According to an article in the linux journal
the Altivec unit handles only single precision
floats
-> only useful for special tasks or for calculations were you can take care for the
reduced precision,
-> not for general scientific numerical calculations
We have a Dell laptop with 1400x1050 on 15.4 inch
and I really like it. The linux installation was
a little bit difficult, you have to set a special
video mode at boot time (vga=791), otherwise the
display will be black as soon as you start X11.
Their support pages had the required pointers to
the internet to find out about it.
Especially the available Add-ons are very important! Mainsoft created a layer for the Stingray Objective Tools. With additional native Toolkits which are available both for Win32 and Linux this really seams to be an interesting migration path for companies which have to port there existing code within a short time. A nice virtual print engine (Idealsoft?) would be a valuable addition... If you already have spent a lot of time and money on your code, which has to be supported further, it isn't easy to go for GTK/Win32, Qt or wxWindows. Changing from COM to anything else might also be a nightmare for really large projects.
I think the meaning of "real-time" in the original posting is "during data aquisition" with soft real time constrains instead of a calculation done after the experiment. In an industrial environment it might also be important to have an upgrade path and a processor family which will be supported for a long enough time (it is really expensive to switch from transputers to something else...).
Something like a "Linux Users&Developers Network" with a nice interface for offline usage would be wonderful. A distribution which can be partially or completely updated from the internet with a few mouse clicks or comands would be really nice. Are there already plans for such a software and distribution project?
I definitely have to learn about SGML to take part!
A scientific theory has to be able to explain the results of experiments, both new ones and OLD ones! I doubt that he is able to explain any quantum effect at all. But that doesn't matter if you just want to get money to play around with that nice electron.
Re:Durability issues/Physical background
on
A 140GB CD-ROM?
·
· Score: 1
What they are using is called a confocal microscope. The same kind of stuff which is used for single molecule detection of fluorescence labeled proteins and things like that. To get a good z-resolution for the separation of the different layers and to get a good photon detection ratio they have to use a high appertur optic. If the layers are deep enough inside of the disc the beam diameter at the surface can be much larger than the diameter of a scratch and the scratch wouldn't matter at all! As the light is detected at the same side of the disc it isn't a problem to print a label on the other side of the disc. This really should be a practical approach! To make a RW-disc might be difficult because you would need to switch the fluorescence behaviour in a permanent and reversable way. Maybe the new blue diode lasers will make it possible.
If you have a really short pulse length of e.g. 10 fs (= 10^-14 s!) the spectral range of this puls covers the whole visual spectrum. If you pick out a small range of this spectrum using a grating you will enlarge the length of the pulse (if you have a pulse with a length of one ns you can't determine the frequency of this pulse with a higher precision than one GHz and vice versa). With fibre gratings you might be able to pick out a large number of different spectral ranges which can then be modulated individually before they are once again combined and put into the fibre. With 1550 nm wavelength the required spectral range should be at least about +- 100 nm! for a data bandwidth of 20 TBits/s
Even if DVD-writers with the required capacity are available, the number of copies should be irrelevant: - price for the raw DVD medium - much more people are using a cd-player than a computer with a burner, same will be true for DVD - If they really want to earn money, DVDs have to get really popular and the few people which are able to decrypt and copy DVDs might even help to make them popular (same with Microsoft)
Only superfluid liquid helium climbs up! You have to use a vacuum pump to reduce the pressure and the boiling point below 2.2 K. A nice feature of superfluid helium is, that it doesn't "boil" anymore. Its heat conductivity is next to infinity and any helium vaporizes from the surface. BTW: Liquid helium is only very expensive if you are not able to recycle it.
Frank Pobell: Matter and Methods at Low Temperatures (Springer) is a really nice book dealing with ordinary He and all the stuff for temperatures 1K
Building an artifical virus might be a much more realistic project to test our understanding of life. You would be able to use a living cell as the machinary to produce the envelope proteins for the virus starting from a RNA- or DNA molecule. In addition other proteins could be added to the code to get some biochemical functions (-> money).
Even though a virus can't live on its own it is nevertheless a unit which reproduces itself. As far as I know no one is able to predict the tertiar structure of a protein from the primary structure (and thus the DNA code). This means that it is still very difficult to design a protein from scratch which should catalyse a reaction. Genetic optimization might be an interesting way to get a RNA or protein molecule with chemical activity without a priori knowledge. I think Prof. M. Eigen (MPI Goettingen) is doing things like that.
In my opinion biology is still doing "reengineering" and is miles away from writing new "device drivers". No one is able to predict the 3D structure or function of a protein yet. It is still hexcode hacking on a 2 bit multi node machine;-)
Thanks for the hint! The WWW-Site at http://www.linux.sgi.com indeed is a good starting point to get informations about Linux on SGI/Mips and SGI/Intel. There is a distribution called "Hard Hat 5.1" derived from RedHat 5.1. It should be possible to use Linux on a large number of R4x00 and R5000 SGI machines. For other brands of R3000 (DEC 2100 etc.) linux ports have been done.
Freely available patches for Irix (according to A.C.) - Are you sure about Irix 5.3? - We are talking about R3000 Indigo for which you can't get an Irix 6.x - Never change a running system;-) Hopefully they will at least be usable as terminals, with or without Linux
Is is already possible to install Linux on these old systems being an ordinary Unix admin? It really would be nice if SGI would do some polishing and make a linux distribution for their old day systems. We have four Indigo systems with an R3000 for which we can't get an actual version of Irix and therefore no Y2K support.
Would water really be an essential resource if one wants to build a station on the moon? If you want to do something useful there you would have to build large transport capacities anyway. With enough energy it should be possible to recycle the water by distillation or electrolyses. To get enough food to the moon should be more difficult then to substitute the water losses.
In the first place you need a lot of money and that seems to be the main reason for these spectacular experiments...
Slashdot Mirror
According to an article in the linux journal
the Altivec unit handles only single precision
floats
-> only useful for special tasks or for calculations were you can take care for the
reduced precision,
-> not for general scientific numerical calculations
We have a Dell laptop with 1400x1050 on 15.4 inch and I really like it. The linux installation was a little bit difficult, you have to set a special video mode at boot time (vga=791), otherwise the display will be black as soon as you start X11. Their support pages had the required pointers to the internet to find out about it.
Especially the available Add-ons are very important! Mainsoft created a layer for the Stingray Objective Tools. With additional native ... If you already have spent a lot of time and money on your code, which has to be supported further, it isn't easy to go for GTK/Win32, Qt or wxWindows. Changing from COM to
Toolkits which are available both for Win32 and Linux this really seams to be an interesting migration path for companies which have to port there existing code within a short time. A nice
virtual print engine (Idealsoft?) would be a valuable addition
anything else might also be a nightmare for really
large projects.
I think the meaning of "real-time" in the original ...).
posting is "during data aquisition" with soft real time constrains instead of a calculation done after the experiment.
In an industrial environment it might also be important to have an upgrade path and a processor
family which will be supported for a long enough
time (it is really expensive to switch from
transputers to something else
Something like a "Linux Users&Developers Network"
with a nice interface for offline usage would be wonderful. A distribution which can be partially or completely updated from the internet with a few mouse clicks or comands would be really nice.
Are there already plans for such a software and distribution project?
I definitely have to learn about SGML to take part!
A scientific theory has to be able to explain the results of experiments, both new ones and OLD
ones!
I doubt that he is able to explain any quantum
effect at all. But that doesn't matter if you
just want to get money to play around with that
nice electron.
What they are using is called a confocal microscope. The same kind of stuff which is used for single molecule detection of fluorescence labeled proteins and things like that. To get a good z-resolution for the separation of the different layers and to get a good photon detection ratio they have to use a high appertur optic. If the layers are deep enough inside of the disc the beam diameter at the surface can be much larger than the diameter of a scratch and the scratch wouldn't matter at all! As the light is detected at the same side of the disc it isn't a problem to print a label on the other side of the disc. This really should be a practical approach! To make a RW-disc might be difficult because you would need to switch the fluorescence behaviour in a permanent and reversable way. Maybe the new blue diode lasers will make it possible.
- Intel bought a DSP company
- Transmeta is focusing on just the same topic
- Redhat gets together with Cygnus (eCos!)
- Microsoft & WinCE doesn't seam to be the winning team
Fun is in the air!If you have a really short pulse length of e.g.
10 fs (= 10^-14 s!) the spectral range of this
puls covers the whole visual spectrum. If you
pick out a small range of this spectrum using
a grating you will enlarge the length of the
pulse (if you have a pulse with a length of one
ns you can't determine the frequency of this
pulse with a higher precision than one GHz and
vice versa).
With fibre gratings you might be able to pick
out a large number of different spectral ranges
which can then be modulated individually before
they are once again combined and put into the
fibre. With 1550 nm wavelength the required spectral range should be at least about +- 100 nm!
for a data bandwidth of 20 TBits/s
Nevertheless it is really amasing!
Wer zu spät kommt, den bestraft das Leben ;-)
> Yeah, because we all know notebooks are cheaper > than desktops... :P
They are at least cheaper than servers or high end workstations for which something like a Xeon or a high end Sparc processor might be reasonable.
c't claims that it is thought for notebooks, due to it's low power consumption. Maybe "Crusoe" is cheap also ;-)
Even if DVD-writers with the required capacity
are available, the number of copies should be
irrelevant:
- price for the raw DVD medium
- much more people are using a cd-player
than a computer with a burner, same will be
true for DVD
- If they really want to earn money, DVDs have
to get really popular and the few people which
are able to decrypt and copy DVDs might even
help to make them popular (same with Microsoft)
Only superfluid liquid helium climbs up! You have
to use a vacuum pump to reduce the pressure and
the boiling point below 2.2 K. A nice feature of
superfluid helium is, that it doesn't "boil"
anymore. Its heat conductivity is next to infinity and any helium vaporizes from the surface.
BTW: Liquid helium is only very expensive if you are not able to recycle it.
Frank Pobell: Matter and Methods at Low Temperatures (Springer) is a really nice book
dealing with ordinary He and all the stuff for
temperatures 1K
I'm still looking for a "first post" which is ...
worth a point 5 rating
Any references?
It seems to be quite a good idea to read Slashdot ;-)
if you are involved with any linux related commercial activities
There is a nice paper "Optomechanics with LEGO"
in Applied-Optics Vol. 37, p. 3408-16, 1998
The even did some interferometry experiments!
I prefered "Fischer-Technik" when I was a chield
and I also used it in the lab for some quick & dirty setups.
Hasn't the Novell software in the first place
been developed to connect computers for playing
games together?
Building an artifical virus might be a much more realistic project to test our understanding of life. You would be able to use a living cell as the machinary to produce the envelope proteins for
the virus starting from a RNA- or DNA molecule.
In addition other proteins could be added to the
code to get some biochemical functions (-> money).
Even though a virus can't live on its own it is
nevertheless a unit which reproduces itself. As
far as I know no one is able to predict the
tertiar structure of a protein from the primary
structure (and thus the DNA code). This means
that it is still very difficult to design a
protein from scratch which should catalyse a
reaction. Genetic optimization might be an
interesting way to get a RNA or protein molecule
with chemical activity without a priori knowledge.
I think Prof. M. Eigen (MPI Goettingen) is doing things like that.
Hic roma, hic salta!
In my opinion biology is still doing "reengineering" and is miles away from writing ;-)
new "device drivers". No one is able to
predict the 3D structure or function of a protein
yet. It is still hexcode hacking on a 2 bit
multi node machine
Thanks for the hint!
;-) Hopefully
The WWW-Site at http://www.linux.sgi.com indeed
is a good starting point to get informations
about Linux on SGI/Mips and SGI/Intel. There
is a distribution called "Hard Hat 5.1" derived from RedHat 5.1.
It should be possible to use Linux on a large
number of R4x00 and R5000 SGI machines. For other
brands of R3000 (DEC 2100 etc.) linux ports have
been done.
Freely available patches for Irix (according
to A.C.)
- Are you sure about Irix 5.3?
- We are talking about R3000 Indigo for which you
can't get an Irix 6.x
- Never change a running system
they will at least be usable as terminals,
with or without Linux
Is is already possible to install Linux on these
old systems being an ordinary Unix admin? It
really would be nice if SGI would do some
polishing and make a linux distribution for their
old day systems.
We have four Indigo systems with an R3000 for
which we can't get an actual version of Irix and
therefore no Y2K support.
Would water really be an essential resource if
...
one wants to build a station on the moon? If
you want to do something useful there you would
have to build large transport capacities anyway.
With enough energy it should be possible to
recycle the water by distillation or electrolyses.
To get enough food to the moon should be more
difficult then to substitute the water losses.
In the first place you need a lot of money and
that seems to be the main reason for these
spectacular experiments
So let's build an infinite improbability drive ;-)
before and go to the restaurant at the end of
the universe
Penguinator II, the new world dominator ;-)