The algorithms which you program a computer with form a general data-dependency DAG. This is what is at issue here. A tree is not sufficient to store this data, nor do the relevant algorithms work on a tree.
If you want something to last for 2000 years, clearly it needs to be in a very simple encoding. SGML is probably fine as it is very easy to extract the text for it. The bigger problem, of course, is what digital medium actually will be physically readable in 2000 years, and what physical device will we use to read it. With a papyrus scroll, you pick it up and you're good to go. Even with relatively long-lived media like CD-ROMs, it's not clear that our decendents would figure out the physical encoding, then ISO-9660, then the SGML DTD.
They're using a directed acyclic graph representation to to register dependency and scheduling analysis. There are a series of transformations which you can apply to such graphs which correspond to loop unrolling and other optimizations, and you can use this to find faster programs. But I suppose you don't care about things like that. You just want to make fun of a technology you could never develop yourself.
Actually there's no perfect optimizing compiler because the halting problem is reducible to it. Thus, there is no general way to get the fastest object code from source code. It is completely impossible with any computer which can be simulated on a turing machine.
As I don't have a degree in Nuclear Physics, i'd like to get your opinion on Liquid Metal Fast Breeders, in particular, the IFR design at Argonne West. It seems to me (a layman) that this solves most all of the problems with current reactors. Your thoughts?
No one at Intel would have forced him out. If he had wanted to stay, he could have had the age changed. Clearly he wants to scale back his duties and concentrate on his foundation and being retired. Hitting the age is a good excuse to do this without alarming shareholders.
See http://www.phs.uiuc.edu/Projects/Argus for one example (near to my heart). Depending on your definition of 3-d videoconferencing, we probably weren't the first either.
Anyone know what happened to CETI?
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What ever happened to James Patterson and Clean Energy Technologies Inc? They had a website, and claimed to have a couple of products which they demonstrated many times. Their website vanished, and I can't find any information about them anymore. What happened?
According the CF guys it's not the neutrons
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IANANP, but from what I've read, it is true that neutrons are released from all known suitable fusion reactions which occur in the plasma phase. However, supposedly there is another reaction that produces gamma rays and helium that can only occur in a solid phase. Since hot fusion does not operate in the solid phase, this reaction has been widely ignored. However, in the P&F cell, helium appears to be produced. Now, there is a lot of debate about whether the helium is actually being produced or just absorbed from the environment through diffusion. Also, the gamma rays have not been observed. I don't think it's appropriate though to dismiss this out of hand, as there is substantial evidence for the helium being produced in the cell, and the only way this could happen is with a nuclear reaction.
Well, both cluster MPI implementations (MPICH and LAM) only support simulated multicasting (a tree approach). However, most switches used in clusters (including the 3com superstack 3300 which we use) support a couple of multicasting protocols on the switch. This would allow you to use multicasting. If MPICH or LAM supported this, it could increase overall bandwidth in certain circumstances, and certainly improve latency. I hope that there will be suport for this in the not-too-distant future, as a lot of people would like to use it, and there are many codes that could benefit from it.
Well, I think it's more than just computational physicists. Certainly Physics has some great software available for QCD and other types of simulations. However, there is a lot more out there than just physics. All kinds of fields now need basically two things. Simulation and Optimization. Simulation to understand how a complex system works and an environment to try new things out before you have to commit to reality, and optimization for things where you have a model and need to find out the best way to accomplish a task.
Airlines, for example, have been on the cutting edge of this. They have very elaborate resource scheduling programs to put their pilots, other staff, and airplanes in the right place at the right time to make the most money. Also they have the (much derided) pricing systems which determine the highest price they can charge for a ticket and still fill the plane. Both of these systems have made the airline industry much more profitable. In finance, computational models have made a big splash in the past fifteen years or so, and in fact it's physicists that are doing a lot of the work.
My broader point though, is that you're going to see the PHP/Perl/ASP people occupying the same position in a few years that HTML people did a few years ago. Their skills are widespread and mostly fungible. The people in huge demand are those that can model and optimize problems with big iron. I certainly expect their to be a growing number of modeling and optimization consultancies popping up soon just as you saw the web development consultancies pop up in the 1995-1996 timeframe.
I agree with the article that you are seeing lots more simulation in science, and regardless of whether you think that is a good thing, it's happening. The problem as I see it is that there aren't many people out there who know how to solve these types of problems compared to the people who know how to do web or UI stuff.
Not just in science, but marketing, economics, manufacturing, and lots of other fields, people want huge numbers crunched in order to either figure out how something works, or to optimize some sort of process. For the past seven years or so you have seen the evolution of the computer as a communications device. Now it's time to do some computing.
The kind of person who is going to succeed in this new area is not the computer-centric person that used to rule in the Internet age. Society is now calling for people who can talk to scientists and experts in the field. This person needs to understand the field well enough to get a handle on the problem, and then apply his knowledge of algorithms, and raw programming ability to the task of solving the problem.
My advice is to learn all you can about algorithms, and have a solid understanding of math. If you can talk in mathematics, and write in code, you have a bright future.
They invented, programmed, and gave away for free SSH. Now they want to sell enhanced versions, meanwhile, the IETF thinks their invention is so good it should be an Internet standard. SSH has had a trademark on their company name for some time. Now IETF comes in and says that they're going to call the standard the same thing as the product. The SSH people get mad, and for good reason -- they have something to sell using their hard-earned (and well-earned) brand, and the IETF wants to make it a generic term. Well, I hope they take the IETF to court and win for being such jackasses.
Ok, so suppose we make a square manhole with a rim the size of the smallest axis of the cover. The rim is then round. Well, if we're going to have a round rim, it doesn't make very much sense to have a square cover, as you just waste material. However, saying a square manhole is just as good is like saying that the manhole should be thirty feet in diameter with a rim 3 feet in diameter. A circular manhole is the only shape that won't fall into the hole where the rim is similar to the shape of the cover.
Mojo nation is a fine group working to solve a problem, but I think it's a solution in search of a problem. If the content is legal (i.e. out of copyright or author's permission), then there is no reason to do P2P. Bandwidth on the server side these days is very cheap if you shop around. In volume, $1 a gigabyte is fairly common. For a site with a decent ammount of traffic, ads more than cover the cost of traffic. If you don't have that much traffic, you can pay for it yourself or move your page to a free hosting provider.
That leaves Mojo Nation with the illegal content. The problem with illegal content from a business perspective is that if you are making money from people trading copyrighted material a la Napster, you will get sued for contributory infringement.
P2P is not going to open up many new investment horizons. Napster was created to skirt copyright laws so that Napster didn't have to be the one violating the law. Now that it looks like that's not going to fly with the courts, I don't think that there's going to be much of any money made in P2P.
I know that there was a bill in congress to change the law on this a couple of years back, but at least as of a few years ago, it was completely legal to copy a database wholesale, as it did not constitute a creative work. CDDB is clearly not a creative work, so perhaps someone can just setup a sneaky bot to download their entire database and move it to FreeDB.
I remember back in '94 or so there were some companies selling CD-ROMS of complete archives of usenet from the early eighties to 94 or so. I'm sure some of these are floating around somewhere.
What do you use then? Latex is primitive in terms of user interface (or lack thereof), but I haven't seen anything that can match its output quality and ability to handle large (100+ pages) documents. Word, for example, crashes and writes corrupt documents if you get a large document with a bunch of figures. Furthermore, the output quality is nowhere near what you get from Latex. I wish there were a better solution, but even though in many ways it is not up to modern standards, Latex is way ahead in terms of the quality of the things it does. Knuth put a huge ammount of work into using the best algorithms for nearly everything in Latex, and it shows.
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The algorithms which you program a computer with form a general data-dependency DAG. This is what is at issue here. A tree is not sufficient to store this data, nor do the relevant algorithms work on a tree.
If you want something to last for 2000 years, clearly it needs to be in a very simple encoding. SGML is probably fine as it is very easy to extract the text for it. The bigger problem, of course, is what digital medium actually will be physically readable in 2000 years, and what physical device will we use to read it. With a papyrus scroll, you pick it up and you're good to go. Even with relatively long-lived media like CD-ROMs, it's not clear that our decendents would figure out the physical encoding, then ISO-9660, then the SGML DTD.
Perl is one of the benchmarks in the SpecInt95 suite. Look it up on www.specbench.org.
They're using a directed acyclic graph representation to to register dependency and scheduling analysis. There are a series of transformations which you can apply to such graphs which correspond to loop unrolling and other optimizations, and you can use this to find faster programs. But I suppose you don't care about things like that. You just want to make fun of a technology you could never develop yourself.
Siemens of Crypto AG fame. I doubt if there are any secret NSA backdoors
Actually there's no perfect optimizing compiler because the halting problem is reducible to it. Thus, there is no general way to get the fastest object code from source code. It is completely impossible with any computer which can be simulated on a turing machine.
As I don't have a degree in Nuclear Physics, i'd like to get your opinion on Liquid Metal Fast Breeders, in particular, the IFR design at Argonne West. It seems to me (a layman) that this solves most all of the problems with current reactors. Your thoughts?
No one at Intel would have forced him out. If he had wanted to stay, he could have had the age changed. Clearly he wants to scale back his duties and concentrate on his foundation and being retired. Hitting the age is a good excuse to do this without alarming shareholders.
See http://www.phs.uiuc.edu/Projects/Argus for one example (near to my heart). Depending on your definition of 3-d videoconferencing, we probably weren't the first either.
What ever happened to James Patterson and Clean Energy Technologies Inc? They had a website, and claimed to have a couple of products which they demonstrated many times. Their website vanished, and I can't find any information about them anymore. What happened?
IANANP, but from what I've read, it is true that neutrons are released from all known suitable fusion reactions which occur in the plasma phase. However, supposedly there is another reaction that produces gamma rays and helium that can only occur in a solid phase. Since hot fusion does not operate in the solid phase, this reaction has been widely ignored. However, in the P&F cell, helium appears to be produced. Now, there is a lot of debate about whether the helium is actually being produced or just absorbed from the environment through diffusion. Also, the gamma rays have not been observed. I don't think it's appropriate though to dismiss this out of hand, as there is substantial evidence for the helium being produced in the cell, and the only way this could happen is with a nuclear reaction.
Well, both cluster MPI implementations (MPICH and LAM) only support simulated multicasting (a tree approach). However, most switches used in clusters (including the 3com superstack 3300 which we use) support a couple of multicasting protocols on the switch. This would allow you to use multicasting. If MPICH or LAM supported this, it could increase overall bandwidth in certain circumstances, and certainly improve latency. I hope that there will be suport for this in the not-too-distant future, as a lot of people would like to use it, and there are many codes that could benefit from it.
Airlines, for example, have been on the cutting edge of this. They have very elaborate resource scheduling programs to put their pilots, other staff, and airplanes in the right place at the right time to make the most money. Also they have the (much derided) pricing systems which determine the highest price they can charge for a ticket and still fill the plane. Both of these systems have made the airline industry much more profitable. In finance, computational models have made a big splash in the past fifteen years or so, and in fact it's physicists that are doing a lot of the work.
My broader point though, is that you're going to see the PHP/Perl/ASP people occupying the same position in a few years that HTML people did a few years ago. Their skills are widespread and mostly fungible. The people in huge demand are those that can model and optimize problems with big iron. I certainly expect their to be a growing number of modeling and optimization consultancies popping up soon just as you saw the web development consultancies pop up in the 1995-1996 timeframe.
Not just in science, but marketing, economics, manufacturing, and lots of other fields, people want huge numbers crunched in order to either figure out how something works, or to optimize some sort of process. For the past seven years or so you have seen the evolution of the computer as a communications device. Now it's time to do some computing.
The kind of person who is going to succeed in this new area is not the computer-centric person that used to rule in the Internet age. Society is now calling for people who can talk to scientists and experts in the field. This person needs to understand the field well enough to get a handle on the problem, and then apply his knowledge of algorithms, and raw programming ability to the task of solving the problem.
My advice is to learn all you can about algorithms, and have a solid understanding of math. If you can talk in mathematics, and write in code, you have a bright future.
They invented, programmed, and gave away for free SSH. Now they want to sell enhanced versions, meanwhile, the IETF thinks their invention is so good it should be an Internet standard. SSH has had a trademark on their company name for some time. Now IETF comes in and says that they're going to call the standard the same thing as the product. The SSH people get mad, and for good reason -- they have something to sell using their hard-earned (and well-earned) brand, and the IETF wants to make it a generic term. Well, I hope they take the IETF to court and win for being such jackasses.
Read their webpage. They plan to use layers of indirection to disguise who is sending what.
Ok, so suppose we make a square manhole with a rim the size of the smallest axis of the cover. The rim is then round. Well, if we're going to have a round rim, it doesn't make very much sense to have a square cover, as you just waste material. However, saying a square manhole is just as good is like saying that the manhole should be thirty feet in diameter with a rim 3 feet in diameter. A circular manhole is the only shape that won't fall into the hole where the rim is similar to the shape of the cover.
That leaves Mojo Nation with the illegal content. The problem with illegal content from a business perspective is that if you are making money from people trading copyrighted material a la Napster, you will get sued for contributory infringement.
P2P is not going to open up many new investment horizons. Napster was created to skirt copyright laws so that Napster didn't have to be the one violating the law. Now that it looks like that's not going to fly with the courts, I don't think that there's going to be much of any money made in P2P.
You should build some power plants using this prinicple and make a fortune on free energy!
I know that there was a bill in congress to change the law on this a couple of years back, but at least as of a few years ago, it was completely legal to copy a database wholesale, as it did not constitute a creative work. CDDB is clearly not a creative work, so perhaps someone can just setup a sneaky bot to download their entire database and move it to FreeDB.
Hydrogen is pollution free, and will be a huge part of energy storage once we convert from fossil fuels to clean nuclear power.
I remember back in '94 or so there were some companies selling CD-ROMS of complete archives of usenet from the early eighties to 94 or so. I'm sure some of these are floating around somewhere.
Sounds like the Telebit Netblazer from back in oh, '94 or so.
What do you use then? Latex is primitive in terms of user interface (or lack thereof), but I haven't seen anything that can match its output quality and ability to handle large (100+ pages) documents. Word, for example, crashes and writes corrupt documents if you get a large document with a bunch of figures. Furthermore, the output quality is nowhere near what you get from Latex. I wish there were a better solution, but even though in many ways it is not up to modern standards, Latex is way ahead in terms of the quality of the things it does. Knuth put a huge ammount of work into using the best algorithms for nearly everything in Latex, and it shows.