with laws relating one to the other.
So take that idea a level deeper. Physicists now believe that the vacuum of space is, paradoxically, not vacuous at all. It seethes with energy, in the form of "virtual particles" constantly flitting in and out of existence. So perhaps, Dr. Volovik suggests, even laws now considered fundamental emerged from this constant subatomic buzz.
Solid-state physics offers clues to how something like this might occur. The atomic vibrations that ripple through matter are, like all quantum phenomena, carried by particles -- called, in this case, phonons.
Just as photons carry light and gravitons carry gravity, phonons carry the subatomic equivalent of sound. Like bubbles in a carbonated beverage, phonons -- physicists call them "quasi particles" -- appear only when the medium is disturbed.
In the world of solid-state physics, quasi particles abound. In some substances, like the semiconductors used to make computer chips, the displacement of an electron leaves behind a "hole" that behaves like a positively charged particle. An electron and a hole can sometimes stick together to form a chargeless quasi particle called an exciton. Other such ephemera include magnons and polarons.
Evanescent though they are, quasi particles act every bit like elementary particles, obeying the laws of quantum mechanics. This has led some mavericks to wonder whether there is really any difference at all. Maybe elementary particles are just quasi particles -- an effervescence in the vacuum.
Particularly intriguing is a phenomenon, occurring at extremely low temperatures, called the fractional quantum Hall effect. In certain substances, quasi particles appear that act curiously like electrons but with one-third the normal charge. (Dr. Laughlin won his Nobel Prize for a theory explaining this.)
Quarks, the basic building blocks of matter, also carry a one-third charge, a coincidence that has fueled speculation that emergence may be somehow fundamental to the very existence of the physical world.
A stumbling block to carrying this idea further has been that the quantum Hall effect seems to work only in two-dimensions -- on the surface of a substance. But in a paper published in the Oct. 26 issue of Science, Dr. Zhang and his student Jiangping Hu showed how to extend the phenomenon. In their scheme, the physical world would be a three-dimensional "surface" of a four-dimensional "quantum liquid" -- an underlying sea of particles that can be thought of as the vacuum.
Analyzing the ripples that would appear in such a medium, the two scientists were surprised to find that they mathematically resembled electromagnetic and gravitational waves. But there are problems with the model. At this point, the hypothetical photons and gravitons that emerge from the equations do not interact with other particles, as they do in the real world.
"The coupling is zero, so apples are weightless, as is everything else," said Dr. Joseph Polchinski, a string theorist at the University of California at Santa Barbara, who recently discussed the model with Dr. Zhang.
And there is what the theory's inventors concede is an "embarrassment of riches" -- the equations predict hordes of exotic particles that do not exist.
"The hope is that some modification of the theory, not yet specified in detail, will remove the extra fields and turn on the coupling," Dr. Polchinski said. "Whether this can be done is at this point a guess. Overall my attitude now is interest with a high degree of skepticism."
If the theory can be made to work, it may point to a new way of unifying quantum mechanics and relativity. But Dr. Zhang is careful not to oversell what he considers a work in progress.
"Our work only made a tiny step toward this direction," Dr. Zhang said, "but it seems to indicate that the goal may not be impossible to reach." At the very least, he said, his work may inspire more collaboration between particle physicists and solid-staters.
Ultimately, though, the two sides know that they are talking across a divide. Taken to its extreme, emergence suggests that all the fundamental laws, even quantum mechanics, may be secondary -- that at the base of reality is random noise.
Dr. Polchinski said he found that idea discouraging.
"To me, the history of science seems to be a steady progression toward simpler and more unified laws, and I expect to see this continue and to contribute to it. Things may take many surprising twists and turns," he said, "but we reductionists are still quite happily and busily reducing."
Ericsson's share was likely to be over $2 billion, Nokia's "well over" $1 billion and Siemens' worth $600 million, indicated the upgrade that Cingular initially said was worth $3 billion was closer to $4 billion.
I wonder where they're getting the funding for this outlay? For four billion dollars, someone sure believes in 3G.
If people don't like it, change it. Lack of interest is the public telling you something. People go to sites like Sluggy Freelance, Slashdot, etc. because the site offers something they enjoy and tell theri friends about. One email blitz of friends telling friends can make a huge difference. People just have to like the contents.
The Treo is a world phone. It works on the GSM standard and is equipped for use in both the U.S. and Europe. In the U.S., it will work with carriers like VoiceStream and Cingular.
Yeah, GSM. So I spend $400-$600 on a cell phone/organizer, plus steep monthly fees for cell phone/internet access. And to top it off, I'm locked into GSM, which here in the USA isn't exactly the leading protocol.
Since the article is long on hype and thin on substance, here are some details:
2 NiMH Rechargeable Batteries - Not Removable
Power Adapter
USB
Installation CD
I don't have the hardware specs on the new "Xtreme", but here is the previous model:
CYBIKO COMPUTER MODEL CY6411.
Hardware specifications
Main Processor: 32 bit, 11 MHz Hitachi H8S/2246
Coprocessor: Atmel AT90S2313, 4 MHz
RAM: 512 KB
Flash disk: 512 KB, extendible up to 1 MB
LCD display: 160x100 dots, 59x40 mm, 4 level grayscale
RF transceiver: RF2915
Expansion cartridge slot: 68-pin
PC connection socket: RS232 serial port
Size: 5.7" x 2.8" x 0.86"
Weight: 4.3 oz
Software specifications
Operating System: CyOS v.1.2
Software: CyOS v.1.2 compatible apps
Communication Protocol: CyDP x.30 (Cybiko RF Digital Protocol)
Dynamic Wireless Local Network: automatically provided by CyOS v.1.2 and CyDP x.30
RF communication features
Frequency: 902-928 MHz
Number of channels: 30 digital channels
Communication Rate: 19200 bps each channel
Transmission and Receiving Range: 150 ft. indoors, 300 ft. outdoors (environment dependent)
Max. online Cybiko units: 3000 (100 units on each of 30 channels)
Slashdot Mirror
At 5c a share . . .
A profit, but not five cents yet.
Amazon reported net income of $5.1 million, or a penny a diluted share, compared with a net loss of $545.1 million, or $1.53 a basic share, a year earlier.
The Gardener
"We feel strongly that the law does not allow for parody to be a defense to a pornographic use of someone else's intellectual property, especially when that use is directed to children."
Of course. Always invoke the children. That justifies any measure.
The Gardener
It gets better:
The next step is to use a more intense beam and an enclosure mirrored on all sides (the energy resolution improves the longer the neutrons spend in the device). An energy resolution as sharp as 10-18 eV is expected
The Gardener
By Carolyn Duffy Marsan
Network World, 01/14/02
The Internet engineering community has run into a significant technical hurdle in the development of an industry standard to support instant messages with multimedia attachments, such as audio or video clips.
If leading instant messaging service providers such as AOL and Microsoft offer multimedia instant messaging services to their millions of users, Internet communications could ground to a halt. Service providers now support only text-based instant messages.
The Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), which identified the multimedia instant messaging problem, is soliciting potential fixes from its participants and plans to debate these fixes at its meeting in March.
IETF leaders say protocols being developed to support text-based instant messaging won't handle multimedia instant messaging attachments. They say a new communications protocol is needed to transport those files. This new protocol must provide congestion-control mechanisms to prevent instant messaging users from overwhelming the Internet's backbone with MP3 music files, photos or voice clips.
"There would be a potential for an AOL usage [of multimedia instant messaging] to either swamp out the rest of the Internet or to require major engineering to stop what we call a congestion collapse, where you cannot send new traffic into the network," says Allison Mankin, co-chair of the IETF's transport area. "This is a big enough problem to need urgent attention."
Demand for multimedia instant messaging is expected to be strong. Text-based instant messaging is popular on the Internet and private, corporate intranets. With multimedia instant messaging, users could send attachments along with chat sessions.
"Our researchers would love to have voice chat integrated with instant messaging, mainly to kill the international long-distance calls," says Ross McKenzie, director of IS at Johns Hopkins University. "Our dean has a research center in Nepal. I know that if I offered that service, he'd be on it tomorrow."
Johns Hopkins began offering regular instant messaging services to 4,000 faculty and staff members in August. Today, instant messaging is the most popular application on the university's Web portal, with more than 1,500 users racking up 60,000 minutes of instant messaging messages per month.
"If we offered [instant messaging] attachments, our faculty would be exchanging chapters out of books. But what they'd really like is voice," McKenzie says. "Our researchers want ad hoc, integrated voice and chat. They want it in Katmandu, at home, at Starbucks or wherever."
Today's instant messaging services use what's called a paging mode, where the signaling information that initiates the chat session is carried along with the text of the chat session using a single protocol.
After four years of effort, the IETF is finalizing a protocol dubbed SIMPLE (SIP for Instant Messaging and Presence Leveraging Extensions) that will let the paging mode work across different instant messaging service providers' offerings. Once deployed, SIMPLE will let AOL users exchange text-based instant messages with users of rival instant messaging services from Microsoft, Yahoo and others. Both AOL and Microsoft have vowed to support SIMPLE.
SIMPLE uses Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) to initiate an instant message and to transport it on a hop-by-hop basis across the Internet. While SIMPLE can handle short, text-based messages of up to 1,000 characters, IETF participants have discovered that it cannot carry attachments to instant messaging sessions. This is because of an inherent problem in SIP, which runs on TCP or User Datagram Protocol (UDP). While TCP features built-in congestion controls, UDP does not.
So UDP should not be used for sending large files. And SIP can't be adjusted to eliminate the possibility that large files would be sent over UDP. That scenario would be catastrophic, Mankin says. "Imagine the after-school surge, with millions of teenagers online and sending MP3s to each other," she says. "We're talking about volumes of traffic that may be half of the backbone."
Mankin says even if AOL were to offer multimedia instant messaging attachments only to its own users, that could still cause congestion problems across the Internet if this issue isn't resolved.
"We can't tell AOL what to do, but they use all the major backbone providers," she says. "If UDP could be used by their [multimedia instant messaging] service, that would be a serious problem."
The IETF is working on a solution that will use SIMPLE to initiate multimedia instant messaging sessions but will rely on a different protocol with built-in congestion control to transport attachments. So far, the IETF has identified several options for that transport protocol, which will use what's called a session mode rather than a paging mode.
The co-chairs of the IETF's SIMPLE working group are asking participants to submit additional proposals for the session-mode transport protocol this month. The group hopes to select one of the proposals by June.
Jon Peterson, co-chair of the SIMPLE working group and a senior technical industry liaison with NeuStar, says the new transport protocol will scale better to carry large volumes of instant messages and multimedia attachments.
"If the No. 1 and No. 2 [instant messaging] providers were going to interconnect, this would be really useful to handle the high volumes of messages," he says.
Meanwhile, government regulators could prevent AOL - the largest instant messaging service provider - from offering multimedia instant messaging services until this technical glitch is resolved. To get approval for its merger with Time Warner, AOL agreed to delay the release of multimedia instant messaging services until it opens its instant messaging system to rival services.
AOL failed to return multiple calls seeking clarification of its multimedia instant messaging plans. But AOL vowed last summer to use SIMPLE to provide interoperability with other instant messaging service providers.
The rest of the instant messaging industry is expected to adopt SIMPLE too, with Microsoft already shipping SIP support in the latest release of its MSN Messenger software.
In related news, the SIMPLE working group. plans to submit documents that detail how the paging mode works to the IETF leadership for approval in the next few weeks. A draft standard could be approved by March.
The multimedia instant messaging hurdle "is not a show stopper" for SIMPLE, says Robert Sparks, co-chair of the IETF's SIMPLE working group and a senior software architect with Dynamicsoft. "It's new functionality that a lot of people really, really want. But the [SIMPLE] method is sufficient to replicate the [instant messaging] services we have right now."
This was the system I benchmarked the P4 on. I used 128MB of Micron PC1600 (200MHz) ECC DDR Memory.
The latest, preproduction, Intel CPU, and he only springs for 128 MB of ram? Why bottleneck the thing? No one is going to production ship it like that. I will likely go out the door with 512 or so.
The Gardener
Four comments, none above zero, and its already Slashdotted
The Gardener
Helicopters aren't fuel efficient, nor are their rotor "wings" good for lifting in a one percent atmosphere. A plane like the U-2 would be the obvious choice, except for the horrendous storms on Mars.
The Gardener
Don't stop maintaining the old code code until the new code is on solid ground. No matter how sure you are that you can do it, the new code might never come through.
The Gardener
Challenging Particle Physics as Path to Truth
By GEORGE JOHNSON
n science's great chain of being, the particle physicists place themselves with the angels, looking down from the heavenly spheres on the chemists, biologists, geologists, meteorologists -- those who are applying, not discovering, nature's most fundamental laws. Everything, after all, is made from subatomic particles. Once you have a concise theory explaining how they work, the rest should just be filigree.
Even the kindred discipline of solid-state physics, which is concerned with the mass behavior of particles -- what metals, crystals, semiconductors, whole lumps of matter do -- is often considered a lesser pursuit. "Squalid state physics," Murray Gell-Mann, discoverer of the quark, dubbed it. Others dismiss it as "dirt physics."
Recently there have been rumblings from the muck. In a clash of scientific cultures, some prominent squalid-staters have been challenging the particle purists as arbiters of ultimate truth.
"The stakes here are very high," said Dr. Robert B. Laughlin, a Stanford University theorist who shared a Nobel Prize in 1998 for discoveries in solid-state physics. "At issue is a deep epistemological matter having to do with what physics is."
Last year Dr. Laughlin and Dr. David Pines, a theorist at the University of Illinois and Los Alamos National Laboratory, published a manifesto declaring that the "science of the past," which seeks to distill the richness of reality into a few simple equations governing subatomic particles, was coming to an impasse.
Many complex systems -- the very ones the solid-staters study -- appear to be irreducible. Made of many interlocking parts, they display a kind of synergy, obeying "higher organizing principles" that cannot be further simplified no matter how hard you try.
Carrying the idea even further, some solid-state physicists are trying to show that the laws of relativity, long considered part of the very bedrock of the physical world, are not platonic truths that have existed since time began.
They may have emerged from the roiling of the vacuum of space, much as supply-and-demand and other "laws" of economics emerge from the bustle of the marketplace. If so, then solid-state physics, which specializes in how emergent phenomena occur, may be the most fundamental science of them all.
"We're in the midst of a paradigm change," Dr. Pines said. "Ours is not the prevailing view, but I think it will turn out to be the one that lasts."
Working in this vein, one of Dr. Laughlin's Stanford colleagues, Dr. Shoucheng Zhang, recently was co- author of a paper suggesting that elementary particles like photons and gravitons, the carriers of electromagnetism and gravity, might not be so elementary after all -- they might emerge as ripples in the vacuum of space, bubbling up from the quagmire in a way that can best be explained in terms of solid-state physics.
"The idea is of course crazy, thought provoking, and somewhat anti-establishment," Dr. Zhang said. "The main idea is to apply concepts from solid-state physics to answer some big questions of the universe."
The particle physicists insist that there is plenty of mileage left in their own approach. "I strongly believe that the fundamental laws of nature are not emergent phenomena," said Dr. David Gross, director of the Institute for Theoretical Physics at the University of California at Santa Barbara. "Bob Laughlin and I have violent arguments about this."
After hearing Dr. Zhang describe his theory at a seminar last month, Dr. Gross deemed it "an interesting piece of work." He said he found the mathematics "beautiful and intriguing, and perhaps of use somewhere."
That may sound like faint praise, but the particle physicists have reason to be wary. The squalid-staters are challenging them in a debate over how the universe is made and how science should be done.
Following the method of Plato, the particle physicists are inclined to see nature as crystallized mathematics. In the beginning was a single superforce, the embodiment of an elegant set of equations they call, only a bit facetiously, the theory of everything. Then along came the Big Bang to ruin it all.
The universe cooled and expanded, the single force splintering into the four very different forces observed today: electromagnetism and the weak and strong nuclear forces, which work inside atoms, are described by quantum mechanics and special relativity. The fourth force, gravity, is described by an entirely different theory, general relativity.
The particle physicists' ultimate goal is "grand unification" -- recovering the primordial symmetry in the form of a single law -- a few concise equations, it is often said, that could be silk-screened onto a T- shirt.
This approach, in which the most complex phenomena are boiled down to a unique underlying theory, is called reductionism.
The problem, the solid-staters say, is that many forms of matter -- ranging from the exotic like superconductors and superfluids to the mundane like crystals and metals -- cannot be described in terms of fundamental particle interactions. When systems become very complex, completely new and independent laws emerge. "More is different," as the Nobel laureate Philip W. Anderson put it in a landmark paper in 1972. To the solid-staters, it would take something the size of a circus tent to hold all the equations capturing the unruliness of the physical world.
Like Aristotle, they lean toward the notion that it is the equations that flow from nature instead of the other way around. Mathematics is just a tool for making sense of it all.
"For at least some fundamental things in nature, the theory of everything is irrelevant," declared Dr. Laughlin and Dr. Pines in the Jan. 4, 2000 issue of The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. "The central task of theoretical physics in our time is no longer to write down the ultimate equations but rather to catalog and understand emergent behavior in its many guises, including potentially life itself."
There may not be a theory of everything, they say, just a lot of theories of things. This is exactly the kind of squalor the particle physicists abhor.
Dr. Grigori E. Volovik, a solid- state physicist at the Helsinki University of Technology in Finland, champions an idea he calls "anti- grand unification." In a review article last year (xxx.lanl.gov/abs /gr-qc/0104046), he ventured that the universe may have begun not in a state of pristine symmetry but in one of lawlessness. The laws of relativity and perhaps quantum mechanics itself would have emerged only later on.
The notion of emergent laws is not radical in itself. A flask of gas consists of trillions of molecules randomly colliding with one another. From this disorder, qualities like temperature and pressure emerge, along with laws relating one to the other.
So take that idea a level deeper. Physicists now believe that the vacuum of space is, paradoxically, not vacuous at all. It seethes with energy, in the form of "virtual particles" constantly flitting in and out of existence. So perhaps, Dr. Volovik suggests, even laws now considered fundamental emerged from this constant subatomic buzz.
Solid-state physics offers clues to how something like this might occur. The atomic vibrations that ripple through matter are, like all quantum phenomena, carried by particles -- called, in this case, phonons.
Just as photons carry light and gravitons carry gravity, phonons carry the subatomic equivalent of sound. Like bubbles in a carbonated beverage, phonons -- physicists call them "quasi particles" -- appear only when the medium is disturbed.
In the world of solid-state physics, quasi particles abound. In some substances, like the semiconductors used to make computer chips, the displacement of an electron leaves behind a "hole" that behaves like a positively charged particle. An electron and a hole can sometimes stick together to form a chargeless quasi particle called an exciton. Other such ephemera include magnons and polarons.
Evanescent though they are, quasi particles act every bit like elementary particles, obeying the laws of quantum mechanics. This has led some mavericks to wonder whether there is really any difference at all. Maybe elementary particles are just quasi particles -- an effervescence in the vacuum.
Particularly intriguing is a phenomenon, occurring at extremely low temperatures, called the fractional quantum Hall effect. In certain substances, quasi particles appear that act curiously like electrons but with one-third the normal charge. (Dr. Laughlin won his Nobel Prize for a theory explaining this.)
Quarks, the basic building blocks of matter, also carry a one-third charge, a coincidence that has fueled speculation that emergence may be somehow fundamental to the very existence of the physical world.
A stumbling block to carrying this idea further has been that the quantum Hall effect seems to work only in two-dimensions -- on the surface of a substance. But in a paper published in the Oct. 26 issue of Science, Dr. Zhang and his student Jiangping Hu showed how to extend the phenomenon. In their scheme, the physical world would be a three-dimensional "surface" of a four-dimensional "quantum liquid" -- an underlying sea of particles that can be thought of as the vacuum.
Analyzing the ripples that would appear in such a medium, the two scientists were surprised to find that they mathematically resembled electromagnetic and gravitational waves. But there are problems with the model. At this point, the hypothetical photons and gravitons that emerge from the equations do not interact with other particles, as they do in the real world.
"The coupling is zero, so apples are weightless, as is everything else," said Dr. Joseph Polchinski, a string theorist at the University of California at Santa Barbara, who recently discussed the model with Dr. Zhang.
And there is what the theory's inventors concede is an "embarrassment of riches" -- the equations predict hordes of exotic particles that do not exist.
"The hope is that some modification of the theory, not yet specified in detail, will remove the extra fields and turn on the coupling," Dr. Polchinski said. "Whether this can be done is at this point a guess. Overall my attitude now is interest with a high degree of skepticism."
If the theory can be made to work, it may point to a new way of unifying quantum mechanics and relativity. But Dr. Zhang is careful not to oversell what he considers a work in progress.
"Our work only made a tiny step toward this direction," Dr. Zhang said, "but it seems to indicate that the goal may not be impossible to reach." At the very least, he said, his work may inspire more collaboration between particle physicists and solid-staters.
Ultimately, though, the two sides know that they are talking across a divide. Taken to its extreme, emergence suggests that all the fundamental laws, even quantum mechanics, may be secondary -- that at the base of reality is random noise.
Dr. Polchinski said he found that idea discouraging.
"To me, the history of science seems to be a steady progression toward simpler and more unified laws, and I expect to see this continue and to contribute to it. Things may take many surprising twists and turns," he said, "but we reductionists are still quite happily and busily reducing."
Ericsson's share was likely to be over $2 billion, Nokia's "well over" $1 billion and Siemens' worth $600 million, indicated the upgrade that Cingular initially said was worth $3 billion was closer to $4 billion.
I wonder where they're getting the funding for this outlay? For four billion dollars, someone sure believes in 3G.
The Gardener
If people don't like it, change it. Lack of interest is the public telling you something. People go to sites like Sluggy Freelance, Slashdot, etc. because the site offers something they enjoy and tell theri friends about. One email blitz of friends telling friends can make a huge difference. People just have to like the contents.
The Gardener
Next year looks like the best time ever to buy a new performance PC.
Well, duh. Just exactly like every year since they were invented.. And just like every computer magazine pundit has said since day one
The Gardener
Moderation is not the same as editing. IOW, delete the lame crap, but don't alter any posts. Lots of places delete inappropriate stuff; no big deal.
The Gardener
The Treo is a world phone. It works on the GSM standard and is equipped for use in both the U.S. and Europe. In the U.S., it will work with carriers like VoiceStream and Cingular.
Yeah, GSM. So I spend $400-$600 on a cell phone/organizer, plus steep monthly fees for cell phone/internet access. And to top it off, I'm locked into GSM, which here in the USA isn't exactly the leading protocol.
The Gardener
What the hell happened to SUSE? IBM was cozily in bed with them; then, whammo!
The Gardener
if you are already intimately involved with online communities, this treatment will seem rather superficial. 'Yeah but ...' will come often to mind.
Well, yeah, every How-To book has this problem. "Do we make it comprehensive at 1250 pages, or do we make it usable at 250-400 pages?"
The Gardener
Since the article is long on hype and thin on substance, here are some details:
2 NiMH Rechargeable Batteries - Not Removable
Power Adapter
USB
Installation CD
I don't have the hardware specs on the new "Xtreme", but here is the previous model:
CYBIKO COMPUTER MODEL CY6411.
Hardware specifications
Main Processor: 32 bit, 11 MHz Hitachi H8S/2246
Coprocessor: Atmel AT90S2313, 4 MHz
RAM: 512 KB
Flash disk: 512 KB, extendible up to 1 MB
LCD display: 160x100 dots, 59x40 mm, 4 level grayscale
RF transceiver: RF2915
Expansion cartridge slot: 68-pin
PC connection socket: RS232 serial port
Size: 5.7" x 2.8" x 0.86"
Weight: 4.3 oz
Software specifications
Operating System: CyOS v.1.2
Software: CyOS v.1.2 compatible apps
Communication Protocol: CyDP x.30 (Cybiko RF Digital Protocol)
Dynamic Wireless Local Network: automatically provided by CyOS v.1.2 and CyDP x.30
RF communication features
Frequency: 902-928 MHz
Number of channels: 30 digital channels
Communication Rate: 19200 bps each channel
Transmission and Receiving Range: 150 ft. indoors, 300 ft. outdoors (environment dependent)
Max. online Cybiko units: 3000 (100 units on each of 30 channels)
The Gardener
The article is one big freakin' advertisment for this stuff. Is slashdot gearing up for Christmas, or what?
The Gardener
The new version will be available from Mac dealers and Apple's own retail stores at no cost for existing OS X owners. Everyone else will pay $129 .
M$ could take a lesson from Apple. "Second edition" bug fix releases sure aren't free, and full versions aren't $129.00.
Oh yeah, Apple doesn't have a Monopoly to screw us with.
The Gardener