And as we all know, Tesla also invented antigravity, Free Energy , and electric telepathy, but the damn oil companies bought the rights to his patents and they've never been seen since.
Don't know about John Wood, but I read somewhere a while ago that the Little Man From Another Place (the dancing backwards-talking dream guy) from Twin Peaks sold personalised backwards-spoken answering machine tapes like this. I'm sure you could find more info if you dug around a bit on the TP fan sites.
I'm currently without a mouse on my machine - one feature which makes the system usable is the "keyboard mouse" available in windoze under accessibility options (why I'm forced to use windoze at all at the moment is another story). Basically you can just navigate using the keypad, using the/*- keys to select which button you want to hit, and then '0' to click. It's pretty easy to use, and I'd love to have a way to make X do the same - window cycling doesn't often cut it, when there are things like checkboxes to select. Any ideas?
As someone who has actually sat down at looked in detail at the OpenBSD source, as part of the FreeBSD auditing project, I can definitively say that _every_ line has not been audited (previously, this is what I thought too, because it's the standard claim). There are quite a few obvious problems which were either missed, or fixed incorrectly - but, to be sure, they did fix a hell of a lot of them, which makes it still "more secure" than FreeBSD at present (until I finish merging all of the fixes:-)
Perhaps they audited the most important bits (i.e. those most likely to cause security problems), but since the start of the FreeBSD auditing project (I guess we spurred them into action again:) there have been about 20 buffer overflows fixed in OpenBSD which were missed the first time around. There was even a remotely exploitable one..
I'm surprised by the naivete of many in the Linux community who believe that companies like SGI, Sun, IBM, etc, are supporting linux because they believe in the ideal of free software and "the community". Sure, that's what they _say_ they're doing, but the subtext is that they're attempting to use Linux as a weapon against their competitors.
Take SGI, for example. Most people would agree their market position hasn't been too great in recent years, and as a business they haven't been doing all that well. Some would go as far as to call them a sinking ship.
Enter Linux. By releasing trinkets of their code under the GPL, they can simultaneously poison the marketplace for that technology (by making the value of the product worthless - i.e. if there's code which does exactly the same thing for free, how can your competitors expect to keep making money on that software), while trying to jockey for "brownie points" by appearing to be friendly and progressive. It's a delicate balance between not giving away too much of the farm so you have nothing left to sell yourself, and degrading the value of your competitors products.
Anyone who doesn't understand that Linux is simply being used as a pawn in the ongoing corporate wars is being naive. Whether or not this is a bad thing for Linux is another matter altogether (after all, if/when the big 'Linux-friendly' businesses either achieve their goal of market dominance, or get bored with lack of progress and move elsewhere, Linux will still have gained some code).
Some of the old Apple ][ speaker hacks are amazing..along with the digitized speech in Wolfenstein (circa 1982?) there were several incarnations of multi-tone generators, which could wring 2, or even 3 simultaneous notes out of a single-bit toggle speaker (essentially a "clicker").
There was even a program which could play 32KHz audio samples with very high quality by somehow doing timing magic with the speaker cone.
Has anyone been able to track down further references to this project? I did a brief scout around but didn't turn up anything. The referenced papers would be nice:-)
Actually, it's not emulation in the sense of a virtual machine, but an alternative syscall interface to the kernel. See this for an excellent explanation of the process.
As for WP using more memory, are you sure you're not confusing it with this?
Unfortunately, the problem is that there is NO experimental particle physics data which is inconsistent with the current theory, and the current theory is: a) ugly b) full of "fudge factors"
The only thing the current theory ("The Standard Model") does not (and _can not_, for very fundamental reasons) address is how to reconcile gravitation with quantum mechanics. This is the single biggest physical problem of the 20th century, and all of the greats (Einstein, Dirac, Feynman,...) attacked it without success.
So, without any experimental evidence to guide us (the SSC would definitely have shown the way forward, and things like the LHC coming online in the next few years hopefully will) the only things we can do are speculate, and look for a simple, elegant theory which is consistent with itself and with the known data, but which can explain a larger amount of stuff than the standard model can.
Surprisingly, the requirement of "internal consistency" is a very strong restriction on what can be considered..but despite decades of trying, the smartest physicists in the world _just haven't been able to find_ a plausible extension to the SM which doesn't involve either a bunch of problems (apparent inconsistencies), a theory as complicated and arbitrary as the original (or more so), or a lot of extra "weird stuff".
Maxwell's equations don't presuppose an aether, actually - originally they might have been stated that way (I haven't read the paper), but they make a lot MORE sense when you write them in terms of special relativity (i.e. they reduce to a single four-dimensional tensor equation), which is aetherless.
These questions are all related. Solve one, and you solve the other.
This is something many non-physicists don't realise: it's not just idle speculation and playing with words ("I think the universe is donut-shaped". "No, I think it's more cubical") - a theory is "written" in terms of mathematics, and for the theory to be useful it can be used to answer a whole bunch of seemingly unrelated questions about the universe.
Your questions are just the kinds of things which theoretical physicists hope to be able to answer convincingly by formulating a (more) fundamental theory of nature.
This kind of thing is indeed considered. Basically under M-theory you lose absolute notions of what dimension of space-time you are in (e.g. 9, 10, 11), what the fundamental objects are (strings, point particles, higher-dimensional membranes), and even how many time dimensions there are (all of these change depending on how you look at the same thing).
Exactly how having extra time dimensions works is still very much an open question, but it seems that it's not as inconsistent as you might think (in some cases you can't propagate along this extra dimension, so there's only one "evolving time", in other cases the dimension is periodic, i.e. "events repeat themselves" in a consistent way, etc). It's very much current research..
From your misuse of terminology it's probable you don't actually know what the words you use mean, but I can reassure you that physicists are smart people and they do realise the theory must agree with the real world (e.g. einsteinian gravity at large scales).
The hope is that when we finally meet the grand theory of everything, it will be completely unique - i.e. there will be no arbitrary fudge factors in the theory which have to be "put in by hand to make the numbers right".
This theory would (so the hope goes) be able to explain things like: why the subatomic particles have the masses they do, why does planck's constant have that value and not some other, why is the large-scale dimension of our spacetime 4, with lorentzian signature (i.e. one time dimension, not more than one), etc. String theory is currently the best candidate for something which might one day turn into such a beast.
Good book (this was the one which put me on the path of becoming a string theorist myself) but it it somewhat out of date - the number of changes in string theory since 1995 are incredible, and it barely recognises the state of play from the mid-80s which Kaku describes.
> The only glaring mistake I see Weinberg make is > that he says that GUT will be the end of trying > to get unified theory for the physical sciences.
He didn't even say this: from the last two paragraphs:
------------------- The discovery of a unified theory that describes nature at all energies will put us in a position to answer the deepest questions of cosmology: Did the expanding cloud of galaxies we call the big bang have a beginning at a definite time in the past? Is our big bang just one episode in a much larger universe in which big and little bangs have been going on eternally? If so, do what we call the constants of nature or even the laws of nature vary from one bang to another?
This will not be the end of physics. It probably won't even help with some of the outstanding problems of today's physics, such as understanding turbulence and high-temperature superconductivity. But it will mark the end of a certain kind of physics: the search for a unified theory that entails all other facts of physical science. -------------------
Unless you're misunderstanding what's meant by "unified". By definition, a theory which explains all four (or more, should these be discovered) fundamental forces in a single unified way, is a theory which, IN PRINCIPLE, could be used to explain everything else in science.
In practise, it's not possible to do this, in much the same way as current day quantum mechanics is incapable of giving many insights into, e.g. developmental biology (the difference in scales is simply too great and it would be impossible to solve the astronomically huge number of simultaneous equations). As Weinberg says, there will still be many many tough puzzles to solve, but at least we'll know it all rests on a firm foundation.
Actually for games which wrap around on all four sides of the screen the topology is that of a torus (donut), not a sphere as you might think - imagine rolling up the screen into a cylinder (gluing together top/bottom), and then joining up the two circular ends.
I've gotta agree. SGI's actions in recent times strike me as those of a drowning man clutching at straws -- anything, anything which might prop him up for a few moments longer. They haven't exactly been making boatloads of money recently..
If you actually read the text of the law, which was repealed about 8 years ago (see other posts), it's quite clear that it's a provision for quarantine of things which have been in contact with another planet, i.e. a space probe which returns from mars, a manned mission to the moon, etc, on the off chance they could bring back viral or other contamination (the original apollo 11 astronauts were quarantined for exactly this reason, probably under that same law).
Nowhere does it mention contact with extraterrestrial BEINGS (maybe the confusion came from the use of the phrase "extra-terrestrial" in the (perfectly clear) sense of "beyond earth", but was interpreted in the E.T. sense by a credulous reader.
Slashdot Mirror
And as we all know, Tesla also invented antigravity, Free Energy , and electric telepathy, but the damn oil companies bought the rights to his patents and they've never been seen since.
:-)
This is not an urban legend
Well, to be pedantic, that was just explained as a "baryon sweep", i.e. "a sweep with baryons". But, it's hardly worth worrying about :-)
Don't know about John Wood, but I read somewhere a while ago that the Little Man From Another Place (the dancing backwards-talking dream guy) from Twin Peaks sold personalised backwards-spoken answering machine tapes like this. I'm sure you could find more info if you dug around a bit on the TP fan sites.
Or they're stacking the search engines ;-)
I'm currently without a mouse on my machine - one feature which makes the system usable is the "keyboard mouse" available in windoze under accessibility options (why I'm forced to use windoze at all at the moment is another story). Basically you can just navigate using the keypad, using the /*- keys to select which button you want to hit, and then '0' to click. It's pretty easy to use, and I'd love to have a way to make X do the same - window cycling doesn't often cut it, when there are things like checkboxes to select. Any ideas?
As someone who has actually sat down at looked in detail at the OpenBSD source, as part of the FreeBSD auditing project, I can definitively say that _every_ line has not been audited (previously, this is what I thought too, because it's the standard claim). There are quite a few obvious problems which were either missed, or fixed incorrectly - but, to be sure, they did fix a hell of a lot of them, which makes it still "more secure" than FreeBSD at present (until I finish merging all of the fixes :-)
:) there have been about 20 buffer overflows fixed in OpenBSD which were missed the first time around. There was even a remotely exploitable one..
Perhaps they audited the most important bits (i.e. those most likely to cause security problems), but since the start of the FreeBSD auditing project (I guess we spurred them into action again
I'm surprised by the naivete of many in the Linux community who believe that companies like SGI, Sun, IBM, etc, are supporting linux because they believe in the ideal of free software and "the community". Sure, that's what they _say_ they're doing, but the subtext is that they're attempting to use Linux as a weapon against their competitors.
Take SGI, for example. Most people would agree their market position hasn't been too great in recent years, and as a business they haven't been doing all that well. Some would go as far as to call them a sinking ship.
Enter Linux. By releasing trinkets of their code under the GPL, they can simultaneously poison the marketplace for that technology (by making the value of the product worthless - i.e. if there's code which does exactly the same thing for free, how can your competitors expect to keep making money on that software), while trying to jockey for "brownie points" by appearing to be friendly and progressive. It's a delicate balance between not giving away too much of the farm so you have nothing left to sell yourself, and degrading the value of your competitors products.
Anyone who doesn't understand that Linux is simply being used as a pawn in the ongoing corporate wars is being naive. Whether or not this is a bad thing for Linux is another matter altogether (after all, if/when the big 'Linux-friendly' businesses either achieve their goal of market dominance, or get bored with lack of progress and move elsewhere, Linux will still have gained some code).
Some of the old Apple ][ speaker hacks are amazing..along with the digitized speech in Wolfenstein (circa 1982?) there were several incarnations of multi-tone generators, which could wring 2, or even 3 simultaneous notes out of a single-bit toggle speaker (essentially a "clicker").
There was even a program which could play 32KHz audio samples with very high quality by somehow doing timing magic with the speaker cone.
Has anyone been able to track down further references to this project? I did a brief scout around but didn't turn up anything. The referenced papers would be nice :-)
Actually, it's not emulation in the sense of a virtual machine, but an alternative syscall interface to the kernel. See this for an excellent explanation of the process.
As for WP using more memory, are you sure you're not confusing it with this?
http://origins.jpl.nasa.gov/missions/sbobs.html These projects seriously rock - real cutting-edge science. I can only dream of what they'll find.
I suppose this is a joke, but it doesn't make much sense to me. For example,
:-)
0 = 0
00 = 1
000 = 2
0000 = 3
...
or,
0 = 0
00 = -1
000 = 1
0000 = -2
00000 = 2
...
so you can represent any natural number with a modicum of effort..it is however, not very efficient
Unfortunately, the problem is that there is NO experimental particle physics data which is inconsistent with the current theory, and the current theory is:
...) attacked it without success.
a) ugly
b) full of "fudge factors"
The only thing the current theory ("The Standard Model") does not (and _can not_, for very fundamental reasons) address is how to reconcile gravitation with quantum mechanics. This is the single biggest physical problem of the 20th century, and all of the greats (Einstein, Dirac, Feynman,
So, without any experimental evidence to guide us (the SSC would definitely have shown the way forward, and things like the LHC coming online in the next few years hopefully will) the only things we can do are speculate, and look for a simple, elegant theory which is consistent with itself and with the known data, but which can explain a larger amount of stuff than the standard model can.
Surprisingly, the requirement of "internal consistency" is a very strong restriction on what can be considered..but despite decades of trying, the smartest physicists in the world _just haven't been able to find_ a plausible extension to the SM which doesn't involve either a bunch of problems (apparent inconsistencies), a theory as complicated and arbitrary as the original (or more so), or a lot of extra "weird stuff".
Maxwell's equations don't presuppose an aether, actually - originally they might have been stated that way (I haven't read the paper), but they make a lot MORE sense when you write them in terms of special relativity (i.e. they reduce to a single four-dimensional tensor equation), which is aetherless.
These questions are all related. Solve one, and you solve the other.
This is something many non-physicists don't realise: it's not just idle speculation and playing with words ("I think the universe is donut-shaped". "No, I think it's more cubical") - a theory is "written" in terms of mathematics, and for the theory to be useful it can be used to answer a whole bunch of seemingly unrelated questions about the universe.
Your questions are just the kinds of things which theoretical physicists hope to be able to answer convincingly by formulating a (more) fundamental theory of nature.
This kind of thing is indeed considered. Basically under M-theory you lose absolute notions of what dimension of space-time you are in (e.g. 9, 10, 11), what the fundamental objects are (strings, point particles, higher-dimensional membranes), and even how many time dimensions there are (all of these change depending on how you look at the same thing).
Exactly how having extra time dimensions works is still very much an open question, but it seems that it's not as inconsistent as you might think (in some cases you can't propagate along this extra dimension, so there's only one "evolving time", in other cases the dimension is periodic, i.e. "events repeat themselves" in a consistent way, etc). It's very much current research..
From your misuse of terminology it's probable you don't actually know what the words you use mean, but I can reassure you that physicists are smart people and they do realise the theory must agree with the real world (e.g. einsteinian gravity at large scales).
The hope is that when we finally meet the grand theory of everything, it will be completely unique - i.e. there will be no arbitrary fudge factors in the theory which have to be "put in by hand to make the numbers right".
This theory would (so the hope goes) be able to explain things like: why the subatomic particles have the masses they do, why does planck's constant have that value and not some other, why is the large-scale dimension of our spacetime 4, with lorentzian signature (i.e. one time dimension, not more than one), etc. String theory is currently the best candidate for something which might one day turn into such a beast.
Good book (this was the one which put me on the path of becoming a string theorist myself) but it it somewhat out of date - the number of changes in string theory since 1995 are incredible, and it barely recognises the state of play from the mid-80s which Kaku describes.
> The only glaring mistake I see Weinberg make is
> that he says that GUT will be the end of trying
> to get unified theory for the physical sciences.
He didn't even say this: from the last two paragraphs:
-------------------
The discovery of a unified theory that describes nature at all energies will put us in a position to answer the deepest questions of cosmology: Did the expanding cloud of galaxies we call the big bang have a beginning at a definite time in the past? Is our big bang just one episode in a much larger universe in which big and little bangs have been going on eternally? If so, do what we call the constants of nature or even the laws of nature vary from one bang to another?
This will not be the end of physics. It probably won't even help with some of the outstanding problems of today's physics, such as understanding turbulence and high-temperature superconductivity. But it will mark the end of a certain kind of physics: the search for a unified theory that entails all other facts of physical science.
-------------------
Unless you're misunderstanding what's meant by "unified". By definition, a theory which explains all four (or more, should these be discovered) fundamental forces in a single unified way, is a theory which, IN PRINCIPLE, could be used to explain everything else in science.
In practise, it's not possible to do this, in much the same way as current day quantum mechanics is incapable of giving many insights into, e.g. developmental biology (the difference in scales is simply too great and it would be impossible to solve the astronomically huge number of simultaneous equations). As Weinberg says, there will still be many many tough puzzles to solve, but at least we'll know it all rests on a firm foundation.
Actually for games which wrap around on all four sides of the screen the topology is that of a torus (donut), not a sphere as you might think - imagine rolling up the screen into a cylinder (gluing together top/bottom), and then joining up the two circular ends.
It's online now..this is a cool thing!
-K.
I've gotta agree. SGI's actions in recent times strike me as those of a drowning man clutching at straws -- anything, anything which might prop him up for a few moments longer. They haven't exactly been making boatloads of money recently..
Can someone explain to me how you GPL ideas?
"You can use my idea as much as you want, and change it, but you have to provide the source code upon request".
WTF is the source code to an idea?
Or is this just buzzwording?
Do you get upset that Solaris Central covers Linux stories as well?
If you actually read the text of the law, which was repealed about 8 years ago (see other posts), it's quite clear that it's a provision for quarantine of things which have been in contact with another planet, i.e. a space probe which returns from mars, a manned mission to the moon, etc, on the off chance they could bring back viral or other contamination (the original apollo 11 astronauts were quarantined for exactly this reason, probably under that same law).
Nowhere does it mention contact with extraterrestrial BEINGS (maybe the confusion came from the use of the phrase "extra-terrestrial" in the (perfectly clear) sense of "beyond earth", but was interpreted in the E.T. sense by a credulous reader.