Hell I remember watching an 80's episode of The Phil Donahue Show where they were talking about fermilab and they had a hard time explaining that matter was made up of protons electrons, and neutrons. News of problems with superconductors were waaay to over the populaces head to get any attention.
Of course Phil had a few things to say about those quarks being tops and bottoms. And when strange came into the picture, man it got nasty.
Now I just have a picture in my head of the whole thing not working because somebody tripped over the cable connecting the whole thing to the standard wall outlet..
No no....someone tripped over a superconducting connection, ruptured the cryogenic lines instead.
Detecting the Higgs Boson is not a process where you turn on an accelerator, smash some protons and go...'look there it is'.
Basically they are never going to see a higgs boson, they are going to look at all the stuff that flies out of these collisions and trace back each bit and try to figure out where what its lifecycle was. When you find something that isn't explained by known particles and fits the model of the higgs boson you can statistically believe it exists.
If the Higgs does exist it you make runs with the accelerator over and over again (it runs at a peak of about 40 million collisions a second). From this you get a large amount of data, about 2GBytes a second. The data is more or less filtered for interesting 'events'. These events are then rated based on how likely they show evidence related to a higgs boson based on various models. Then after a long period of time you look at trends and you can statistically map the mass and energies of particles in an attempt to figure out where the higgs boson exists.
The LEP (at CERN before he LHC) and The Tevatron (at fermilab) have done a lot of work to narrow down what areas should be focused on...but essentially the more energy you have the more granularity your going to have in the resulting data and thus the more confident they can be about the results.
It sounds like they just used the flash laser to blast the sample with a massive amount of energy floating around 10nm. Then for 40 femtoseconds they blasted enough of the electrons out of the way that a few of the longer waves passed through. Still cool, but not as cool as it first sounds.
The down side is if the photon emitted by the molecule is visible to you, it couldn't have be properly passed to the next optical transistor....
okay it could but:
1. you would have to be entangled
2. make sure noone observes you seeing the photon
3. Don't make any sort of measurement or acknowledge that you saw the photon
Otherwise you could either see the light from the processor or the processor would work properly...it couldn't do both.:)
Exactly, so she might have the cure for aging but they waited till now to publish the case? I know hospitals are slow, but man waiting 15+ years to get around to investigating a patient. Don't ever go to this Dr Walker if you think you might have a terminal illness...you'll be dead by the time he runs the blood tests.
Hell If this was real pharmaceutical companies would be tossing bags of cash in her parent's window in exchange for a couple of blood cells.
Ocean current that might vary in flow and not exactly match models that are decades old...sheesh. Don't they teach kids how to do fluid dynamics calculations with billions upon billions of variables all of which change over with time and depend on a multitude of other models which themselves have varying levels of accuracy to their data these days.
Of course its usually a exponential communication problem with dealing with groups. If I'm standing with 10 people in a group not only do we need to fetch the world from the servers. We also need to send our avitar's audio, model data, textures, etc to 9 other people...and they in-turn are fetching 9 other user updates. In many cases it all routes through one communication channel to the server and what is relevant to the user's POV is sorted out on the client....in many cases that can be a large amount of data to stream, buffer, and sort through constantly. You could push this burden off to the server and transmit only relevant data to each client, but thats usually can cause more world update problems...also you loose the ability to try to do predictive calculation of models on the client box based on your own actions because you have to request all the textures, models, etc that were not in view 10 seconds ago but now are in view because you changed angles.
You could do 48GB on any modern server...it would be one bank of 32 and another of 16...which would be quite odd but, still possible. My new Generation 6 HPs are sporting 72GB of 10600 DDR3 across 3 Banks.
Also where you do have large open parts of the world you can dynamically allocate location clusters based on groups/concentrations of people, hand off the processing of those groups to various processing nodes. Usually you need to add the ubiquitous 'fog of war' to make this work graphically. Yes the management is complex, but it is very doable.
Another major problem most MMOs make is they build the client protocol with way to many "global" broadcasting, and forced acknowledgment of updates. This tends to get out of hand very quickly. And from a design perspective while its cool to have things like every client triggering the play of the same sound and graphic event at the exact same split second, such events come at a high cost. A lot of games deploy these entire world updates for way too many basic changes....do I really need to ensure that every client withing 500 ft knows that X Player's avatar twitched his left hand, and then wait for an acknowledgment before moving on? You really need to prioritize what events are important and enforce that pretty heavily on the development team.
Fracturing a game based on location is not that difficult design wise. The main problem is cost effectiveness I hate pulling out business models and cost benefit analysis, but unfortunately centralized systems usually take either large centralized shared storage, RDBMS, schedulers, resource allocation management, etc; or the proper development of a distributed data server farm. This ends up costing a lot of money and a decent amount of development & operations manpower...in the MMO world your profits are not that high to begin with.
Even on some of the grids that I've built that have gone google-style (map-reduce, column based DB, true distributed file system, on cheap hardware) the costs quickly hit a few million per location. On our larger GPFS, oracle, vmware, on HP based clusters the software site licenses alone will eat most game companies.
Your best bet these days would be to try to develop something that uses Amazon's elastic compute cloud, apache's messaging system, run something like greenplum to distribute the DB load, and don't skimp on developers...cheap ones usually don't understand that in a distributed environment that every little chunk of code from the network/disk/etc up has to scale and be massively efficient cause you can't afford to 'just throw faster hardware at it'
God damn fingers, you ruined my post... Now I've given the impression of a bunch of freaking Trans Ams doing donuts on the dude's lawn. Actually that would be kinda cool, too bad I didn't double the t then.
Eliminate odors electronically and help repair that pesky hole in the ozone while you're at it
And trigger problems for anyone who has Asthma, COPD, or other respiratory aliments. Ozone is actually a pretty nasty irritant http://www.epa.gov/iaq/pubs/ozonegen.html. Its one of the reasons Sharper Image had several class action lawsuits about the ionic breeze, and one of the things they tried to repress Consumer Reports from releasing data on.
Knowing cabs it would either be broken or increase the ozone above 0.50 ppm.
Maybe we should have a drivers education program and testing system that actually requires people to know how to really drive. Include items like driving on wet pavement, snow, ice, recovering from a real skid and hydroplaning. Driving programs in the United States are a joke, and then when a majority of people actually loose traction, panic stop, or generally do something wrong they stop and go into utter panic because they never had it happen before.
Maybe finland has the right idea...according to Top Gear they start at about 9 years old and take several years of classes (Or according to some schools if you spend 4 hours every day training you can pass in just 6 weeks; whereas in the US its 30mins of training and 4-6 hours standing in line at the DMV)
One of the real problems is local municipalities. Many of them have signed exclusive contracts for Cable TV services. For example in many Chicago suburbs Comcast has exclusive 'media services' access to the cabling right of way, in exchange comcast has to be able to service all residents within the municipality (in many towns without these agreements they only wire the middle and upper class areas).
This actually caused a bit problem when AT&T wanted to lay fiber for TV, internet, and phone. Comcast argued that AT&T was encroaching on their 'media rights'
Actually they may not be able to... I believe the 96 TeleCommunication Act 30 percent limit still exists. Basically it states that no cable media provider can own more then 30 percent of the cable market. Thus Comcast, TimeWarner, RCN etc routinely trade eachother's territories, or pick and choose which ones will give the most profit.
9600...I remember blowing $450+ for an internal 14400 baud modem when those came out. It was a full length ISA board that was slightly beyond spec in width so you couldn't have anything sitting in the next slot.
Actually back then that was the bulk what I was using the internet for.
Yeah I was thinking more 92-93ish...hell I think 94-95 was the last time I used POTS for net access.
In 96 a company I worked for had the crazy idea of trying to use javascript to write webapps and running some sort of dynamically generated content in on the webserver using java and some sort of templating system. I'm glad that never went anywhere it would have been such a mess...
It's probably either "photoshopped" so they're not showing what's really on it. Or they have some pre-configured "guests without clearance are here" screen that they can change all the monitors to with the push of a button.
Assuming these pictures didn't span multiple visits and taking the following into account: 1. The shadows in all the pics show the sun is at a very low angle. 2. The state of the trees, combined with green IVY in pic 3 indicate its mid-fall. 3. In mid-fall sun would only be as low as the reflection in the bomb containment vessel in the mid/late-morning and the evening. 4. The clock indicates it is 10:33:24 (can't be PM because of the sun) 5. The upper left looks like a morning talk show, and the lower left looks to be a talk show, or game show. (the other is an interior cam)
I can conclude that they most likely have tuned the TV to local over-the-air TV stations to show that they can both monitor the news and closed circuit feeds on their display system....
Determining patent viability under section 101. "Under this test, a patent claim is eligible if: (1) it is tied to a particular machine or apparatus, or (2) it transforms a particular article into a different state or thing."
See USPTO: Ex parte Langemyr and Ex parte Wasynczuk
"A general purpose computer is not a particular machine, and thus innovative software processes are unpatentable if they are tied to a general purpose computer."
"Some people just can't take the floor of the room turning into a 3D sign wave"
--The words of Many a CAVE operator.
Back when I was in school I used to give Cave tours to lots of folks (http://evlweb.eecs.uic.edu/index2.php)... Trust me, some people just can't handle their visual senses giving 3D info and the rest of their senses not agreeing. After watching a few people fall over, or occasionally having someone puke on the floor is never fun.
Then of course you can torment people by making them watch you play Cave Quake (http://www.visbox.com/cq3a/)....
Slashdot Mirror
Hell I remember watching an 80's episode of The Phil Donahue Show where they were talking about fermilab and they had a hard time explaining that matter was made up of protons electrons, and neutrons. News of problems with superconductors were waaay to over the populaces head to get any attention.
Of course Phil had a few things to say about those quarks being tops and bottoms. And when strange came into the picture, man it got nasty.
Now I just have a picture in my head of the whole thing not working because somebody tripped over the cable connecting the whole thing to the standard wall outlet..
No no....someone tripped over a superconducting connection, ruptured the cryogenic lines instead.
Detecting the Higgs Boson is not a process where you turn on an accelerator, smash some protons and go...'look there it is'.
Basically they are never going to see a higgs boson, they are going to look at all the stuff that flies out of these collisions and trace back each bit and try to figure out where what its lifecycle was. When you find something that isn't explained by known particles and fits the model of the higgs boson you can statistically believe it exists.
If the Higgs does exist it you make runs with the accelerator over and over again (it runs at a peak of about 40 million collisions a second). From this you get a large amount of data, about 2GBytes a second. The data is more or less filtered for interesting 'events'. These events are then rated based on how likely they show evidence related to a higgs boson based on various models. Then after a long period of time you look at trends and you can statistically map the mass and energies of particles in an attempt to figure out where the higgs boson exists.
The LEP (at CERN before he LHC) and The Tevatron (at fermilab) have done a lot of work to narrow down what areas should be focused on...but essentially the more energy you have the more granularity your going to have in the resulting data and thus the more confident they can be about the results.
Yes but would you be prepared if gravity reversed itself?
It sounds like they just used the flash laser to blast the sample with a massive amount of energy floating around 10nm. Then for 40 femtoseconds they blasted enough of the electrons out of the way that a few of the longer waves passed through. Still cool, but not as cool as it first sounds.
The down side is if the photon emitted by the molecule is visible to you, it couldn't have be properly passed to the next optical transistor....
:)
okay it could but:
1. you would have to be entangled
2. make sure noone observes you seeing the photon
3. Don't make any sort of measurement or acknowledge that you saw the photon
Otherwise you could either see the light from the processor or the processor would work properly...it couldn't do both.
Exactly, so she might have the cure for aging but they waited till now to publish the case? I know hospitals are slow, but man waiting 15+ years to get around to investigating a patient.
Don't ever go to this Dr Walker if you think you might have a terminal illness...you'll be dead by the time he runs the blood tests.
Hell If this was real pharmaceutical companies would be tossing bags of cash in her parent's window in exchange for a couple of blood cells.
Ocean current that might vary in flow and not exactly match models that are decades old...sheesh. Don't they teach kids how to do fluid dynamics calculations with billions upon billions of variables all of which change over with time and depend on a multitude of other models which themselves have varying levels of accuracy to their data these days.
Of course its usually a exponential communication problem with dealing with groups. If I'm standing with 10 people in a group not only do we need to fetch the world from the servers. We also need to send our avitar's audio, model data, textures, etc to 9 other people...and they in-turn are fetching 9 other user updates. In many cases it all routes through one communication channel to the server and what is relevant to the user's POV is sorted out on the client....in many cases that can be a large amount of data to stream, buffer, and sort through constantly. You could push this burden off to the server and transmit only relevant data to each client, but thats usually can cause more world update problems...also you loose the ability to try to do predictive calculation of models on the client box based on your own actions because you have to request all the textures, models, etc that were not in view 10 seconds ago but now are in view because you changed angles.
You could do 48GB on any modern server...it would be one bank of 32 and another of 16...which would be quite odd but, still possible. My new Generation 6 HPs are sporting 72GB of 10600 DDR3 across 3 Banks.
Also where you do have large open parts of the world you can dynamically allocate location clusters based on groups/concentrations of people, hand off the processing of those groups to various processing nodes. Usually you need to add the ubiquitous 'fog of war' to make this work graphically. Yes the management is complex, but it is very doable.
Another major problem most MMOs make is they build the client protocol with way to many "global" broadcasting, and forced acknowledgment of updates. This tends to get out of hand very quickly. And from a design perspective while its cool to have things like every client triggering the play of the same sound and graphic event at the exact same split second, such events come at a high cost. A lot of games deploy these entire world updates for way too many basic changes....do I really need to ensure that every client withing 500 ft knows that X Player's avatar twitched his left hand, and then wait for an acknowledgment before moving on? You really need to prioritize what events are important and enforce that pretty heavily on the development team.
Fracturing a game based on location is not that difficult design wise. The main problem is cost effectiveness I hate pulling out business models and cost benefit analysis, but unfortunately centralized systems usually take either large centralized shared storage, RDBMS, schedulers, resource allocation management, etc; or the proper development of a distributed data server farm. This ends up costing a lot of money and a decent amount of development & operations manpower...in the MMO world your profits are not that high to begin with.
Even on some of the grids that I've built that have gone google-style (map-reduce, column based DB, true distributed file system, on cheap hardware) the costs quickly hit a few million per location. On our larger GPFS, oracle, vmware, on HP based clusters the software site licenses alone will eat most game companies.
Your best bet these days would be to try to develop something that uses Amazon's elastic compute cloud, apache's messaging system, run something like greenplum to distribute the DB load, and don't skimp on developers...cheap ones usually don't understand that in a distributed environment that every little chunk of code from the network/disk/etc up has to scale and be massively efficient cause you can't afford to 'just throw faster hardware at it'
Damn kits
God damn fingers, you ruined my post... Now I've given the impression of a bunch of freaking Trans Ams doing donuts on the dude's lawn. Actually that would be kinda cool, too bad I didn't double the t then.
Damn kits....Get off my lawn!!!
Eliminate odors electronically and help repair that pesky hole in the ozone while you're at it
And trigger problems for anyone who has Asthma, COPD, or other respiratory aliments. Ozone is actually a pretty nasty irritant http://www.epa.gov/iaq/pubs/ozonegen.html. Its one of the reasons Sharper Image had several class action lawsuits about the ionic breeze, and one of the things they tried to repress Consumer Reports from releasing data on.
Knowing cabs it would either be broken or increase the ozone above 0.50 ppm.
Maybe we should have a drivers education program and testing system that actually requires people to know how to really drive. Include items like driving on wet pavement, snow, ice, recovering from a real skid and hydroplaning. Driving programs in the United States are a joke, and then when a majority of people actually loose traction, panic stop, or generally do something wrong they stop and go into utter panic because they never had it happen before.
Maybe finland has the right idea...according to Top Gear they start at about 9 years old and take several years of classes (Or according to some schools if you spend 4 hours every day training you can pass in just 6 weeks; whereas in the US its 30mins of training and 4-6 hours standing in line at the DMV)
One of the real problems is local municipalities. Many of them have signed exclusive contracts for Cable TV services. For example in many Chicago suburbs Comcast has exclusive 'media services' access to the cabling right of way, in exchange comcast has to be able to service all residents within the municipality (in many towns without these agreements they only wire the middle and upper class areas).
This actually caused a bit problem when AT&T wanted to lay fiber for TV, internet, and phone. Comcast argued that AT&T was encroaching on their 'media rights'
Actually they may not be able to... I believe the 96 TeleCommunication Act 30 percent limit still exists. Basically it states that no cable media provider can own more then 30 percent of the cable market. Thus Comcast, TimeWarner, RCN etc routinely trade eachother's territories, or pick and choose which ones will give the most profit.
9600...I remember blowing $450+ for an internal 14400 baud modem when those came out. It was a full length ISA board that was slightly beyond spec in width so you couldn't have anything sitting in the next slot.
Actually back then that was the bulk what I was using the internet for.
Yeah I was thinking more 92-93ish...hell I think 94-95 was the last time I used POTS for net access.
In 96 a company I worked for had the crazy idea of trying to use javascript to write webapps and running some sort of dynamically generated content in on the webserver using java and some sort of templating system. I'm glad that never went anywhere it would have been such a mess...
Who would use this internet thing when you could download warez and play doors on BBSs.
It's probably either "photoshopped" so they're not showing what's really on it. Or they have some pre-configured "guests without clearance are here" screen that they can change all the monitors to with the push of a button.
Assuming these pictures didn't span multiple visits and taking the following into account:
1. The shadows in all the pics show the sun is at a very low angle.
2. The state of the trees, combined with green IVY in pic 3 indicate its mid-fall.
3. In mid-fall sun would only be as low as the reflection in the bomb containment vessel in the mid/late-morning and the evening.
4. The clock indicates it is 10:33:24 (can't be PM because of the sun)
5. The upper left looks like a morning talk show, and the lower left looks to be a talk show, or game show. (the other is an interior cam)
I can conclude that they most likely have tuned the TV to local over-the-air TV stations to show that they can both monitor the news and closed circuit feeds on their display system....
But you know...just a hunch.
Too bad they didn't file this 3+ months ago.
See USPTO: Re Bilski
Determining patent viability under section 101. "Under this test, a patent claim is eligible if: (1) it is tied to a particular machine or apparatus, or (2) it transforms a particular article into a different state or thing."
See USPTO: Ex parte Langemyr and Ex parte Wasynczuk
"A general purpose computer is not a particular machine, and thus innovative software processes are unpatentable if they are tied to a general purpose computer."
"Some people just can't take the floor of the room turning into a 3D sign wave"
A 3-D sine wave even
"Some people just can't take the floor of the room turning into a 3D sign wave"
--The words of Many a CAVE operator.
Back when I was in school I used to give Cave tours to lots of folks (http://evlweb.eecs.uic.edu/index2.php)... Trust me, some people just can't handle their visual senses giving 3D info and the rest of their senses not agreeing. After watching a few people fall over, or occasionally having someone puke on the floor is never fun.
Then of course you can torment people by making them watch you play Cave Quake (http://www.visbox.com/cq3a/)....