That Other Site did an almost exact article many months ago called Code Food that's worth looking at. Their aim was stuff that was relatively quick, stored well, and could be easily done in big batches. There's some genuinely good recipes in there too:)
Unreal Mode (aka Voodoo Mode, Flat Mode, or Big Real Mode) was a weird hack to allow 32bit addressing in real mode. It works because when you turn an IA-32 CPU on, it may boot in real mode, but it's not really doing true 16-bit addressing. It's just setting the limit register in the MMU to 1MB.
Therefore, you can set a single-entry GDT with a 4GB limit starting at address 0, kick the CPU into 32bit PE mode, and then go back into realmode, and the end result is realmode capable of accessing 4GB of RAM using the 32bit registers. Just use 0000 as a segment. (Of course, this weirdness also means you won't be able to use movsb or other string operations that expect realmode segments.)
People stopped doing this around the Pentium era because 16-bit instructions ran up to four times as slow as 32-bit instructions, and Windows was becoming ubiquitous, so it was easier to just use 32-bit protected mode with the same single-entry GDT.
(BTW, V86-mode is a hack where a task handle is put in the GDT and it runs for all intents and purposes as if it were a real-mode program. When an interrupt occurs, it goes through to an alternate IDT instead of the normal low-memory block, and the handlers run in protected mode.)
I think it's painfully obvious that digital 0 and 1 can be any fucking voltage level we want - or even a transition between voltage levels in the case of Manchester encodings. The problem isn't the definition of ones and zero, it's that the tape stretches and distorts with use, and you end up reading two zeros, or a zero and a zero-to-one transition, or etc. where you should read a single zero. With an analog signal, this means some distortion, but it's still fairly viewable. With a digital signal, if you're lucky the CRC check will notice a bad frame - and the best you can do is either use an ECC algorithm to guess at what you should have gotten, or just redisplay the last frame. Needless to say, if you have a stretch of bad frames, just call yourself fucked at that point.
If you're going to nitpick, do it on something germane to the issue, rather than spouting off a painfully obvious fact that has absolutely no relevance and making yourself look like a retard.
Not quite. Your skin's resistance is quite high... but once it pierces your skin (it takes an arc about 400V to do it, but if you stab yourself, tada), inner muscle and soft tissue racks up about 10 ohms an inch. And if applied across the heart, 9mA is enough to trigger fibrillation.
You don't need to be paranoid when working with lethal voltages... but you do need an ounce of common sense. Work with one hand.
(Cue web surfing while masturbating joke here - but I'm quite serious.)
After compositing the two camera images in the framebuffer, it did a read from the back buffer into main memory (specifically, into a block in the heap with buffer space above and below to get a power of 2), was uploaded back to the card as a OpenGL texture, and rendered bilinear across a precalculated set of vertices and UV coords (stored in vertex arrays and display lists). If we were running it on a Voodoo, I could have used Glide to do it all on the card, but this was right when they were ditching Glide, and the rendering engine didn't have a Glide plugin:-\
I would have liked to work out an entirely 2D routine for doing it instead of having to do the texturing, but I was under a rather nasty timeframe to do it, and the example code we got from the inventor of the technique took some time to decipher. Why people insist on doing horrible pointer arithmetic instead of [] (which expands to *(x+i) in the preprocessor anyways), I'll never know.
On a Geforce2GTS the fill rate and AGP2x limited us to about 20fps, but on an SGI NT workstation it absolutely FLEW since main memory and video memory were shared. Unfortunately, we had to do 10 kiosks with this, and the budget didn't allow getting an SGI for each one:-\
I did a contract coding job similar to this about two years ago - for an exhibit at a tech expo, we rigged up a pair of curved mirrors and a plexiglass semisphere with a hinged hatch. A projector shot a 1024x768 image through the pair of mirrors, producing an image that gave you roughly 270deg FOV horiz and 90deg vertical. Add a joystick and a rudimentary tunnel shooter...:)
My part of it was hacking up the game engine (Virtools' kit) to render from two in-game viewpoints each frame and distorting the image in a third rendering pass so you'd get a correct image on the screen - lots of optimization, since we were rendering at that resolution two years ago when the Geforce2GTS and 1GHz P3s were the height of consumer technology. That, and some other blocks for the scripting language for level transfers and whatnot.
(The engine used to be marketed under the name Nemo, now called just Virtools Dev. Not too impressive graphically by today's standards, but it has the most artist-friendly scripting system I've EVER seen. If they strapped a decent rendering tech onto it and some network code, they'd have an absolutely outstanding project on their hands.)
You're right - ironically, most of the nomadic tribes in desert zones wear loose black robes. The change in temperature causes convection, and you get a breeze underneath. It actually feels cooler than wearing light colors.
Since it's not in italic, chances are that this was CT's comment, and not the original article writers.
And while they wouldn't dance around a camp fire, the hate isn't exactly pretended either. KDE/Gnome has become one of the holy wars of computing: vi/emacs (go nano!!!), littleendian/bigendian, OOP, and many other venerable silly battles. It's actually an ideological battle - GNOME was started in the first place because KDE was based on Qt, which isn't GPL. Thus, the rush to create a GPL'd window/widget toolkit (GTK) and environment.
Agreed with the soul-merging thing - this is one of the reasons so many people see SEELE as an evil org:) MSFT++.
You're also right about the reform - the other possibility is that they'll return to the Hall of Gehim, leaving Shinji and Asuka to rebuild humanity. (Hahahahaha... just mark us dead at that point.)
Whether or not Shinji screwed up is more debatable. You're already dead by the time he made that decision - so either you're going to completely cease to be yourself when you merge with all humanity, or something "else" is gonna happen (namely, you stop being dead, or you keep being dead.) He's definitely an anti-hero of the series, but I don't think his decision could be universally deemed a failure.
I didn't say I was cooler for it - I honestly preferred the ending. As far as I'm concerned, episode 24 was the climax and "end" of the series - 25 and 26 are the denouement, the cleanup, and in that respect a clip assembly and a lot of talk works fine.
I'm not a karma whore, I'm just expressing my opinion. I'm not going to be hurt if a couple of/.ers don't agree with it.
Actually, children in the womb are fed pre-oxygenated blood via the placenta. The fluid is mostly water - ever heard of someone's water breaking at the start of labor?
That, and while "breathable" oxygenated fluids do exist, LCL was a bit more. Lilith (the big white being down in the basement of NERV, the second Angel) bleeds LCL instead of blood - it's a primordial soup that the equipment in the plug artificially oxygenates. Everyone poofs into big puddles of it in End of Eva, if you haven't seen it:)
(In the ep where Eva-01 gets swallowed and Shinji has l33t flashbacks, the LCL becomes hard to breathe because the oxygenation equipment stops running.)
There were two possible results of the Human Complementation Project. Both would result in the annihilation of mankind as it's known today - one would simply be the complete destruction, the other would join and merge all souls into a single uniform being, continuing life with a single soul. The former would happen if an Angel came into contact with Adam, the first angel, the latter through a a ritual involving Rei. (There's actually a third option, also, below.)
The series portrayed NERV (the organization behind the Evas) as a puppet for a council of planners called SEELE - a group of old men who had a hand in the original discovery of Adam, attempting to save their own skins. According to the script, they used technology pioneered by Dr. Katsuragi (Misato's father) to force Adam to revert in time to an embryonic form, allowing them to restrain him - however, the energy produced triggered the melting of the ice caps. (No debates about embryos and life please, that's another topic for another time.)
Thus, the Evas were created to prevent the Angels (sent by God) from coming into contact with Adam before they could complete the ritual and trigger the "good" type of complementation. In the first episode containing Asuka, Kaji is carrying around a cryogenic container holding Adam - it stays with Gendo Ikari after that.
As for the ending... in the original series ending, the "good" ending is assumed to occur, and the final two episodes trace what happens to Shinji as he merges with the souls of his cloest friends. (The ritual that triggers this is left undisclosed.) I thought it was a great ending - however, it left a lot of questions unanswered, and many fans complained. So, Gainax dragged Anno back, and released the movie End of Evangelion, which presents a different ending. In EoE, the ritual and creation of the group being is very explicitly shown, along with the freeing of all souls on earth - however, at the last minute, Shinji (inside EVA-01) rejects the new life form, and it all falls apart. The movie doesn't say what happens to the souls of humanity explicitly - they're shown coasting back to earth, and most people figure their bodies will reform.
(The whole idea of the ending was that the so-called AT field was the intangible, inpenetrable barrier of the soul, keeping us in human shape; if our AT fields were somehow countered, the human body would break apart into base elements - which Eva calls LCL - and the soul float free.)
Personally, I don't see a need to interpret it in terms of my religious beliefs, just because it has symbols and imagery from it. I just enjoy the series for what it is, and for the philosophical issues it presents:)
The child pilots (Shinji, Asuka, Toji, etc) were children who had been born after the Hall of Souls had become emptied. Ritsuko references this in the room-o-clones scene after Kaji's death: it's a bit of early Christian myth about a room of souls for those that have not yet been born. This was also given as the explanation - if anyone else tried to pilot an Eva, two souls in one body would somehow conflict.
As for Rei, she's not entirely human, for reasons explained explicitly in the plot.
You might be thinking of the ability to create an AT field. Kaoru claimed that all humans had one, and that rare people could extend it outside their own bodies - Rei can, but Shinji and Asuka are fairly normal.
Heh - they actually have offered entire classes on Haskell and functional programming in the past at UP. Try writing a console game in Haskell sometime - it's fun:)
About the same as an iPod bud - those things are beefy enough to run Quake and Quake2, and in fact both have been ported. Can you say the same for your Palm3? Hahhahaha fuckno.
For that matter, try to decode MPEG-1 or MP3 on your Palm. Hahahahah fuckno.
Embedded technology is cheap as long as it can't do much. When you want to build a palmtop that can actually DO something people ooh and ahh over, it's not quite so cheap.
I suspect that a QC isn't capable of solving the halting problem in general - however, it would be far easier to evaluate finite instances of the problem than with a conventional machine.
I haven't given it much thought at this juncture, but it seems to me that one could reduce a Turing machine program to a unitary matrix, and then supply the Hadamard operator as input (i.e. a superposition of all possible inputs, equally likely) - thus evaluating the program on all possible inputs at once. Based on this line, if the resulting quantum state wasn't representable as a tensor product of basi, the program would halt.
The above probably wouldn't work, but at least I'm thinking it over:)
Haskell Curry invented a variation on lambda calculus now called Curried functions. They're used in the increasingly popular functional language (guess it's name...) Haskell.
Hehe... the point is, what's the most minimal machine you can build that can solve a given class of problems?
Layman's example - It's the concept that you could theoretically rework the Quake3 engine to run using the 8088's capabilities. (I say theoretically because some Slashdot nitpicker is inevitably going to try to karma whore by pointing out that 8088s could only use 16 bits of memory addresses, and you'd need way more.) The point is that given the 8088's instruction set, it's theoretically possible to emulate a 32-bit protected mode, and graphics, and so on and so on until you had one frame every hour of Quake 3. Now, try a Z80. Back on down the chain... what is the most minimal machine possible that can still run a translated version of today's software?
One of the major ideas in Computer Science is what sorts of questions and problems are difficult, or absolutely downright impossible, for a given type of machine to solve. In particular we like to talk about Turing machines, which are damn minimal:) (See the parent for a rough description.) Any machine or language that can be used to solve the same class of problems as a Turing machine is said to be Turing-equivalent - most every conventional machine out there is Turing equivalent.
(There are problems that Turing machines can't solve - the classic one is the halting problem. Can you write a program that can look at any other programs (not just most programs, ANY program in the infinite universe, including itself) and say if it'll lock up or not? With a Turing-equivalent machine, it's fundamentally impossible to do that - not just improbable or hard-to-implement, but impossible. The solution is to create a machine that's more capable than a Turing-equivalent machine, but that's rather tricky with macroscopic physics.)
This is just a very rough intro - the article is that this guy came up with a CFG (Context-Free Grammar) with only two rules that apparently is capable of arbitrary computation of functions, which is damn cool. The site is slashdotted, so I've only read the top HTML page, not the Postscript paper:\
It's not magnetic fields that do the moving, it's a reaction to the electric field. The fact that running a current through a bit of metal produces BOTH electric and magnetic fields is just a curiosity. Both can and do exist independantly in nature, and water moves in an electric field.
Re:interesting, I thought submersables used this
on
PC Fan of the Future?
·
· Score: 5, Informative
Not quite. The caterpillar drive was a gigantic induction pump. Water moves in an electric field, similar to magnetism - generate a large enough field and you can get water moving at a decent pressure. Small induction pumps are fairly common in homebrew watercooling rigs on PCs.
In all seriousness, if/. wants people to pay for it, there needs to be some serious checking of stories before posting. The Internet may have partially obsoleted deadtree papers, but it hasn't obsoleted the concept of journalistic integrity - and integrity is what separates a legitmate newspaper from a tabloid.
Slashdot Mirror
That Other Site did an almost exact article many months ago called Code Food that's worth looking at. Their aim was stuff that was relatively quick, stored well, and could be easily done in big batches. There's some genuinely good recipes in there too :)
Unreal Mode (aka Voodoo Mode, Flat Mode, or Big Real Mode) was a weird hack to allow 32bit addressing in real mode. It works because when you turn an IA-32 CPU on, it may boot in real mode, but it's not really doing true 16-bit addressing. It's just setting the limit register in the MMU to 1MB.
Therefore, you can set a single-entry GDT with a 4GB limit starting at address 0, kick the CPU into 32bit PE mode, and then go back into realmode, and the end result is realmode capable of accessing 4GB of RAM using the 32bit registers. Just use 0000 as a segment. (Of course, this weirdness also means you won't be able to use movsb or other string operations that expect realmode segments.)
People stopped doing this around the Pentium era because 16-bit instructions ran up to four times as slow as 32-bit instructions, and Windows was becoming ubiquitous, so it was easier to just use 32-bit protected mode with the same single-entry GDT.
(BTW, V86-mode is a hack where a task handle is put in the GDT and it runs for all intents and purposes as if it were a real-mode program. When an interrupt occurs, it goes through to an alternate IDT instead of the normal low-memory block, and the handlers run in protected mode.)
I think it's painfully obvious that digital 0 and 1 can be any fucking voltage level we want - or even a transition between voltage levels in the case of Manchester encodings. The problem isn't the definition of ones and zero, it's that the tape stretches and distorts with use, and you end up reading two zeros, or a zero and a zero-to-one transition, or etc. where you should read a single zero. With an analog signal, this means some distortion, but it's still fairly viewable. With a digital signal, if you're lucky the CRC check will notice a bad frame - and the best you can do is either use an ECC algorithm to guess at what you should have gotten, or just redisplay the last frame. Needless to say, if you have a stretch of bad frames, just call yourself fucked at that point.
If you're going to nitpick, do it on something germane to the issue, rather than spouting off a painfully obvious fact that has absolutely no relevance and making yourself look like a retard.
Not quite. Your skin's resistance is quite high... but once it pierces your skin (it takes an arc about 400V to do it, but if you stab yourself, tada), inner muscle and soft tissue racks up about 10 ohms an inch. And if applied across the heart, 9mA is enough to trigger fibrillation.
You don't need to be paranoid when working with lethal voltages... but you do need an ounce of common sense. Work with one hand.
(Cue web surfing while masturbating joke here - but I'm quite serious.)
After compositing the two camera images in the framebuffer, it did a read from the back buffer into main memory (specifically, into a block in the heap with buffer space above and below to get a power of 2), was uploaded back to the card as a OpenGL texture, and rendered bilinear across a precalculated set of vertices and UV coords (stored in vertex arrays and display lists). If we were running it on a Voodoo, I could have used Glide to do it all on the card, but this was right when they were ditching Glide, and the rendering engine didn't have a Glide plugin :-\
:-\
I would have liked to work out an entirely 2D routine for doing it instead of having to do the texturing, but I was under a rather nasty timeframe to do it, and the example code we got from the inventor of the technique took some time to decipher. Why people insist on doing horrible pointer arithmetic instead of [] (which expands to *(x+i) in the preprocessor anyways), I'll never know.
On a Geforce2GTS the fill rate and AGP2x limited us to about 20fps, but on an SGI NT workstation it absolutely FLEW since main memory and video memory were shared. Unfortunately, we had to do 10 kiosks with this, and the budget didn't allow getting an SGI for each one
I did a contract coding job similar to this about two years ago - for an exhibit at a tech expo, we rigged up a pair of curved mirrors and a plexiglass semisphere with a hinged hatch. A projector shot a 1024x768 image through the pair of mirrors, producing an image that gave you roughly 270deg FOV horiz and 90deg vertical. Add a joystick and a rudimentary tunnel shooter... :)
My part of it was hacking up the game engine (Virtools' kit) to render from two in-game viewpoints each frame and distorting the image in a third rendering pass so you'd get a correct image on the screen - lots of optimization, since we were rendering at that resolution two years ago when the Geforce2GTS and 1GHz P3s were the height of consumer technology. That, and some other blocks for the scripting language for level transfers and whatnot.
(The engine used to be marketed under the name Nemo, now called just Virtools Dev. Not too impressive graphically by today's standards, but it has the most artist-friendly scripting system I've EVER seen. If they strapped a decent rendering tech onto it and some network code, they'd have an absolutely outstanding project on their hands.)
You're right - ironically, most of the nomadic tribes in desert zones wear loose black robes. The change in temperature causes convection, and you get a breeze underneath. It actually feels cooler than wearing light colors.
A Good Fscking Lawyer?
That's not an abbreviation, that's an oxymoron.
It's hard to understand what people mean when they mean to say the mean and say median instead. Of course, they may mean well...
Couldn't resist.
Since it's not in italic, chances are that this was CT's comment, and not the original article writers.
And while they wouldn't dance around a camp fire, the hate isn't exactly pretended either. KDE/Gnome has become one of the holy wars of computing: vi/emacs (go nano!!!), littleendian/bigendian, OOP, and many other venerable silly battles. It's actually an ideological battle - GNOME was started in the first place because KDE was based on Qt, which isn't GPL. Thus, the rush to create a GPL'd window/widget toolkit (GTK) and environment.
Agreed with the soul-merging thing - this is one of the reasons so many people see SEELE as an evil org :) MSFT++.
You're also right about the reform - the other possibility is that they'll return to the Hall of Gehim, leaving Shinji and Asuka to rebuild humanity. (Hahahahaha... just mark us dead at that point.)
Whether or not Shinji screwed up is more debatable. You're already dead by the time he made that decision - so either you're going to completely cease to be yourself when you merge with all humanity, or something "else" is gonna happen (namely, you stop being dead, or you keep being dead.) He's definitely an anti-hero of the series, but I don't think his decision could be universally deemed a failure.
Sorry for the spoiler bit though.
I didn't say I was cooler for it - I honestly preferred the ending. As far as I'm concerned, episode 24 was the climax and "end" of the series - 25 and 26 are the denouement, the cleanup, and in that respect a clip assembly and a lot of talk works fine.
/.ers don't agree with it.
I'm not a karma whore, I'm just expressing my opinion. I'm not going to be hurt if a couple of
Actually, children in the womb are fed pre-oxygenated blood via the placenta. The fluid is mostly water - ever heard of someone's water breaking at the start of labor?
:)
That, and while "breathable" oxygenated fluids do exist, LCL was a bit more. Lilith (the big white being down in the basement of NERV, the second Angel) bleeds LCL instead of blood - it's a primordial soup that the equipment in the plug artificially oxygenates. Everyone poofs into big puddles of it in End of Eva, if you haven't seen it
(In the ep where Eva-01 gets swallowed and Shinji has l33t flashbacks, the LCL becomes hard to breathe because the oxygenation equipment stops running.)
There were two possible results of the Human Complementation Project. Both would result in the annihilation of mankind as it's known today - one would simply be the complete destruction, the other would join and merge all souls into a single uniform being, continuing life with a single soul. The former would happen if an Angel came into contact with Adam, the first angel, the latter through a a ritual involving Rei. (There's actually a third option, also, below.)
:)
The series portrayed NERV (the organization behind the Evas) as a puppet for a council of planners called SEELE - a group of old men who had a hand in the original discovery of Adam, attempting to save their own skins. According to the script, they used technology pioneered by Dr. Katsuragi (Misato's father) to force Adam to revert in time to an embryonic form, allowing them to restrain him - however, the energy produced triggered the melting of the ice caps. (No debates about embryos and life please, that's another topic for another time.)
Thus, the Evas were created to prevent the Angels (sent by God) from coming into contact with Adam before they could complete the ritual and trigger the "good" type of complementation. In the first episode containing Asuka, Kaji is carrying around a cryogenic container holding Adam - it stays with Gendo Ikari after that.
As for the ending... in the original series ending, the "good" ending is assumed to occur, and the final two episodes trace what happens to Shinji as he merges with the souls of his cloest friends. (The ritual that triggers this is left undisclosed.) I thought it was a great ending - however, it left a lot of questions unanswered, and many fans complained. So, Gainax dragged Anno back, and released the movie End of Evangelion, which presents a different ending. In EoE, the ritual and creation of the group being is very explicitly shown, along with the freeing of all souls on earth - however, at the last minute, Shinji (inside EVA-01) rejects the new life form, and it all falls apart. The movie doesn't say what happens to the souls of humanity explicitly - they're shown coasting back to earth, and most people figure their bodies will reform.
(The whole idea of the ending was that the so-called AT field was the intangible, inpenetrable barrier of the soul, keeping us in human shape; if our AT fields were somehow countered, the human body would break apart into base elements - which Eva calls LCL - and the soul float free.)
Personally, I don't see a need to interpret it in terms of my religious beliefs, just because it has symbols and imagery from it. I just enjoy the series for what it is, and for the philosophical issues it presents
Yes and no.
The child pilots (Shinji, Asuka, Toji, etc) were children who had been born after the Hall of Souls had become emptied. Ritsuko references this in the room-o-clones scene after Kaji's death: it's a bit of early Christian myth about a room of souls for those that have not yet been born. This was also given as the explanation - if anyone else tried to pilot an Eva, two souls in one body would somehow conflict.
As for Rei, she's not entirely human, for reasons explained explicitly in the plot.
You might be thinking of the ability to create an AT field. Kaoru claimed that all humans had one, and that rare people could extend it outside their own bodies - Rei can, but Shinji and Asuka are fairly normal.
I guess you haven't used Kazaa since you uinstalled b3d. It'll refuse to run if Brilliant ins't installed.
:P)
(Didn't MSFT have this problem... bundling?
Heh - they actually have offered entire classes on Haskell and functional programming in the past at UP. Try writing a console game in Haskell sometime - it's fun :)
About the same as an iPod bud - those things are beefy enough to run Quake and Quake2, and in fact both have been ported. Can you say the same for your Palm3? Hahhahaha fuckno.
For that matter, try to decode MPEG-1 or MP3 on your Palm. Hahahahah fuckno.
Embedded technology is cheap as long as it can't do much. When you want to build a palmtop that can actually DO something people ooh and ahh over, it's not quite so cheap.
I suspect that a QC isn't capable of solving the halting problem in general - however, it would be far easier to evaluate finite instances of the problem than with a conventional machine.
:)
I haven't given it much thought at this juncture, but it seems to me that one could reduce a Turing machine program to a unitary matrix, and then supply the Hadamard operator as input (i.e. a superposition of all possible inputs, equally likely) - thus evaluating the program on all possible inputs at once. Based on this line, if the resulting quantum state wasn't representable as a tensor product of basi, the program would halt.
The above probably wouldn't work, but at least I'm thinking it over
Haskell Curry invented a variation on lambda calculus now called Curried functions. They're used in the increasingly popular functional language (guess it's name...) Haskell.
Hehe... the point is, what's the most minimal machine you can build that can solve a given class of problems?
:) (See the parent for a rough description.) Any machine or language that can be used to solve the same class of problems as a Turing machine is said to be Turing-equivalent - most every conventional machine out there is Turing equivalent.
:\
Layman's example - It's the concept that you could theoretically rework the Quake3 engine to run using the 8088's capabilities. (I say theoretically because some Slashdot nitpicker is inevitably going to try to karma whore by pointing out that 8088s could only use 16 bits of memory addresses, and you'd need way more.) The point is that given the 8088's instruction set, it's theoretically possible to emulate a 32-bit protected mode, and graphics, and so on and so on until you had one frame every hour of Quake 3. Now, try a Z80. Back on down the chain... what is the most minimal machine possible that can still run a translated version of today's software?
One of the major ideas in Computer Science is what sorts of questions and problems are difficult, or absolutely downright impossible, for a given type of machine to solve. In particular we like to talk about Turing machines, which are damn minimal
(There are problems that Turing machines can't solve - the classic one is the halting problem. Can you write a program that can look at any other programs (not just most programs, ANY program in the infinite universe, including itself) and say if it'll lock up or not? With a Turing-equivalent machine, it's fundamentally impossible to do that - not just improbable or hard-to-implement, but impossible. The solution is to create a machine that's more capable than a Turing-equivalent machine, but that's rather tricky with macroscopic physics.)
This is just a very rough intro - the article is that this guy came up with a CFG (Context-Free Grammar) with only two rules that apparently is capable of arbitrary computation of functions, which is damn cool. The site is slashdotted, so I've only read the top HTML page, not the Postscript paper
It's not magnetic fields that do the moving, it's a reaction to the electric field. The fact that running a current through a bit of metal produces BOTH electric and magnetic fields is just a curiosity. Both can and do exist independantly in nature, and water moves in an electric field.
Not quite. The caterpillar drive was a gigantic induction pump. Water moves in an electric field, similar to magnetism - generate a large enough field and you can get water moving at a decent pressure. Small induction pumps are fairly common in homebrew watercooling rigs on PCs.
Actually, I'm NOT paying for this. :P
/. wants people to pay for it, there needs to be some serious checking of stories before posting. The Internet may have partially obsoleted deadtree papers, but it hasn't obsoleted the concept of journalistic integrity - and integrity is what separates a legitmate newspaper from a tabloid.
In all seriousness, if
At a time when nearly every other decent site with subscriptions (K5, etc) is charging a per month fee for no ads, /. is charging per pageview.
;)
It's all a secret plot to stop people from refreshing nonstop to get first post.