the world as i see it

Demon Core

2011-09-29T08:27:00.000-07:00

The Demon core was the nickname given to a 6.2-kilogram (14 lb) subcritical mass of plutonium that accidentally went briefly critical in two separate accidents at the Los Alamos laboratory in 1945 and 1946. Both incidents resulted in the acute radiation poisoning and the subsequent death of a scientist. After these incidents, the sphere of plutonium was referred to as the Demon Core.

The core was used in an atomic bomb test in 1946, five weeks after the second fatal accident, and proved in practice to have a slightly increased yield over similar cores which had not been subjected to criticality excursions.

First incident

On August 21, 1945, the plutonium core produced a burst of neutron radiation that caught Harry Daghlian in its path. Daghlian was a physicist who made a mistake while working alone performing neutron reflection experiments on the core. The core was placed within a stack of neutron-reflective tungsten carbide bricks, and the addition of each brick moved the assembly closer to criticality. While attempting to stack another brick around the assembly Daghlian accidentally dropped it onto the core and thereby caused the core to go critical. Despite quick action in moving the brick off the assembly, Daghlian received a fatal dose of radiation. He died 25 days later from acute radiation poisoning.

Another person who was in the lab at the time of the accident—Private Robert J. Hemmerly, a Special Engineer Detachment (SED) guard—received an exposure of approximately 31 roentgens of soft X-rays (80 kV equivalent) and less than 1 roentgen of gamma rays. Hemmerly died in 1978 (33 years after the accident) from acute myelogenous leukemia at the age of 62.

Second Incident

On May 21, 1946, physicist Louis Slotin and seven other scientists were in a Los Alamos laboratory conducting an experiment to verify the exact point at which a subcritical mass (core) of fissile material could be made critical by the positioning of neutron reflectors. The test was known as "tickling the dragon's tail" for its extreme risk. It required the operator to place two half-spheres of beryllium (a neutron reflector) around the core to be tested and manually lower the top reflector over the core via a thumb hole on the top. As the reflectors were manually moved closer and farther away from each other, scintillation counters measured the relative activity from the core. Allowing them to close completely would result in the instantaneous formation of a critical mass and a lethal power excursion. Under Slotin's unapproved protocol, the only thing preventing this was the blade of a standard flathead screwdriver, manipulated by the scientist's other hand. Slotin, who was given to bravado, became the local expert, performing the test almost a dozen separate times, often in his trademark bluejeans and cowboy boots, in front of a roomful of observers. Enrico Fermi reportedly told Slotin and others they would be "dead within a year" if they continued performing it.

While lowering the top reflector, Slotin's screwdriver slipped a fraction of an inch, allowing the top reflector to fall into place around the core. Instantly there was a flash of blue light and a wave of heat across Slotin's skin; the core had become supercritical, releasing a massive burst of neutron radiation. He quickly knocked the two halves apart, stopping the chain reaction and likely saving the lives of the other men in the laboratory. Slotin's body positioning over the apparatus also shielded the others from much of the neutron radiation. He received a massively lethal dose in under a second and died nine days later from acute radiation poisoning. The nearest physicist to Slotin, Alvin C. Graves, was watching over Slotin's shoulder and was thus partially shielded by him, receiving a high but non-lethal radiation dose. Graves was hospitalized for several weeks with severe radiation poisoning, developed chronic neurological and vision problems as a result of the exposure, suffered a significant shortening of his lifespan and died of a radiation-induced heart attack 20 years later. The other six people in the room were far enough away from the assembly to avoid fatal injury, but they all suffered other complications as a result of the accident. Two people suffered severe shortening of their lives and died years later from radiation induced complications: leukemia (at age 42, 18 years after the accident) and clinical aplastic anemia.

Demon Core In Use

The Demon core was put to use for the Able detonation test of the Crossroads series on July 1, 1946, demonstrating that the criticality experiments of Daghlian and Slotin increased the efficiency of the weapon.

Dark Flow

2011-07-01T14:02:00.000-07:00

Dark flow is an astrophysical term describing a peculiar velocity of galaxy clusters. The actual measured velocity is the sum of the velocity predicted by Hubble's Law plus a small and unexplained (or dark) velocity flowing in a common direction.

According to standard cosmological models, the motion of galaxy clusters with respect to the cosmic microwave background should be randomly distributed in all directions. However, analyzing the three-year WMAP data using the kinematic Sunyaev-Zel'dovich effect, the authors of the study found evidence of a "surprisingly coherent" 600–1000 km/s flow of clusters toward a 20-degree patch of sky between the constellations of Centaurus and Vela.

The authors (Alexander Kashlinsky, F. Atrio-Barandela, D. Kocevski, and H. Ebeling) suggest that the motion may be a remnant of the influence of no-longer-visible regions of the universe prior to inflation. Telescopes cannot see events earlier than about 380,000 years after the big bang, when the universe became transparent (the Cosmic Microwave Background); this corresponds to the particle horizon at a distance of about 46 billion (4.6×10^10) light years. Since the matter causing the net motion in this proposal is outside this range, it would in a certain sense be outside our visible universe; however, it would still be in our past light cone.

The results appeared in the October 20, 2008, issue of Astrophysical Journal Letters. Since then, the authors have extended their analysis to additional clusters and the recently released WMAP five-year data.

Location

The dark flow was determined to be flowing in the direction of the Centaurus and Hydra constellations. This corresponds with the direction of the Great Attractor, which was a previous gravitational mystery originally discovered in 1973. However, the source of the Great Attractor's attraction was thought to originate from a massive cluster of galaxies called the Norma cluster, situated merely between 150-250 million light-years away. This may reveal that the source of that attraction might lie even further away, and which the Great Attractor itself is heading towards.

In a study from March 2010, Kashlinsky extended his work from 2008, by using the 5-year WMAP results rather than the 3-year results, and doubling the number of galaxy clusters observed from 700. The team also sorted the cluster catalog into four "slices" representing different distance ranges. They then examined the preferred flow direction for the clusters within each slice. While the size and exact position of this direction display some variation, the overall trends among the slices exhibit remarkable agreement. "We detect motion along this axis, but right now our data cannot state as strongly as we'd like whether the clusters are coming or going," Kashlinsky said.

The team has so far catalogued the effect as far out as 2.5 billion light-years, and hope to expand their catalog out further still to twice the current distance.

Panoramic view of galaxies beyond Milky Way, with Norma cluster & Great Attractor shown by a long blue arrow at the bottom-right in image near the disk of the Milky Way.

NASA's Goddard Space Center confirmed this could be the effects of a sibling universe or a region of space-time fundamentally different from the observable universe. Data on more than 1,000 galaxy clusters have been measured, including some as distant as 3 billion light-years. Alexander Kashlinsky claims these measurements show the universe's steady flow is clearly not a statistical fluke. Said Kashlinsky: "At this point we don't have enough information to see what it is, or to constrain it. We can only say with certainty that somewhere very far away the world is very different than what we see locally. Whether it's 'another universe' or a different fabric of space-time we don't know."

Sloan Great Wall

2011-07-01T00:07:00.000-07:00

The Sloan Great Wall is a giant wall of galaxies (a galactic filament) and to the present day is the largest known structure in the universe. Its discovery was announced on October 20, 2003 by J. Richard Gott III of Princeton University and Mario Jurić and their colleagues, based on data from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey.

The wall measures 1.37 billion light years (1.30×1025 m) in length, which is approximately 1/60 of the diameter of the observable universe, and is located approximately one billion light-years from Earth.

The Sloan Great Wall, classified as the supercluster SCl 126 in SIMBAD, is nearly three times longer than the CfA2 Great Wall of galaxies, the previous record-holder, which was discovered by Margaret Geller and John Huchra of Harvard in 1989.

Flexible organic light-emitting diode (FOLED)

2011-05-23T01:09:00.001-07:00

A flexible organic light emitting diode (FOLED) is a type of organic light-emitting diode (OLED) incorporating a flexible plastic substrate on which the electroluminescent organic semiconductor is deposited. This enables the device to be bent or rolled while still operating. Currently the focus of research in industrial and academic groups, flexible OLEDs form one method of fabricating a rollable display.

An OLED emits light due to the electroluminescence of thin films of organic semiconductors approximately 100 nm thick. Regular OLEDs are usually fabricated on a glass substrate, but by replacing glass with a flexible plastic such as polyethylene terephthalate (PET) among others, OLEDs can be made both bendable and lightweight.

Such materials may not be suitable for comparable devices based on inorganic semiconductors due to the need for lattice matching and the high temperature fabrication procedure involved.

In contrast, flexible OLED devices can be fabricated by deposition of the organic layer onto the substrate using a method derived from inkjet printing, allowing the inexpensive and roll-to-roll fabrication of printed electronics.

Flexible OLEDs may be used in the production of rollable displays, electronic paper, or bendable displays which can be integrated into clothing, wallpaper or other curved surfaces. Prototype displays have been exhibited by companies such as Sony, which are capable of being rolled around the width of a pencil.

Chengdu J-20

2011-03-06T06:07:00.001-08:00

The Chengdu J-20 (simplified Chinese: 歼二十; traditional Chinese: 殲二十; pinyin: Jiān èr shí; literally "Annihilator Twenty") is a fifth generation stealth, twin-engine fighter aircraft prototype developed by Chengdu Aircraft Industry Group for the Chinese People's Liberation Army Air Force. In late 2010, the J-20 underwent high speed taxiing tests. The J-20 made its first flight on 11 January 2011. General He Weirong, Deputy Commander of the People's Liberation Army Air Force said in November 2009 that he expected the J-20 to be operational in 2017–2019.

The J-20 was one of the stealth fighter programs under the codename J-XX that was launched in the late 1990s. It has been also designated “Project 718”. Two prototypes (#2001-01 & #2001–02) have been built as of the end of 2010.

On 22 December 2010, the J-20 was under-going high speed taxiing tests outside the Chengdu Aircraft Design Institute with no confirmed flight tests. The J-20 made its first flight, which lasted about 20 minutes, on 11 January 2011.

Sukhoi PAK FA

2011-03-06T05:26:00.001-08:00

The Sukhoi PAK FA (Russian: Перспективный авиационный комплекс фронтовой авиации, Perspektivny aviatsionny kompleks frontovoy aviatsii, literally "Prospective Airborne Complex - Frontline Aviation") is a fifth-generation jet fighter being developed by Sukhoi OKB for the Russian Air Force.

The current prototype is Sukhoi's T-50. The PAK FA, when fully developed, is intended to be the successor to the MiG-29 and Su-27 in the Russian inventory and serve as the basis of the Sukhoi/HAL FGFA project being developed with India. A fifth generation jet fighter, the T-50 performed its first flight 29 January 2010. Its second flight was on 6 February and its third on 12 February 2010. As of 31 August 2010, it had made 17 flights and by mid-November, 40 in total. The second prototype was to start its flight test by the end of 2010, but this was delayed until March 2011.

Design

Although most of information about the PAK FA is classified, it is believed from interviews with people in the Russian Air Force and Defense Ministry that it will be stealthy, have the ability to supercruise, be outfitted with the next generation of air-to-air, air-to-surface, and air-to-ship missiles, incorporate a fix-mounted AESA radar with a 1,500-element array and have an "artificial intellect".

According to Sukhoi, the new radar will reduce pilot load and the aircraft will have a new data link to share information between aircraft.

Composites are used extensively on the T-50 and comprise 25% of its weight and almost 70% of the outer surface.It is estimated that titanium alloy content of the fuselage is 75%. Sukhoi's concern for minimizing radar cross-section (RCS) and drag is also shown by the provision of two tandem main weapons bays in the centre fuselage, between the engine nacelles. Each is estimated to be between 4.9-5.1 m long. The main bays are augmented by bulged, triangular-section bays at the wing root.

The Moskovsky Komsomolets reported that the T-50 has been designed to be more maneuverable than the F-22 Raptor at the cost of making it less stealthy than the F-22. One of the design elements that have such an effect is the Leading Edge Vortex Controller (LEVCON).

Avionics

The PAK-FA SH121 radar complex includes three X-Band AESA radars located on the front and sides of the aircraft. These will be accompanied by L-Band radars on the wing leading edges. Band radars are proven to have increased effectiveness against very low observable (VLO) targets which are optimized only against X-Band frequencies, but their longer wavelengths reduce their resolution.

The PAK-FA will feature an IRST optical/IR search and tracking system, based on the OLS-35M which is currently in service with the Su-35S.

Hindustan Aeronautics Limited will reportedly provide the navigation system and the mission computer.

Engines

The PAK FA was expected to use a pair of Saturn 117S engines on its first flights. The 117S (AL-41F1A) is a major upgrade of the AL-31F based on the AL-41F intended to power the Su-35BM, producing 142 kN (32,000 lb) of thrust in afterburner and 86.3 kN (19,400 lb) dry. In fact, PAK FA already used a completely new engine in its first flight, as stated by NPO Saturn. The engine is not based on the Saturn 117S and is rumoured to be called "127 engine". The engine generates a larger thrust and has a complex automation system, to facilitate flight modes such as maneuverability. Exact specifications of the new engine are still secret. It is expected that each engine will be able to independently vector its thrust upwards, downward or side to side. Vectoring one engine up with the other one down can produce a twisting force. Therefore the PAK FA would be the first fifth generation fighter with full 3-D thrust vectoring along all three aircraft axes: pitch, yaw and roll. These engines will incorporate infrared and RCS reduction measures.

Axial Precession

2011-01-17T06:33:00.000-08:00

In astronomy, axial precession is a gravity-induced, slow and continuous change in the orientation of an astronomical body's rotational axis. In particular, it refers to the gradual shift in the orientation of Earth's axis of rotation, which, like a wobbling top, traces out a cone in a cycle of approximately 26,000 years (called a Great or Platonic Year in astrology). The term "precession" typically refers only to this largest secular motion; other changes in the alignment of Earth's axis — nutation and polar motion — are much smaller in magnitude.

Earth's precession was historically called precession of the equinoxes because the equinoxes moved westward along the ecliptic relative to the fixed stars, opposite to the motion of the Sun along the ecliptic. This term is still used in non-technical discussions, that is, when detailed mathematics are absent. Historically, Hipparchus is credited with discovering precession of the equinoxes. The exact dates of his life are not known, but astronomical observations attributed to him by Ptolemy date from 147 BC to 127 BC.

With improvements in the ability to calculate the gravitational force between planets during the first half of the 19th century, it was recognized that the ecliptic itself moved slightly, which was named planetary precession as early as 1863, while the dominant component was named lunisolar precession. Their combination was named general precession instead of precession of the equinoxes. Lunisolar precession is caused by the gravitational forces of the Moon and Sun on Earth's equatorial bulge, causing Earth's axis to move with respect to inertial space. Planetary precession (actually an advance) is due to the small angle between the gravitational force of the other planets on Earth and its orbital plane (the ecliptic), causing the plane of the ecliptic to shift slightly relative to inertial space. Lunisolar precession is about 500 times larger than planetary precession. In addition to the Moon and Sun, the other planets also cause a small movement of Earth's axis in inertial space, making the contrast in the terms lunisolar versus planetary misleading, so in 2006 the International Astronomical Union recommended that the dominant component be renamed the precession of the equator and the minor component be renamed precession of the ecliptic, but their combination is still named general precession.

Effects

The precession of the Earth's axis has a number of observable effects. First, the positions of the south and north celestial poles appear to move in circles against the space-fixed backdrop of stars, completing one circuit in 25,771.5 years (2000 rate). Thus, while today the star Polaris lies approximately at the north celestial pole, this will change over time, and other stars will become the "north star". As the celestial poles shift, there is a corresponding gradual shift in the apparent orientation of the whole star field, as viewed from a particular position on Earth.

Secondly, the position of the Earth in its orbit around the Sun at the solstices, equinoxes, or other time defined relative to the seasons, slowly changes. For example, suppose that the Earth's orbital position is marked at the summer solstice, when the Earth's axial tilt is pointing directly towards the Sun. One full orbit later, when the Sun has returned to the same apparent position relative to the background stars, the Earth's axial tilt is not now directly towards the Sun: because of the effects of precession, it is a little way "beyond" this. In other words, the solstice occurred a little earlier in the orbit. Thus, the tropical year, measuring the cycle of seasons (for example, the time from solstice to solstice, or equinox to equinox), is about 20 minutes shorter than the sidereal year, which is measured by the Sun's apparent position relative to the stars. Note that 20 minutes per year is approximately equivalent to one year per 25,771.5 years, so after one full cycle of 25,771.5 years the positions of the seasons relative to the orbit are "back where they started". (In actuality, other effects also slowly change the shape and orientation of the Earth's orbit, and these, in combination with precession, create various cycles of differing periods; see also Milankovitch cycles. The magnitude of the Earth's tilt, as opposed to merely its orientation, also changes slowly over time, but this effect is not attributed directly to precession.)

For identical reasons, the apparent position of the Sun relative to the backdrop of the stars at some seasonally fixed time, say the vernal equinox, slowly regresses a full 360° through all twelve traditional constellations of the zodiac, at the rate of about 50.3 seconds of arc per year (approximately 360 degrees divided by 25,771.5), or 1 degree every 71.6 years.

Android

2011-01-13T07:32:00.000-08:00

Android is a mobile operating system initially developed by Android Inc. Android was bought by Google in 2005. Android is based upon a modified version of the Linux kernel. Google and other members of the Open Handset Alliance collaborated on Android's development and release. The Android Open Source Project (AOSP) is tasked with the maintenance and further development of Android. Unit sales for Android OS smartphones ranked first among all smartphone OS handsets sold in the U.S. in the second and third quarters of 2010, with a third quarter market share of 43.6%.

Android has a large community of developers writing application programs ("apps") that extend the functionality of the devices. There are currently over 200,000 apps available for Android. Android Market is the online app store run by Google, though apps can be downloaded from third party sites (AT&T only permits third party apps on their Aria phone). Developers write primarily in the Java language, controlling the device via Google-developed Java libraries.] Python, Ruby and other languages are also available for Android development via the Android Scripting Environment.

The unveiling of the Android distribution on 5 November 2007 was announced with the founding of the Open Handset Alliance, a consortium of 79 hardware, software, and telecom companies devoted to advancing open standards for mobile devices. Google released most of the Android code under the Apache License, a free software and open source license.

The Android operating system software stack consists of Java applications running on a Java based object oriented application framework on top of Java core libraries running on a Dalvik virtual machine featuring JIT compilation. Libraries written in C include the surface manager, OpenCore media framework, SQLite relational database management system, OpenGL ES 2.0 3D graphics API, WebKit layout engine, SGL graphics engine, SSL, and Bionic libc. The Android operating system consists of 12 million lines of code including 3 million lines of XML, 2.8 million lines of C, 2.1 million lines of Java, and 1.75 million lines of C++.

2.3 (Gingerbread) Based on Linux Kernel 2.6.35.7

Updated user interface design
Support for extra-large screen sizes and resolutions (WXGA and higher)
Native support for SIP VoIP telephony
Support for WebM/VP8 video playback, and AAC audio encoding
New audio effects such as reverb, equalization, headphone virtualization, and bass boost
Support for Near Field Communication
System-wide copy–paste functionalities
Redesigned multi-touch software keyboard
Enhanced support for native code development
Audio, graphical, and input enhancements for game developers
Concurrent garbage collection for increased performance
Native support for more sensors (such as gyroscopes and barometers)
A download manager for long running downloads
Improved power management and application control
Native support for multiple cameras
Switched from YAFFS to the ext4 filesystem

Community-based firmware

There is a community of open-source enthusiasts that build and share Android-based firmware with a number of customizations and additional features, such as FLAC lossless audio support and the ability to store downloaded applications on the microSD card. This usually involves rooting the device. Rooting allows users root access to the operating system, giving more control over their environment variables. In order to use custom firmwares the devices bootloader must be unlocked. Rooting alone does not allow the flashing of custom firmware. Modified firmwares allow users of older phones to use applications available only on newer releases.

Those firmware packages are updated frequently, incorporate elements of Android functionality that haven't yet been officially released within a carrier-sanctioned firmware, and tend to have fewer limitations. CyanogenMod and VillainROM are two examples of such firmware.

On 24 September 2009, Google issued a cease and desist letter to the modder Cyanogen, citing issues with the re-distribution of Google's closed-source applications within the custom firmware. Even though most of Android OS is open source, phones come packaged with closed-source Google applications for functionality such as the application store and GPS navigation. Google has asserted that these applications can only be provided through approved distribution channels by licensed distributors. Cyanogen has complied with Google's wishes and is continuing to distribute this mod without the proprietary software. He has provided a method to back up licensed Google applications during the mod's install process and restore them when it is complete.

Plex

2011-01-01T14:19:00.001-08:00

Plex (also known as "Plexapp" or "Plex Media Center") is a partially open-source freeware media player for Intel-based Apple Macintosh computers. It has a 10-foot user interface design for the living-room TV. Its source code was initially forked from XBMC Media Center on May 21, 2008 which Plex today uses as an application framework platform for its GUI (Graphical User Interface) and media player part of their software. Similar to XBMC and Boxee, it is an alternative to Apple's Front Row for Mac, with skinnable and user-configurable interface.

Plex integrates content from iTunes and iPhoto (from the iLife software suite) as well as allows the user to manage all video, photos, music, and podcasts from a computer, optical disk, local network, and the Internet using an Apple or Harmony remote control. In 2009 the developers added their own 'app store' digital distribution platform called "Plex Online" with a growing list of community driven plugins for online content like Hulu, Netflix, and CNN video that are being distributed via "Plex Media Server" application which runs as a standa-alone software and media management interface.

Plex began as a free software hobby project but since 2010 has evolved into a (freeware) project that is owned and developed by a single for-profit startup company, (Plex, Inc.). It is a high tech company based in the United States that is responsible for the development of the Plex front-ends and back-end, its client–server model, and all accompanying software under the "Plex" trademark, as well as the exclusive copyright of the closed source software/code parts for both commercial and non-commercial use.

Plex supports a wide range of multimedia formats and includes features such as playlists, audio visualizations, slideshows, weather forecasts reporting, and an expanding array of third-party plugins. As a media center, Plex can play most audio and video file formats, as well as display images from many sources, including CD/DVD-ROM drive, USB flash drives, the Internet, and local area network shares. DVD playback is not yet fully integrated and requires the use of helper applications like Apple's DVD Player.

Through the processing power of modern Mac computer hardware, Plex is able to decode high-definition video up to 1080p. For older Macintosh computers, the software does not however support any hardware accelerated video decoding which means that users require a 2 GHz Intel Core 2 processor to decode the majority of 1080p videos encoded with the H.264 codec. Newer Apple models using Nvidia 9400M/GT320M/GT330M chipsets and Snow Leopard OS 10.6.3 or later does however benefit from H.264 hardware accelerated video decoding meaning that most of the decoding process is offloaded to the GPU.

Through its plugin system, Plex includes features such as YouTube and Apple movie trailer support, SHOUTcast, and more. Most plugin content (such as the Hulu and Netflix) is provided via a separate helper program called Plex Media Server, while some use an integrated Python runtime engine and plugin framework.

Plex Media Server is from closed source (contains proprietary code), however the other parts of Plex media center software are open-sourced and distributed under the GNU General Public License. Plex's open source code is hosted on GitHub. Plex media center and media player source code was initially based upon XBMC Media Center, which it uses as its application framework. The founder of Plex, Elan Feingold, was actually part of the official XBMC development team for a short while, but tension over the rest of XBMC's developers' strict adherence to the GPL and their open-source software mindset was one of the factors that led Elan (Plex founder) to leave the XBMC project and create the Plex fork.

GFAJ-1

2010-12-21T09:27:00.001-08:00

GFAJ-1 is a strain of rod-shaped bacterium in the family Halomonadaceae. The extremophile was isolated from the hypersaline and alkaline Mono Lake in eastern California, and reported as new to science by a research team led by NASA astrobiologist Felisa Wolfe-Simon in a 2010 Science journal publication. According to the authors, the microbe, when starved of phosphorus, is capable of substituting arsenic for a small percentage of its phosphorus and sustain its growth. Immediately after publication, other microbiologists and biochemists expressed doubt about this hypothesis, and the claim that this bacterium uses arsenic instead of phosphorus in its metabolism is robustly debated in the scientific community.

The GFAJ-1 bacterium was discovered by geomicrobiologist Felisa Wolfe-Simon, a NASA astrobiology fellow in residence at the US Geological Survey in Menlo Park, California. GFAJ stands for "Give Felisa a Job". The organism was isolated and cultured beginning in 2009 from samples she and her colleagues collected from sediments at the bottom of Mono Lake, California, U.S.A. Mono Lake is hypersaline (about 90 grams/liter) and highly alkaline (pH 9.8). It also has one of the highest natural concentrations of arsenic in the world (200 μM). The discovery was widely publicized on 2 December 2010.

Biochemistry

A phosphorus-free growth medium (which actually contained 3.1 ± 0.3 μM of residual phosphate, from impurities in reagents) was used to culture the bacteria in a regime of increasing exposure to arsenate; the initial level of 0.1 mM was eventually ramped up to 40 mM. Alternative media used for comparative experiments contained either high levels of phosphate (1.5 mM) with no arsenate, or had neither added phosphate nor added arsenate. It was observed that GFAJ-1 could grow through many doublings in cell numbers when cultured in either phosphate or arsenate media, but could not grow when placed in a medium of a similar composition to which neither phosphate nor arsenate was added. The phosphorus content of the arsenic-fed, phosphorus-starved bacteria (as measured by ICP-MS) was only 0.019 (± 0.001) % by dry weight, one thirtieth of that when grown in phosphate, and about one hundredth that of most bacteria. This phosphorus content was also only about one tenth of the cells' arsenic content (0.19 ± 0.25 % by dry weight). Other data from the same study obtained with nano-SIMS does however suggest a ~75-fold excess of phosphate (P) over arsenic (As) when expressed as P:C and As:C ratios, even in cells grown with arsenate and no added phosphate. When cultured in the arsenate solution, GFAJ-1 only grew 60% as fast as it did in phosphate solution. The phosphate-starved bacteria had an intracellular volume 1.5 times normal; the greater volume appeared to be associated with the appearance of large "vacuole-like regions".

When the researchers added isotope-labeled arsenate to the solution to track its distribution, they found that arsenic was present in the cellular fractions containing the bacteria's proteins, lipids and metabolites such as ATP, as well as its DNA and RNA. Nucleic acids from stationary phase cells starved of phosphorus were concentrated via five extractions (one with phenol, three with phenol-chloroform and one with chloroform extraction solvent), followed by ethanol precipitation. Although direct evidence of the incorporation of arsenic into biomolecules is still lacking, radioactivity measurements suggested that approximately one-tenth (11.0 ± 0.1 %) of the arsenic absorbed by these bacteria ended up in the fraction that contained the nucleic acids (DNA and RNA) and all other co-precipitated compounds not extracted by the previous treatments. A comparable control experiment with isotope-labeled phosphate was not performed.

Nokia E72

2010-10-17T01:57:00.001-07:00

The Nokia E72 is a smartphone from the Nokia Eseries range. It is the successor to the Nokia E71 and is based on a similar design and form factor, and offers a similar feature set. The Nokia E72 is an enterprise-based smartphone (as it is a Nokia Eseries device) and has standard features including mobile email, calendar and instant messaging amongst many others.

The Nokia E72 has a new Optical Navi Key feature as opposed to the standard D-pad used on many other Nokia devices including the Nokia E71 - this is said to improve the ease of scrolling through menus, emails, Internet browser, and images as it is an optical sensor rather than a series of closely-spaced buttons. In comparison to its predecessor, the Nokia E72 is said to have a higher level of performance (likely due to the faster 600 MHz ARM processor) and also includes a 5 Megapixel AF camera. Other changes and improvements are software-based including changes to the user interface and built-in messaging application amongst others.

The Nokia E72 was announced on June 15, 2009 at the Nokia Connections 2009 event in Singapore.

The Nokia E73 Mode is a USA version of the E72 for T-Mobile USA, with support for T-Mobile's UMA service and Band IV support for 3G.

Features and enhancements from E7
New features

* Symbian OS 9.3, Series 60 v3.2 UI, Feature Pack 2.
* Optical navi key, along with the conventional D-Pad
* 3.5 mm audio jack
* Ovi Maps with free lifetime drive and walk voice assisted navigation
* Use of front facing camera (video call, VGA snapshots and QCIF videos for 15 seconds)
* USB charging
* Active noise cancellation
* Magnetometer sensor
* Digital compass
* RDS support
* PictBridge
* uPnP Media Streaming support (Not present on E73)
* UMA (E73)

Upgrades

* 3.5mm jack in contrast to the 2.5mm jack used in the E71.
* 12 hours of talktime(2G) instead of the E71's 10hrs (2G).
* Tri-band UMTS / HSDPA / HSUPA instead of Dual-band
* HSDPA support of up to 10.2 Mbit/s instead of 3.6
* Added HSUPA at 2.0 Mbit/s
* Improved CPU clock speed from 369 MHz to 600 MHz
* Real time Push e-mail HTML
* Improved reception from the E71's fluctuating signal reception
* 5 Megapixel camera (up from 3.2)
* VGA at 15 FPS (E72) rather than QVGA at 15 FPS (E71)
* Added flashlight feature

Specs

Available November 2009
Screen 320×240 px, 2.36 in, up to 16.7 million colours
Camera 5 megapixel (2592 x 1944 pixels) with autofocus and LED flash
Second camera Front facing
Operating system S60 3rd Edition Feature Pack 2 UI on Symbian OS v9.3
Input QWERTY thumb keyboard, optical navigation key
CPU 600 MHz ARM11 processor
Memory 250 MB Internal user storage
ROM: 512 MB
SDRAM: 128 MB ~71 MB Free Executable RAM
Memory card MicroSDHC Hot-swappable, support for up to 16GB
Networks
GSM 800 / 900 / 1800 / 1900 MHz
Tri Band UTMS / HSPDA / HSUPA / 850 / 1900 / 2100 MHz (North American Version)
Connectivity WLAN Wi-Fi 802.11 b,g, Integrated & Assisted GPS, Bluetooth 2.0, microUSB, 3.5 mm audio jack
Battery BP-4L, 3.7V 1,500 mAh lithium-polymer
Physical size114 x 59.5 x 10.1 mm
Weight 128 g (with battery)

Other
FOTA (Firmware update Over The Air)
Accelerometer Sensor
Ambient Light Sensor
Magnetometer Sensor
Digital Compass

Laughing Man

2010-10-02T06:21:00.000-07:00

"The Laughing Man" is a short story written by J. D. Salinger and originally published in The New Yorker magazine on March 19, 1949. It largely takes the structure of a story within a story and is thematically occupied with the relationship between narrative and narrator, and the end of youth. The story also appears in Salinger's short story collection Nine Stories.

The Laughing Man (笑い男, Warai Otoko?) is a fictional hacker character in the anime series Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex:

History

The hacker's first appearance in the GITS: SAC storyline is six years before the anime starts, when he assaulted the head of Serano Genomics in public on February 3, 2024, hiding his face from eyewitnesses and cameras with his Laughing Man logo. The Laughing Man is such an expert that he can "steal eyes" of entire crowds, in real time—hacking their visual cyber-brain implants, either to make himself appear invisible or to hide his face with the cartoon logo. He can also alter memories, erasing all records of his existence. Many of those who indeed saw his face would only recall and refer to the stylized logo as depicted above. Togusa was one such person, as were many of the witnesses of the initial incident involving the head of Serano Genomics. His talents were recognized even by Motoko Kusanagi and Aramaki. When Section 9 finally tracked him down, they offered him a position on the Section 9 payroll; The Laughing Man was flattered by the offer but politely declined it.

The Laughing Man has quite a fascination with The Catcher in the Rye, as if the work greatly influenced him: like that novel's main character, Holden Caulfield, he can't stand "phonies" (corrupt politicians in this case). He also kept a prized left-handed baseball catcher's mitt for a time with a quote from The Catcher in the Rye written on it: "You know what I'd like to be? I mean, if I had my goddamn choice, I'd just be a catcher in the rye and all". Ironically, while the mitt is actually real, the term "a lefty's catcher mitt" is described in an episode as being net jargon for "something people think exists, but really doesn't." Aoi also has stated fairly out front that he is an atheist (or is, at the very least, completely comfortable with using blasphemous statements such as directly insulting God).

For an unknown amount of time before the storyline begins, the Laughing Man lived in the Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare's Rehabilitation Center, posing as, not-coincidentally, a deaf-mute in a wheelchair. He apparently revealed his ability to walk and talk to the other patients at the center, who knew him as "leader" ("chief" in the English dub) and referred to his occasional periods of communication as "visits." When Togusa comes to investigate the center, he discovers that someone has written the famous Laughing Man logo text in a PBX cabinet but has added "or should I?" Apparently feeling that he was about to be discovered, the Laughing Man erases all record of his existence from the center, including wiping the memories of his friends (who apparently not only consent to this treatment, but seem to expect it as if they know of it happening before) and vanishes again before Section 9 can track him down.

The Laughing Man has made it a point that he never came up with the name "The Laughing Man" for himself, it was a label that the media gave based on the J.D. Salinger quote on the logo that eventually stuck.

The Laughing Man's kidnapping of the head of Serano Genomics was actually a spontaneous act, and he did not strike again until some six years later. However, following the kidnapping there was, for some time, a large wave of "Laughing Man"-related graffiti attacks, corporate vandalism and extortion. It was later revealed that a corrupt power cabal in the Japanese government used the sudden appearance of the Laughing Man to their own advantage by carrying out acts of corporate sabotage, then heavily using the "Laughing Man" motif in order to fool the media into thinking it was the Laughing Man's doing, thus shifting suspicion from themselves and their illegal actions.

An unexpected element was that 39 people who were arrested in regard to the assassination attempt on Secretary General Daido all showed no sign of external influence by The Laughing Man, or anyone else. It was thought that many of the direct attackers were not influenced at all; they attempted the assassination to be a part of The Laughing Man's effort for the truth. The police, however, informed the public that they were forced to do it through ghost hacking.

"The Laughing Man" became something of a pop culture obsession. Much to the chagrin of the actual Laughing Man - the irony being that since everybody used his icon and name for their own purposes, the original meaning of his actions, an artful forced confession of the truth through fear in the public eye, became "phony" itself. The effort to stand for and demand the truth was also lost forever. A further irony is that the Laughing Man icon itself is a retooling by the Laughing Man of the fictional Starchild Coffee company logo (itself a reference to the Starbucks logo) and the Sunflower Society logo.

The Laughing Man admitted that he embarked on his notorious kidnapping caper after chancing upon a file in the depths of the Net detailing the extensive corruption in the corporate world, leaving the true identity of the propagator of the aforementioned incidents a mystery. The identified Laughing Man confesses to have been a brash student at the time, but had mellowed out somewhat over the six years since the Serano Genomics event, seeming to now prefer a more intellectual approach over his former overzealous and radical approach. His real name, as far as can be ascertained from the number of events where he appears, is Aoi, meaning Blue in Japanese.

After the events of the Section 9 raid by the Umibozu and the last meeting with Motoko and Aramaki, it was discovered that Aoi, though responsible for the initial incident that made the Laughing Man a phenomenon, was not in fact its true originator. He chose to confront Serano only because of the file he found, and despite years of extensive investigation on his own part, he never discovered the origin of that file. It could be said that whoever abandoned the file was in fact the "real" Laughing Man - and it is possible that he obtained it from someone else. Aoi tells Aramaki to make of that what he will.

Aramaki understands the sheer absurdity of it all, but is still impressed enough with Aoi's skills to offer him a position with Section 9. Though Aoi is deeply flattered by the offer, he declined. Afterwards, he disappeared again for the last time from Japanese society; he is probably employed as a librarian in the National Library. Earlier in the series when trying to crack the Laughing Man case, Togusa theorizes that because the Laughing Man was such a superb hacker, he placed no value at all in digital media because it could easily be overwritten or deleted. This would explain Aoi's choice to work in a library, because paper media, existing in a real, physical state, cannot be so easily gotten rid of or altered.

Kite Runner

2010-09-27T05:55:00.001-07:00

The Kite Runner is a novel by Khaled Hosseini. Published in 2003 by Riverhead Books, it is Hosseini's first novel, and was adapted into a film of the same name in 2007.

The Kite Runner tells the story of Amir, a young boy from the Wazir Akbar Khan district of Kabul, who befriends Hassan, the son of his father's Hazara servant. The story is set against a backdrop of tumultuous events, from the fall of Afghanistan's monarchy through the Soviet invasion, the mass exodus of refugees to Pakistan and the United States, and the rise of the Taliban regime.

The Kite Runner received the South African Boeke Prize in 2004. It was the first 2005 best seller in the United States, according to Nielsen BookScan. It was also voted the Reading Group Book of the Year for 2006 and 2007 and headed a list of 60 titles submitted by entrants to the Penguin/Orange Reading Group prize.

Adaptations

The Kite Runner was published in 2003 and in 2007 adapted as a motion picture starring Khalid Abdalla (Amir), Homayoun Ershadi (Baba), and Ahmad Khan Mahmoodzada (Hassan). Directed by Marc Forster and with a screenplay by David Benioff, this movie won numerous awards and was nominated for an Oscar (2008), the BAFTA Film Award (2008) and the Critics Choice Award (2008). However, Manhola Dargis of the New York Times states that "The back of my paperback copy of this Khaled Hosseini novel is sprinkled with words like 'powerful' and 'haunting' and 'riveting' and 'unforgettable'. It's a good guess this film will be rolled around in a similarly large helping of lard."

In addition to the film adaptation, the novel was also adapted to the stage by Bay Area playwright Matthew Spangler. David Ira Goldstein (Arizona Theater Company Artistic Director) directed a cast that included Barzin Akhavan as Amir, Demosthenes Chrysan (General Taheri), Gregor Paslawsky (Rahim Khan) and James Saba (Ali), all from New York City, Thamos Fiscelle (Baba) of Los Angeles, and Bay Area actors Craig Piaget (Young Amir), Lowell Abellon (Young Hassan), Rinabeth Apostol (Soraya), Adam Yazbeck (Assef), Zarif Kabier Sadiqi, Wahab Shayek, and Lani Carissa Wong. The cast was joined on stage by Tabla player Salar Nader.

The Kite Runner was given its southwest premiere on stage at the Arizona Theatre Company in September-October 2009. David Ira Goldstein again directed. The cast was the same except that Korken Alexander replaced Adam Yazbeck as Assef and Remi Sandri replaced Demosthenes Chrysan as General Taheri.

The Kite Runner is receiving its Mid-West premiere at Actor's Theatre of Louisville directed by Artistic Director, Marc Masterson. The Cast includes Jos Viramontes (Amir), Jose Pere Flores (Young Amir), Nasser Faris (Baba), Matt Pascua (Hassan/Sohrab), Zarif Kabier Sadiqi (Assef), James Saba (Ali/Zaman), Remi Sandri (General Taheri), Aadya Bedi (Sorya), Omar Koury (Farid), Ariya Ghahramani, Kario Pereira-Bailey and Annie Pesch. The cast is once again joined by Salar Nader playing life Tabla for the production.

Memristor

2010-09-25T23:18:00.001-07:00

An array of 17 purpose-built oxygen-depleted titanium dioxide memristors built at HP Labs, imaged by an atomic force microscope. The wires are about 50 nm, or 150 atoms, wide. Electric current through the memristors shifts the oxygen vacancies, causing a gradual and persistent change in electrical resistance.

A memristor (a portmanteau of "memory resistor") is a passive two-terminal circuit element in which the resistance is a function of the time history of the current and voltage through the device. Memristor theory was formulated and named by Leon Chua in a 1971 paper.

On April 30, 2008 a team at HP Labs announced the development of a switching memristor. Based on a thin film of titanium dioxide, it has a regime of operation with an approximately linear charge-resistance relationship. These devices are being developed for application in nanoelectronic memories, computer logic, and neuromorphic computer architectures.

A memristor is a passive two-terminal electronic component for which the resistance (dV/dI) is proportional to the amount of charge that has flowed through the circuit. When current flows in one direction through the device, the resistance increases; and when current flows in the opposite direction, the resistance decreases. When the current is stopped, the component retains the last resistance that it had, and when the flow of charge starts again, the resistance of the circuit will be what it was when it was last active.

More generally, a memristor is a two-terminal component in which the resistance depends on the integral of the input applied to the terminals, rather than on the instantaneous value of the input at the terminals. Since the element "remembers" the amount of current that has passed through it in the past, it was tagged by Chua with the name "memristor." A general memristor is any of various kinds of passive two-terminal circuit elements that maintain a functional relationship between the time integrals of current and voltage. This function, called memristance, is similar to variable resistance. Specifically engineered memristors provide controllable resistance, but such devices are not commercially available. Other devices such as batteries and varistors have memristance, but it does not normally dominate their behavior. The definition of the memristor is based solely on fundamental circuit variables, similar to the resistor, capacitor, and inductor. Unlike those three elements, which are allowed in linear time-invariant or LTI system theory, memristors are nonlinear and may be described by any of a variety of time-varying functions of net charge. There is no such thing as a generic memristor. Instead, each device implements a particular function, wherein either the integral of voltage determines the integral of current, or vice versa. A linear time-invariant memristor is simply a conventional resistor.

In his 1971 paper, memristor theory was formulated and named by Leon Chua, extrapolating the conceptual symmetry between the resistor, inductor, and capacitor, and inferring that the memristor is a similarly fundamental device. Other scientists had already proposed fixed nonlinear flux-charge relationships, but Chua's theory introduced generality.

Like other two-terminal components (e.g., resistor, capacitor, inductor), real-world devices are never purely memristors ("ideal memristor"), but will also exhibit some amount of capacitance, resistance, and inductance.

Williams' solid-state memristors can be combined into devices called crossbar latches, which could replace transistors in future computers, taking up a much smaller area.

They can also be fashioned into non-volatile solid-state memory, which would allow greater data density than hard drives with access times potentially similar to DRAM, replacing both components. HP prototyped a crossbar latch memory using the devices that can fit 100 gigabits in a square centimeter, and has designed a highly scalable 3D design (consisting of up to 1000 layers or 1 petabit per cm3).[7] HP has reported that its version of the memristor is currently about one-tenth the speed of DRAM. The devices' resistance would be read with alternating current so that the stored value would not be affected.

Some patents related to memristors appear to include applications in programmable logic, signal processing, neural networks, and control systems.

Recently, a simple electronic circuit consisting of an LC network and a memristor was used to model experiments on adaptive behavior of unicellular organisms. It was shown that the electronic circuit subjected to a train of periodic pulses learns and anticipates the next pulse to come, similarly to the behavior of slime molds Physarum polycephalum subjected to periodic changes of environment. Such a learning circuit may find applications, e.g., in pattern recognition.

Sedna

2010-09-18T07:30:00.001-07:00

90377 Sedna is a trans-Neptunian object, discovered in 2003, which currently lies about three times as far from the Sun as Neptune. However, its farthest orbital distance from the Sun is estimated to be 960 astronomical units (AU), and thus it is, for the majority of its orbit, the most distant known object in the Solar System after long-period comets.

Roughly two-thirds the size of Pluto, Sedna is hypothetically large enough to be rounded by its own gravity, and thus would qualify as a dwarf planet under current definitions. However, its distance from the Sun makes determining its shape difficult. Spectroscopy has revealed that Sedna's surface composition is similar to that of some other trans-Neptunian objects, being largely a mixture of water, methane and nitrogen ices with tholins. Its surface is one of the reddest in the Solar System.

Sedna's exceptionally long and elongated orbit, taking approximately 12,000 years to complete, and distant point of closest approach to the Sun, at 76 AU, have led to much speculation as to its origin. The Minor Planet Center currently places Sedna in the scattered disc, a group of objects sent into highly elongated orbits by the gravitational influence of Neptune. However, this classification has been contested, as Sedna never comes close enough to Neptune to have been scattered by it, leading some astronomers to conclude that it is in fact the first known member of the inner Oort cloud. Others speculate that it might have been tugged into its current orbit by a passing star, perhaps one within the Sun's birth cluster, or even that it was captured from another star system. Another hypothesis suggests that its orbit may be evidence for a large planet beyond the orbit of Neptune. Astronomer Mike Brown, who co-discovered Sedna as well as the dwarf planets Eris, Haumea, and Makemake, believes it to be the most scientifically important trans-Neptunian object found to date, as understanding its peculiar orbit is likely to yield valuable information about the origin and early evolution of the Solar System.

Orbit and rotation

Barring comets, Sedna has the longest orbital period of any known object in the Solar System, calculated at between 11,800 and 12,100 years. This represents a best-fit solution, as Sedna has only been observed over a brief part of its orbital arc. Its orbit is extremely elliptical, with an aphelion estimated at 960 AU and a perihelion at about 76 AU. At its discovery it was approaching perihelion at 89.6 AU from the Sun, and was the most distant object in the Solar System yet observed. Eris was later detected by the same survey at 97 AU. Although the orbits of some long-period comets extend farther than that of Sedna, they are too dim to be discovered except when approaching perihelion in the inner Solar System. Even as Sedna nears its perihelion in late 2075 to mid 2076, the Sun would appear merely as a bright star in its sky: with an angular diameter too small to resolve as a disc, it would be only 100 times brighter than a full Moon on Earth.

When first discovered, Sedna was believed to have an unusually long rotational period (20 to 50 days). It was initially speculated that Sedna's rotation was slowed by the gravitational pull of a large binary companion, similar to Pluto's moon Charon. A search for such a satellite by the Hubble Space Telescope in March 2004 found nothing, and subsequent measurements from the MMT telescope suggest a much shorter rotation period, only about 10 hours, rather typical for bodies of its size.

Bulldozer Core (AMD)

2010-09-05T11:47:00.001-07:00

Bulldozer is the codename AMD has given to one of the next-generation CPU cores after the K10 microarchitecture for the company's M-SPACE design methodology, with the core specifically aimed at 10 watt to 100 watt TDP computing products. Bulldozer is a completely new design developed from the ground up. AMD claims dramatic performance-per-watt improvements in HPC applications with Bulldozer cores. Products implementing the Bulldozer core are planned for release in 2011.

According to AMD, Bulldozer-based CPUs will be based on advanced 32nm SOI process technology and utilize a new approach to multithreaded computer performance that, according to press notes, "balances dedicated and shared compute resources to provide a highly compact, high core count design that is easily replicated on a chip for performance scaling." In other words, by eliminating some of the redundancies that naturally creep into multicore designs, AMD hopes to take better advantage of its hardware capabilities, while utilizing less power.

The Bulldozer cores will support most of the instruction sets currently implemented in Intel processors (including SSE4.1, SSE4.2, AES, CLMUL), future Instruction sets announced by Intel (AVX), as well as future instruction sets proposed by AMD (XOP and FMA4).

As of November 2009, Bulldozer-based implementations built on 32nm SOI with HKMG are scheduled to arrive in 2011 for both servers and desktops, as the 16-core Opteron processor codenamed Interlagos and as the 4- or 8-core desktop processor codenamed Zambezi.

Bulldozer is the next-generation micro-architecture and processor design developed from the ground up by AMD. Bulldozer will be the first major redesign of AMD’s processor architecture since 2003, when the firm launched its Athlon 64/Opteron (K8) processors. Bulldozer will feature two 128-bit FMA-capable FPUs which can be combined into one 256-bit FPU. This design is accompanied with two integer cores each with 4 pipelines (the fetch/decode stage is shared). Bulldozer will also introduce shared L2 cache in the new architecture. AMD calls this design a "Bulldozer module". A 16-core processor design would feature eight of these modules, but the operating system will see each module as two physical cores.

The module is similar to an SMT core, but enhanced with a dedicated integer core and scheduler for each thread. Because the shared floating point core is significantly enhanced, performance could get beyond that of two equivalent Bobcat cores while one of the running threads is integer-only.

Bulldozer Design Breakdown

* Two tightly coupled, "conventional" x86 out-of-order processing engines which AMD internally named module
(Single-Module ==> Dual-Core, Dual-Module ==> Quad-Core, Quad-Module ==> Octa-Core etc...)
* Between 8MB to 16MB of L3 cache shared among all Modules on the same silicon die
* DDR3-1866 and Higher Memory Level Parallelism
* Dual channel DDR3 integrated memory controler (support for PC3-12800 (DDR3-1600))
* Cluster Multi-threading (CMT) Technology
* Bulldozer module consists of the following:
o 128kB L2 cache inside each module (shared between module cores)
o 4kB L1 data cache per core and 2-way 16kB L1 instruction cache per module L1 cache, Fruehe for THW
o Two dedicated integer cores
- each consist of 2 ALU and 2 AGU which are capable for total of 4 independent arithmetic or memory operations per clock per core
- duplicating integer schedulers and execution pipelines offers dedicated hardware to each of two threads which significantly increase performance in multithreaded integer applications
- second integer core increases Bulldozer module die by around 12%, which at chip level adds about 5% of total die space[9]
o Two symmetrical 128-bit FMAC (fused multiply-add (FMA) capability) Floating Point Pipelines per module that can be unified into one large 256-bit wide unit if one of integer cores dispatch AVX instruction and two symmetrical x87/MMX/3DNow! capable FPPs for backward compatibility with SSE2 non-optimized software
* 32nm SOI process with implemented first generation GF's High-K Metal Gate (HKMG)
* Support for AMD's only SSE5 128-bit instructions
- incl. three smaller supplemental extensions CVT16, XOP and FMA4 instruction set, which are now part of SSE5 specification (since May 2009 revision)
* Support for Intel's Advanced Vector Extensions (AVX) (Supports 256-Bit FP Operations via AVX)SSE4.1, SSE4.2, AES, CLMUL), future Instruction sets announced by Intel (AVX), as well as future instruction sets proposed by AMD (XOP and FMA4
* Hyper Transport Technology rev.3.1 (3.20 GHz, 6.4 GT/s, 51.6 GB/s, 16-bit uplink/16-bit downlink) [first implemented into HY-D1 revision "Magny-Cours" on the socket G34 Opteron platform in March 2010 and "Lisbon" on the socket C32 Opteron platform in June 2010]
* Socket AM3+ (AM3r2)
- 938pin(?), DDR3 support
- will retain only backwards compatiblity with previous Socket AM3/AM2 processors ("new AM3+ socket for consumer versions of Bulldozer CPUs. AM2 and AM3 processors will work in the AM3+ socket, but Bulldozer chips will not work in non-AM3+ motherboards")
* Min-Max Power Usage - 10-100 watts
* Bulldozer Module sharing levels Bulldozer module

Deniable Encryption

2010-09-03T22:21:00.001-07:00

In cryptography and steganography, deniable encryption is encryption that allows its users to convincingly deny the fact that the data is encrypted or, assuming that the data is obviously encrypted, its users can convincingly deny that they are able to decrypt it. Such convincing denials may or may not be genuine, e.g., although suspicions might exist that the data is encrypted, it may be impossible to prove it without the cooperation of the users. In any case, even if the data is encrypted then the users genuinely may not have the ability to decrypt it. Deniable encryption serves to undermine an attacker's confidence either that data is encrypted, or that the person in possession of it can decrypt it and provide the associated plaintext.

Normally ciphertexts decrypt to a single plaintext and hence once decrypted, the encryption user cannot claim that he encrypted a different message. Deniable encryption allows its users to decrypt the ciphertext to produce a different (innocuous but plausible) plaintext and insist that it is what they encrypted. The holder of the ciphertext will not have the means to differentiate between the true plaintext, and the bogus-claim plaintext.

Deniable encryption allows an encrypted message to be decrypted to different sensible plaintexts, depending on the key used, or otherwise makes it impossible to prove the existence of the real message without the proper encryption key. This allows the sender to have plausible deniability if compelled to give up his or her encryption key. The notion of "deniable encryption" was introduced by Julian Assange & Ralf Weinmann in the Rubberhose filesystem and explored in detail in a paper by Ran Canetti, Cynthia Dwork, Moni Naor, and Rafail Ostrovsky in 1996.

Modern forms of deniable encryption

Modern deniable encryption techniques exploit the pseudorandom permutation properties of existing block ciphers, making it cryptographically infeasible to prove that the ciphertext is not random padding data generated by a cryptographically secure pseudorandom number generator. This is used in combination with some decoy data that the user would plausibly want to keep confidential that will be revealed to the attacker, claiming that this is all there is. This form of deniable encryption is sometimes referred to as "steganographic encryption".

One example of deniable encryption is a cryptographic filesystem that employs a concept of abstract "layers", where each layer would be decrypted with a different encryption key. Additionally, special "chaff layers" are filled with random data in order to have plausible deniability of the existence of real layers and their encryption keys. The user will store decoy files on one or more layers while denying the existence of others, claiming that the rest of space is taken up by chaff layers. Physically, these types of filesystems are typically stored in a single directory consisting of equal-length files with filenames that are either randomized (in case they belong to chaff layers), or cryptographic hashes of strings identifying the blocks. The timestamps of these files are always randomized. Examples of this approach include Rubberhose filesystem and PhoneBookFS.

Another approach utilized by some conventional disk encryption software suites is creating a second encrypted volume within a container volume. The container volume is first formatted by filling it with encrypted random data and then initializing a filesystem on it. The user then fills some of the filesystem with legitimate, but plausible-looking decoy files that the user would seem to have an incentive to hide. Next, a new encrypted volume (the hidden volume) is allocated within the free space of the container filesystem which will be used for data the user actually wants to hide. Since an adversary cannot differentiate between encrypted data and the random data used to initialize the outer volume, this inner volume is now undetectable. Concerns have, however, been raised for the level of plausible deniability in hiding information this way – the contents of the "outer" container filesystem (in particular the access or modification timestamps on the data stored) could raise suspicions as a result of being frozen in its initial state to prevent the user from corrupting the hidden volume. This problem can be eliminated by instructing the system not to protect the hidden volume, although this could result in lost data. FreeOTFE and BestCrypt can have many hidden volumes in a container; TrueCrypt is limited to one hidden volume.

Needless to say, insecure block ciphers or pseudorandom number generators can make it possible to compromise the deniability of such filesystems. To escape the assumption that the used pseudorandom number generation is cryptographically secure, it has been advised to instead fill the encrypted space with pseudorandom data which has itself been encrypted, thus being protected by a separate encryption key since encrypted data is impossible to differentiate from encrypted data In addition to that, the flawed use of block cipher modes of operation can also compromise the cipher algorithm due to watermarking attacks.

Singularity

2010-09-02T10:02:00.001-07:00

Singularity is a video game developed by Raven Software published by Activision and released for Microsoft Windows, Xbox 360, and PlayStation 3, Singularity is Raven Software's second title based on Epic Games' Unreal Engine 3. The title was announced at Activision's E3 2008 press conference.

The game takes place on a mysterious island known as "Katorga-12" where Russian experiments involving "E99" took place during the height of the Cold War era. Sometime during 1955, a terrible catastrophe involving experiments attempting to form a "Singularity" occurred on the island, causing the island's very existence to be covered up by the Russian government. The player controls Nate Renko, a Black Ops soldier who is sent to investigate bizarre radiation emissions coming from the island. The operation goes poorly when team crashes during transport and the operation is scrapped. After regaining consciousness, Renko discovers that the island is constantly shifting between the time periods of 1955 and 2010. Renko acidentally shifts the timeline by saving a scientist who died in 1955. Renko finds the TMD (Time Manipulation Device), a device created by Dr. Victor Barisov. Barisov, the scientist who was in charge of the Katorga-12 experiments, reveals that a man named Nikolai Demichev, also a scientist on Katorga-12, used E99 technology to conquer the world. During the quest to stop Demichev, the player deals with hostile Russian forces in both time periods, and the mutated flora, fauna and former residents of the island, some of which have developed extreme power of their own.

In response to the United States' development and deployment of the atomic bomb, Joseph Stalin makes nuclear research the top scientific priority of the USSR. On a small island near Kamchatka, scientists discover an isotope of E99 that has strange properties. A research base named Katorga-12 is established on the island. E99-related research continued on the island until late 1955, when the island was destroyed by an accident. The Soviet government then erased any information about Katorga-12 and suppressed public knowledge of the accident.

In 2010, a sudden electromagnetic surge from Katorga-12 damages an American spy satellite. A military reconnaissance team is sent to investigate the uninhabited island, but a second surge causes their helicopter to crash. Captain Nathaniel Renko, a member of the reconnaissance team, enters the abandoned scientific complex on the island, where he phases between 1955 and 2010.

Renko is first transported back to 1955 during a major fire at the facility, where he saves one Nikolai Demichev. As this happens, an unidentified man yells, "Renko, stop! Don't let Demichev live!", before being killed by a ceiling collapse. Dr. Demichev would have otherwise died in the fire; by rescuing him, Renko altered history. Renko is abruptly returned to the year 2010, where he discovers that the island has changed. He encounters strange and violent creatures, and regroups with Devlin, a second survivor of the helicopter crash. Both soldiers are captured by Russian soldiers under the command of Demichev. Devlin demands asylum at the American embassy, at which point he is executed by Demichev.

Renko is saved by an organization called Mir-12. Mir-12 is a secretive resistance organization that bases its existence off of a journal recovered from the accident on Katorga-12. The journal declares that Nathaniel Renko will be able to stop Demichev using the "TMD", or "Time Manipulation Device". This device was apparently created by Dr. Viktor Barisov, who died in a laboratory accident, leaving Demichev to command the research base and eventually rule the world. Kathryn tells Renko to find the TMD and use it to go back in time and save Barisov. Renko succeeds and returns to 2010, where Barisov is now alive and well.

Barisov and Renko plan to fix history by going back in time and destroying the island's Singularity tower with an E-99 bomb. Renko recovers an E99 bomb from a sunken ship (the Pearl), but Kathryn dies in the process.

Renko and Barisov then fight their way into the Singularity Tower, which lies at the heart of Katorga-12. When they reach the tower's reactor, Renko travels back in time and uses the E99 bomb to destroy the reactor; he returns to 2010 moments before the tower is destroyed. It is implied that this explosion triggered the destruction of the Singularity and mutated the island's population.

Upon returning to 2010, Renko finds that nothing has changed. He sees Demichev holding Barisov at gunpoint. Demichev reveals that he rebuilt the facility after the bomb was detonated (presumably at another location). Renko shoots and non-fatally wounds Demichev, freeing Barisov. Barisov realizes that Demichev's rescue is what altered the timeline, and tells Renko that the only way to fix the timeline is for Renko to go back in time and stop himself from rescuing Demichev. Demichev reveals that Renko already tried that; he was the unidentified man that Renko saw in the fire. The three realize that the only way for Renko to stop Demichev's rescue is to kill his past self. Demichev offers Renko unlimited power in exchange for the TMD. The player is left with a choice resulting in three endings, based on whether Renko shoots Demichev, Barisov, or both men.

If the player shoots Barisov, he joins forces with Demichev and the team succeed in taking over most of the world, with Renko training the Katorga-12 mutants as soldiers and using them as first wave attackers in all of his battles. But with his control of the TMD, Demichev feels Renko is even more powerful than he is and takes precautionary measures against him by starting a weapons research program in the former United States. This settles the world into another Cold War with Renko on one side and Demichev on the other, although Renko is most likely to win, seeing he has almost complete control over the East and his power is slowly consuming the West.

If the player shoots both Demichev and Barisov, Renko leaves Katorga-12 and allows the world to fall into chaos. The public believes his very existence to be a myth as he disappears with the TMD in his possession. The Singularity explodes some years later and destroys the eastern coast of Russia and the Western coast of Alaska. Katorga-12 mutants escape onto mainland Russia and wreak havoc. A new leader rises in the former United States and is reported to be very aggressive and tyrannical as he leads the entire world with an iron fist. The in-game cutscenes and narration heavily imply the leader to be Renko himself.

If the player chooses to kill Demichev, or if he shoots neither man, then Barisov urges Renko to go back in time and stop himself from rescuing Demichev by killing his past self. The player then assumes the position of the man who shouted at Renko in the fire, only instead of being crushed by debris, he shoots the past Renko. Shooting the past version of Renko sends the narrative back to Devlin and Renko's arrival at Katorga-12. The game's intro credits are shown written in Russian, the helicopters bear the hammer and sickle on the side, and Devlin, armed with a Russian weapon, comments that monitoring Katorga-12 is a waste of time. The helicopter moves past the statue seen in the intro credits, but it has changed into a massive monument to Barisov wearing the TMD. Renko seems to have retained his memories from the rest of the game, as he checks his left hand when he sees the monument. Renko and Devlin's mission is called off by their dispatcher -- Red Fleet instead of Titan One -- and Devlin refers to Renko as "comrade". It is implied that Barisov recovered the TMD from the fire and used it to unite the world under Soviet rule.

A post-credit scene shows a wounded Kathryn emerging in 1955 from the Pearl's wreckage and hiding in an office. Bleeding heavily, she writes "Renko" in the Mir-12 journal.

Single Point of Failure

2010-08-26T11:01:00.001-07:00

A single point of failure (SPOF) is a part of a system which, if it fails, will stop the entire system from working. They are undesirable in any system whose goal is high availability, be it a network, software application or other industrial system.

The assessment of a potentially single location of failure identifies the critical components of a complex system that would provoke a total systems failure in case of malfunction. Highly reliable systems may not rely on any such individual component.

Deep Crack

2010-08-20T01:22:00.001-07:00

In cryptography, the EFF DES cracker (nicknamed "Deep Crack") is a machine built by the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) in 1998 to perform a brute force search of DES cipher's key space — that is, to decrypt an encrypted message by trying every possible key. The aim in doing this was to prove that DES's key is not long enough to be secure.

DES uses a 56-bit key, meaning that there are 2^56 possible keys under which a message can be encrypted. This is exactly 72,057,594,037,927,936, or approximately 72 quadrillion, possible keys. When DES was approved as a federal standard in 1976, a machine fast enough to test that many keys in a reasonable time would have cost an unreasonable amount of money to build.

Deep Crack was designed by Cryptography Research, Inc., Advanced Wireless Technologies and the EFF. The principal designer was Paul Kocher, president of Cryptography Research. Advanced Wireless Technologies built 1856 custom ASIC DES chips (called Deep Crack or AWT-4500), housed on 29 circuit boards of 64 chips each. The boards were then fitted in six cabinets and mounted in a Sun-4/470 chasis. The search was coordinated by a single PC which assigned ranges of keys to the chips. The entire machine was capable of testing over 90 billion keys per second. It would take about 9 days to test every possible key at that rate. On average, the correct key would be found in half that time.

In 2006, another custom hardware attack machine was designed based on FPGAs. COPACOBANA (COst-optimized PArallel COdeBreaker) shows a similar performance as Deep Crack at considerably lower cost. This advantage is mainly due to progress in IC technology.

Since DES was a federal standard, the US government encouraged the use of DES for all non-classified data. RSA Security wished to demonstrate that DES's key length was not enough to ensure security, so they set up the DES Challenges in 1997, offering a monetary prize. The first DES Challenge was solved in 96 days by the DESCHALL Project led by Rocke Verser in Loveland, Colorado. RSA Security set up DES Challenge II-1, which was solved by distributed.net in 41 days in January and February 1998.

In 1998, the EFF built Deep Crack for less than $250,000. In response to DES Challenge II-2, on July 17, 1998, Deep Crack decrypted a DES-encrypted message after only 56 hours of work, winning $10,000. This was the final blow to DES, against which there were already some published cryptanalytic attacks. The brute force attack showed that cracking DES was actually a very practical proposition. For well-endowed governments or corporations, building a machine like Deep Crack would be no problem.

Six months later, in response to RSA Security's DES Challenge III, and in collaboration with distributed.net, the EFF used Deep Crack to decrypt another DES-encrypted message, winning another $10,000. This time, the operation took less than a day — 22 hours and 15 minutes. The decryption was completed on January 19, 1999. In October of that year, DES was reaffirmed as a federal standard, but this time the standard recommended Triple DES (also referred to as 3DES or TDES).

The small key-space of DES, and relatively high computational costs of triple DES resulted in its replacement by AES as a Federal standard, effective May 26, 2002.

Rubik's Cube

2010-08-14T09:13:00.000-07:00

The Rubik's Cube is a 3-D mechanical puzzle invented in 1974 by Hungarian sculptor and professor of architecture Ernő Rubik. Originally called the "Magic Cube", the puzzle was licensed by Rubik to be sold by Ideal Toys in 1980 and won the German Game of the Year special award for Best Puzzle that year. As of January 2009, 350 million cubes have sold worldwide making it the world's top-selling puzzle game. It is widely considered to be the world's best-selling toy.

In a classic Rubik's Cube, each of the six faces is covered by nine stickers, among six solid colours (traditionally white, red, blue, orange, green, and yellow). A pivot mechanism enables each face to turn independently, thus mixing up the colours. For the puzzle to be solved, each face must be a solid colour. Similar puzzles have now been produced with various numbers of stickers, not all of them by Rubik. The original 3×3×3 version celebrates its thirtieth anniversary in 2010.

There are many algorithms to solve scrambled Rubik's Cubes. The minimum number of face turns needed to solve any instance of the Rubik's cube is 20. This number is also known as the diameter of the Cayley graph of the Rubik's Cube group. An algorithm that solves a cube in the minimum number of moves is known as God's algorithm.

There are two common ways to measure the length of a solution. The first is to count the number of quarter turns. The second is to count the number of face turns. A move like F2 (a half turn of the front face) would be counted as 2 moves in the quarter turn metric and as only 1 turn in the face metric.

In 2006, Silviu Radu further improved his methods to prove that every position can be solved in at most 27 face turns or 35 quarter turns. Daniel Kunkle and Gene Cooperman in 2007 used a supercomputer to show that all unsolved cubes can be solved in no more than 26 moves (in face-turn metric). Instead of attempting to solve each of the billions of variations explicitly, the computer was programmed to bring the cube to one of 15,000 states, each of which could be solved within a few extra moves. All were proved solvable in 29 moves, with most solvable in 26. Those that could not initially be solved in 26 moves were then solved explicitly, and shown that they too could be solved in 26 moves.

Tomas Rokicki reported in 2008 computational proof that all unsolved cubes could be solved in 25 moves or fewer. This was later reduced to 23 moves. In August 2008 Rokicki announced that he had a proof for 22 moves. In 2009, Tomas Rokicki proved that 29 moves in quarter turn metric is enough to solve any scrambled cube. Finally, in 2010, an international Group around Morley Davidson gave the final proof that all cube positions could be solved with a maximum of 20 face turns.

Metallic Hydrogen

2010-07-28T05:01:00.001-07:00

Metallic hydrogen is a state of hydrogen which results when it is sufficiently compressed and undergoes a phase transition; it is an example of degenerate matter. Solid metallic hydrogen is predicted to consist of a crystal lattice of hydrogen nuclei (namely, protons), with a spacing which is significantly smaller than the Bohr radius. Indeed, the spacing is more comparable with the de Broglie wavelength of the electron. The electrons are unbound and behave like the conduction electrons in a metal. In liquid metallic hydrogen, protons do not have lattice ordering; rather, it is a liquid system of protons and electrons.

Liquid metallic hydrogen

Helium-4 is a liquid at normal pressure and temperatures near absolute zero, a consequence of its high zero-point energy (ZPE). The ZPE of protons in a dense state is also high, and a decline in the ordering energy (relative to the ZPE) is expected at high pressures. Arguments have been advanced by Neil Ashcroft and others that there is a melting point maximum in compressed hydrogen, but also that there may be a range of densities (at pressures around 400 GPa) where hydrogen may be a liquid metal, even at low temperatures.

Astrophysics

Metallic hydrogen is thought to be present in large amounts in the gravitationally compressed interiors of Jupiter, Saturn, and some of the newly discovered extrasolar planets. Because previous predictions of the nature of those interiors had taken for granted metallization at a higher pressure than the one at which we now know it to happen, those predictions must now be adjusted. The new data indicate much more metallic hydrogen must exist inside Jupiter than previously thought, that it comes closer to the surface, and that therefore, Jupiter's tremendous magnetic field, the strongest of any planet in the solar system is, in turn, produced closer to the surface.

PSPgo

2010-07-25T04:07:00.001-07:00

The PSP Go (model PSP-N1000) is a version of the PlayStation Portable handheld video game console manufactured by Sony. It was released on October 1, 2009 in American and European territories[1] and on November 1 in Japan. It was revealed prior to E3 2009 through Sony's Qore VOD service. Although its design is significantly different from other PSPs, it is not intended to replace the PSP 3000, which Sony will continue to manufacture, sell, and support.

Unlike previous PSP models, the PSP Go does not feature a UMD drive, but instead has 16GB of internal flash memory to store games, video, pictures, and other media.[12] This can be extended by up to 32GB with the use of a Memory Stick Micro (M2) flash card. Also unlike previous PSP models, the PSP Go's rechargeable battery is not removable or replaceable by the user. The unit is 43% lighter and 56% smaller than the original PSP-1000, and 16% lighter and 35% smaller than the PSP-3000.[6] It has a 3.8" 480×272 LCD[13] (compared to the larger 4.3" 480×272 pixel LCD on previous PSP models). The screen slides up to reveal the main controls.

The PSP Go features 802.11b Wi-Fi like its predecessors, but no longer uses a standard USB A-to-Mini-B cable common with many devices. A new proprietary multi-use connector is used for USB connectivity. A suitable USB cable is included with the unit. The new multi-use connector allows for charging and USB similar to previous units, but also allows video and sound output with the same connector (with optional Composite AV cable and Component AV cable), unlike previous offerings which had TV OUT functionality on a separate port to the USB port. Sony also offers an optional cradle for charging and USB data transfer on the PSP Go, similar to previous offerings.

Generation: Seventh
Retail availability
* NA/EU October 1, 2009[1]
* JP November 1, 2009[2]
CPU: MIPS 333 MHz[5]
Storage capacity: Memory Stick M2, 16GB of internal flash memory
Memory: 64 MB RAM
Display: 480 x 272 pixels with 16.8 million colours, 16:9 widescreen TFT LCD, 3.8 in (97 mm)
Connectivity: Wi-Fi 802.11b, USB 2.0 via Media Go Software, Bluetooth 3.0, PlayStation 3
Dimensions:
69 mm (2.7 in) (h)
128 mm (5.0 in) (w)
16.5 mm (0.65 in) (d)
Weight: 158 grams

Eris

2010-07-24T02:27:00.001-07:00

Eris, formal designation 136199 Eris, is the largest known dwarf planet in the Solar System and the ninth-largest body known to orbit the Sun directly. It is approximately 2,500 kilometres in diameter and 27% more massive than Pluto.

Eris was first identified in January 2005 by a Palomar Observatory-based team led by Mike Brown, and its identity verified later that year. It is a trans-Neptunian object (TNO) native to a region of space beyond the Kuiper belt known as the scattered disc. Eris has one moon, Dysnomia; recent observations have found no evidence of further satellites. The current distance from the Sun is 96.7 AU, roughly three times that of Pluto. With the exception of some comets the pair are the most distant known natural objects in the Solar System.

Because Eris is larger than Pluto, its discoverers and NASA initially described it as the Solar System’s tenth planet. This, along with the prospect of other similarly sized objects being discovered in the future, motivated the International Astronomical Union (IAU) to define the term planet for the first time. Under a then-new IAU definition approved on August 24, 2006, Eris is a "dwarf planet" along with Pluto, Ceres, Haumea and Makemake.

Eris is named after the Greek goddess Eris, a personification of strife and discord. The name was assigned on September 13, 2006 following an unusually long period in which it was known by the provisional designation 2003 UB313, which was granted automatically by the IAU under their naming protocols for minor planets. The regular adjectival form of Eris is Eridian.

Orbit

Eris has an orbital period of 557 years, and as of 2009 lies at 96.7 astronomical units from the Sun, almost its maximum possible distance. (Its aphelion is 97.5 AU.) Eris came to perihelion between 1698 and 1699, to aphelion around 1977, and will return to perihelion around 2256[34] to 2258. Eris and its moon are currently the most distant known objects in the Solar System apart from long-period comets and space probes. However, approximately forty known TNOs, most notably 2000 OO67 and Sedna, while currently closer to the Sun than Eris, have greater average orbital distances than Eris' semimajor axis of 67.7 AU.

The Eridian orbit is highly eccentric, and brings Eris to within 37.9 AU of the Sun, a typical perihelion for scattered objects. This is within the orbit of Pluto, but still safe from direct interaction with Neptune (29.8–30.4 AU). Pluto, on the other hand, like other plutinos, follows a less inclined and less eccentric orbit and, protected by orbital resonance, can cross Neptune’s orbit. (It is possible that Eris is in a 17:5 resonance with Neptune, though further observations will be required to know for sure.[37]) Unlike the eight planets, whose orbits all lie roughly in the same plane as the Earth's, Eris' orbit is highly inclined: It is tilted at an angle of about 44 degrees to the ecliptic. In about 800 years, Eris will be closer to the Sun than Pluto for some time.

Eris currently has an apparent magnitude of 18.7, making it bright enough to be detectable to some amateur telescopes. A 200 mm telescope with a CCD can detect Eris under favorable conditions. The reason it had not been noticed until now is because of its steep orbital inclination; most searches for large outer Solar System objects concentrate on the ecliptic plane, where most bodies are found.

Eris is now in the constellation Cetus. It was in Sculptor from 1876 until 1929 and Phoenix from roughly 1840 until 1875. In 2036 it will enter Pisces and stay there until 2065, when it will enter Aries. It will then move into the northern sky, entering Perseus in 2128 and Camelopardalis (where it will reach its northernmost declination) in 2173. Because the orbit of Eris is highly inclined, it only passes through a few constellations of the traditional Zodiac.

Size, mass, and density

The diameter of Eris has been measured to be 2,397 km, give or take 100 km, using images from the Hubble Space Telescope (HST).[38][39] The size of an object depends on its absolute magnitude and the albedo (the amount of light it reflects). At a distance of 97 AU, an object with a radius of 3,000 km would have an angular size of 40 milliarcseconds, which is directly measurable with the HST; although resolving such small objects is at the very limit of Hubble's capabilities, sophisticated image processing techniques such as deconvolution can be used to measure such angular sizes fairly accurately.)

This makes Eris only 0-8% larger than Pluto, which is about 2,306 km across. It also indicates an albedo of 0.86, higher than any other large body in the Solar System other than Enceladus. It is speculated that the high albedo is due to the surface ices being replenished due to temperature fluctuations as Eris' eccentric orbit takes it closer and farther from the Sun.

In 2007, a series of observations of the largest trans-Neptunian objects with the Spitzer Space Telescope gave an estimate of Eris's diameter of 2,600 (+400; -200) km.[8] The Spitzer and Hubble estimates overlap in the range of 2,400-2,500 km, 4-8% larger than Pluto.

The mass of Eris can be calculated with much greater precision. Based on the currently accepted value for Dysnomia's period, 15.774 days, Eris is 27 percent more massive than Pluto.

HTML5

2010-07-16T03:35:00.000-07:00

HTML5 is currently under development as the next major revision of the HTML standard. Like its immediate predecessors, HTML 4.01 and XHTML 1.1, HTML5 is a standard for structuring and presenting content on the World Wide Web. The new standard incorporates features like video playback and drag-and-drop that have been previously dependent on third-party browser plug-ins such as Adobe Flash, Microsoft Silverlight, and Google Gears.

The Web Hypertext Application Technology Working Group (WHATWG) started work on the specification in June 2004 under the name Web Applications 1.0.[1] As of March 2010, the specification is in the Draft Standard state at the WHATWG, and in Working Draft state at the W3C. Ian Hickson of Google, Inc. is the editor of HTML5.

The HTML5 specification was adopted as the starting point of the work of the new HTML working group of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) in 2007. This working group published the First Public Working Draft of the specification on January 22, 2008. The specification is an ongoing work, and is expected to remain so for many years, although parts of HTML5 are going to be finished and implemented in browsers before the whole specification reaches final Recommendation status.

According to the W3C timetable, it is estimated that HTML5 will reach W3C Recommendation by late 2010. However, the First Public Working Draft estimate was missed by 8 months, and Last Call and Candidate Recommendation were expected to be reached in 2008, but as of July 2010 HTML5 is still at Working Draft stage in the W3C. HTML5 has been at Last Call in the WHATWG since October 2009.

Markup

HTML5 introduces a number of new elements and attributes that reflect typical usage on modern websites. Some of them are semantic replacements for common uses of generic block (

) and inline () elements, for example

(website navigation block) and

Linus Torvalds

2010-07-13T02:29:00.001-07:00

Linus Benedict Torvalds (born December 28, 1969 in Helsinki, Finland) is a Finnish software engineer best known for having initiated the development of the Linux kernel and git revision control system. He later became the chief architect of the Linux kernel, and now acts as the project's coordinator.

Early years

Linus Torvalds was born in Helsinki, Finland, the son of journalists Anna and Nils Torvalds, and the grandson of poet Ole Torvalds. Both of his parents were campus radicals at the University of Helsinki in the 1960s. His family belongs to the Swedish-speaking minority (5.5%) of Finland's population. Torvalds was named after Linus Pauling, the American Nobel Prize-winning chemist, although in the book Rebel Code: Linux and the Open Source Revolution, Torvalds is quoted as saying, "I think I was named equally for Linus the Peanuts cartoon character", noting that this makes him half "Nobel-prize-winning chemist" and half "blanket-carrying cartoon character".

Torvalds attended the University of Helsinki from 1988 to 1996, graduating with a master's degree in computer science from NODES research group. His academic career was interrupted after his first year of study when he joined the Finnish Army, selecting the 11-month officer training program to fulfill the mandatory military service of Finland. In the army he holds the rank of second lieutenant, with the role of a ballistic calculation officer. In 1990, he resumed his university studies, and was exposed to UNIX for the first time, in the form of a DEC MicroVAX running ULTRIX. His M.Sc. thesis was titled Linux: A Portable Operating System.

His interest in computers began with a Commodore VIC-20. After the VIC-20 he purchased a Sinclair QL which he modified extensively, especially its operating system. He programmed an assembly language and a text editor for the QL, as well as a few games. He is known to have written a Pac-Man clone named Cool Man. On January 5, 1991 he purchased an Intel 80386-based IBM PC and spent a month playing the game Prince of Persia before receiving his MINIX copy which in turn enabled him to begin his work on Linux.

Later years

After a visit to Transmeta in late 1996, he accepted a position at the company in California, where he would work from February 1997 through June 2003. He then moved to the Open Source Development Labs, which has since merged with the Free Standards Group to become the Linux Foundation, under whose auspices he continues to work. In June 2004, Torvalds and his family moved to Portland, Oregon to be closer to the OSDL's Beaverton, Oregon-based headquarters.

From 1997 to 1999 he was involved in 86open helping to choose the standard binary format for Linux and Unix.

Red Hat and VA Linux, both leading developers of Linux-based software, presented Torvalds with stock options in gratitude for his creation. In 1999, both companies went public and Torvalds' net worth shot up to roughly $20 million.

His personal mascot is a penguin nicknamed Tux, which has been widely adopted by the Linux community as the mascot of the Linux kernel.

Although Torvalds believes "open source is the only right way to do software", he also has said that he uses the "best tool for the job", even if that includes proprietary software. He has been criticized for his use and alleged advocacy of the proprietary BitKeeper software for version control in the Linux kernel. However, Torvalds has since written a free-software replacement for BitKeeper called Git. Torvalds has commented on official GNOME developmental mailing lists that, in terms of desktop environments, he encourages users to switch to KDE. However, Torvalds thought KDE 4.0 was a "disaster" because of its lack of maturity, so he temporarily switched to GNOME.

About 2% of the Linux kernel as of 2006 was written by Torvalds himself. Since Linux has had thousands of contributors, such a percentage represents a significant personal contribution to the overall amount of code. Torvalds remains the ultimate authority on what new code is incorporated into the standard Linux kernel.

NonStop

2010-07-11T10:21:00.001-07:00

Tandem NonStopII System (1981)

NonStop can refer to the line of HP Integrity NonStop computers, the line of Tandem NonStop computers that preceded them, or the NonStop OS operating system that is designed for them. NonStop systems are based on an integrated hardware/software stack. They are self-healing systems designed with redundant components and automatic reconfiguration in the event of a component failure, to prevent against "single-point failures". The systems run the NonStop OS operating system and the database management systems NonStop SQL and Enscribe.

Originally introduced in 1976 by Tandem Computers Inc., the line was later owned by Compaq (from 1997) and Hewlett-Packard (since 2003). In 2005, the current product line of HP Integrity NonStop servers, based on Intel Itanium microprocessors, was introduced.

Early NonStop applications had to be specially coded to be fault-tolerant. That obstacle was removed in 1983 with the introduction of the Transaction Monitoring Facility (TMF), which handles the various aspects of fault tolerance on the system level, transparent to the application.

NonStop OS

NonStop OS is a message-based operating system designed for software fault tolerance. It works with process pairs and ensures that backup processes in different CPU's take over in case of a process or CPU failure. Data integrity is maintained during those takeovers, no transactions or data are lost or corrupted.

NonStop Hardware

The HP Integrity NonStop computers are a line of fault-tolerant server computers, optimized for transaction processing and providing an extreme level of availability and data integrity. Average availability levels of 99.999% have been observed. NonStop systems feature a massive parallel processing (MPP) architecture and provide linear scalability. Each CPU (systems can be expanded up to over 4000 CPUs) runs its own copy of the OS. This is a "share nothing" arrangement and no "diminishing returns" occur as more processors are added.

Due to the integrated hardware/software stack and a single system image for even the largest configurations, system management requirements for NonStop systems are rather low. In most deployments there is just a single production server, not a complex server farm.

Most customers also have a backup server in a remote location for disaster recovery. There are standard products to keep the data of the production and the backup server in sync, hence there is fast takeover and no data loss also in a disaster situation with the production server being disabled or destroyed.

NonStop systems are inherently very secure, no security breach by outside hackers has been reported so far.

HP also developed a data warehouse and business intelligence server line, HP Neoview, based on the NonStop line. It acts as a database server, providing NonStop OS and NonStop SQL, but lacks the transaction processing functionality of the original NonStop systems.

Windows Server 2003 Datacenter Edition

2010-07-09T07:00:00.001-07:00

Windows Server 2003, Datacenter Edition is designed for infrastructures demanding high security and reliability. Windows Server 2003 is available for x86, Itanium, and x86-64 processors. It supports a maximum of up to 32 processors on 32-bit or 64 processors on 64-bit hardware. 32-bit architecture also limits memory addressability to 64 GB, while the 64-bit versions support up to 1 TB. Windows Server 2003, Datacenter Edition, also allows limiting processor and memory usage on a per-application basis.

Windows Server 2003 Datacenter Edition also supports Non-Uniform Memory Access. If supported by the system, Windows, with help from the system firmware creates a Static Resource Affinity Table (SRAT) that defines the NUMA topology of the system. Windows then uses this table to optimize memory accesses, and provide NUMA awareness to applications, thereby increasing the efficiency of thread scheduling and memory management.

Windows Server 2003, Datacenter Edition has better support for Storage Area Networks (SAN). It features a service which uses Windows sockets to emulate TCP/IP communication over native SAN service providers, thereby allowing a SAN to be accessed over any TCP/IP channel. With this, any application that can communicate over TCP/IP can use a SAN, without any modification to the application.

Windows Server 2003, Datacenter Edition, also supports 8-node clustering. Clustering increases availability and fault tolerance of server installations, by distributing and replicating the service among many servers. Windows supports clustering, with each cluster having its own dedicated storage, or all clusters connected to a common Storage Area Network (SAN), which can be running on Windows as well as non-Windows Operating systems. The SAN may be connected to other computers as well.

Windows Server 2003 R2

Windows Server 2003 R2, an update of Windows Server 2003, was released to manufacturing on 6 December 2005. It is distributed on two CDs, with one CD being the Windows Server 2003 SP1 CD. The other CD adds many optionally installable features for Windows Server 2003. The R2 update was released for all x86 and x64 versions. Windows Server 2003 R2 Enterprise Edition was not released for Itanium.

Service Pack 2

Service Pack 2 for Windows Server 2003 was released on 13 March 2007. The release date was originally scheduled for the first half of 2006. On 13 June 2006, Microsoft made an initial test version of Service Pack 2 available to Microsoft Connect users, with a build number of 2721. This was followed by build 2805, known as Beta 2 Refresh. The latest build is the build 3959.

Microsoft has described Service Pack 2 as a "standard" service pack release containing previously-released security updates, hotfixes, and reliability and performance improvements. In addition, Service Pack 2 contains Microsoft Management Console 3.0, Windows Deployment Services (which replaces Remote Installation Services), support for WPA2, and improvements to IPsec and MSConfig. Service Pack 2 also adds Windows Server 2003 Scalable Networking Pack (SNP), which allows hardware acceleration for processing network packets, thereby enabling faster throughput. SNP was previously available as an out-of-band update for Windows Server 2003 Service Pack 1.

As of October 2009, no further Service Packs are planned for Windows Server 2003.

Solar Impulse project

2010-07-09T02:46:00.001-07:00

Solar Impulse is a European long-range solar powered plane project being undertaken at the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne. The project is promoted by Bertrand Piccard, who co-piloted the first balloon to circle the world non-stop. This project hopes to repeat that feat using only solar power. The first aircraft, bearing the Swiss aircraft registration code of HB-SIA, is a one-seater, capable of taking off under its own power, and intended to remain airborne up to 36 hours. Building on the experience of this prototype, a slightly larger follow-on design (HB-SIB) is planned to make circumnavigation of the globe in 20–25 days.

Design and development

Piccard initiated the Solar Impulse project in 2003, but since then the team has grown to a multi-disciplinary team of 50 specialists from six countries, assisted by about 100 outside advisers.

The project is partially financed by private companies such as Solvay, Omega SA, Deutsche Bank, Bayer MaterialScience, Altran and Swisscom. The EPFL, the European Space Agency (ESA) and Dassault provide technical expertise.

Achieved timeline
2003: Feasibility study at the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne.
2004–2005: Development of the concept.
2006: Simulation of long-haul flights.
2006–09: Prototype.
2009: First flight of prototype

Planned timeline
2009–10: Test flights with prototype
2011: Building HB-SIB
2011–12: Test flights
2012: Circumnavigation flight

Planned second aeroplane (HB-SIB)

HB-SIB, the Swiss registration code borne by the second Solar Impulse aeroplane, is planned for completion in 2011, with a pressurized cockpit and advanced avionics to allow for trans-continental and trans-oceanic flights.

The wingspan of HB-SIB will be 80 m (260 ft), slightly wider than the wingspan of an Airbus A380, the largest passenger airliner in the world.

The cockpit will include cabin pressurization, supplemental oxygen and various environmental support to the pilot to allow a cruise altitude of 12,000 metres (39,000 ft).

The team hopes that a round-the-world flight will be possible in 2012. The flight would circle the world in the northern hemisphere near the equator. Five stops are planned to change pilots. Each leg will last three to four days, limited by the physiology of the human pilot.

Once improved battery efficiency makes it possible to reduce the weight, a two-seater is envisaged to make a non-stop circumnavigation.

General characteristics
Crew: 1
Payload: Lithium-ion batteries: 450 kg, (capacity: 200 Wh/kg = 90 KWh)
Length: 21.85 m (71.7 ft)
Wingspan: 63.4 m (208 ft)
Height: 6.40 m (21.0 ft)
Wing area: 11,628 photovoltaic cells: 200 m2 (2,200 sq ft)
Loaded weight: 1600 kg (3,500 lb)
Max takeoff weight: 2000 kg (4,400 lb)
Powerplant: 4× electric motors, (10 HP) each
Take-off speed: 35 kilometres per hour (22 mph)

Performance
Cruise speed: 70 kilometres per hour (43 mph)
Endurance: 36 hours
Service ceiling: 8,500 m (27,900 ft) Maximum altitude: 12,000 metres (39,000 ft)

Osman Hamdi Bey

2010-07-06T13:10:00.001-07:00

Osman Hamdi Bey (1842 – 24 February 1910) was an Ottoman statesman, intellectual, art expert and also a prominent and pioneering Turkish painter. He was also an accomplished archaeologist, and is considered as the pioneer of the museum curator's profession in Turkey. He was the founder of Istanbul Archaeology Museums and of İstanbul Academy of Fine Arts (Sanayi-i Nefise Mektebi in Turkish), known today as the Mimar Sinan University of Fine Arts.

The Tortoise Trainer

The painting expresses a sarcastic innuendo on the painter's own view of his style of work compared to those of his collaborators and apprentices, and is also a reference to the historical fact of tortoises having been employed for illuminative and decorative purposes, by placing candles on the shell, in evening outings during the Tulip Era in the early 18th century. The painting was acquired by the Suna and İnan Kıraç Foundation and is currently on display at the Pera Museum in İstanbul, which was established by this foundation.

Career

Osman Hamdi exhibited three paintings at the 1867 Paris Exposition Universelle. None seem to have survived today, but their titles were Repose of the Gypsies, Black Sea Soldier Lying in Wait, and Death of the Soldier. An important step in his career was his assignment as the director of the Imperial Museum (Müze-i Hümayun) in 1881. He used his position as museum director to develop the museum and rewrite the antiquities laws and to create nationally sponsored archaeological expeditions. In 1882, he instituted and became director of the Academy of Fine Arts, which provided Ottomans with training in aesthetics and artistic techniques without leaving the empire. In 1884, he oversaw the promulgation of a Regulation prohibiting historical artifacts from being smuggled abroad (Asar-ı Atîka Nizamnamesi), a giant step in constituting a legal framework of preservation of the antiquities. Representatives or middlemen of 19th century European Powers routinely smuggled artifacts with historical value from within the boundaries of the Ottoman Empire (which then comprised the geographies of ancient Greek and Mesopotamian civilizations, among others), often resorting to shadily obtained licenses or bribes, to enrich museums in European capitals.

He conducted the first scientific based archaeological researches done by a Turkish team. His digs included sites as varied as the Commagene tomb-sanctuary in Nemrut Dağı in southeastern Anatolia (a top tourist's venue in Turkey and a UNESCO World Heritage Site today, within the Adıyaman Province), the Hekate sanctuary in Lagina in southwestern Anatolia (also much visited, and within the Muğla Province today), and Sidon in Lebanon. The sarcophagi he discovered in Sidon (including the one known as the Alexander Sarcophagus, although this sarcophagus is thought to contain the remains of a Persian noble who was also the governor of Babylon. ]]) are considered among the worldwide jewels of archaeological findings. To lodge these, he started building what is today the Istanbul Archaeology Museum in 1881. The museum officially opened in 1891 under his directorship.

Throughout his professional career as museum and academy director, Osman Hamdi continued to paint in the style of his teachers, Gérôme and Boulanger.

Tom Clancy's Ghost Recon: Future Soldier

2010-07-04T01:15:00.001-07:00

Tom Clancy's Ghost Recon: Future Soldier (previously known as Tom Clancy's Ghost Recon 4) is a video game published by Ubisoft and due for release in early 2011. Excluding expansions, it is the fifth installment in the Ghost Recon series, and was announced to be in development by Ubisoft on January 22, 2009. The game will be a futuristic take on the Ghost Recon series.

The story will take place in Northern Europe, the Middle East, and Asia. The Ghosts will be fighting an ultra-nationalist force that took control of Russia and are invading neighboring countries.

Initially, the title was revealed to be Tom Clancy's Ghost Recon Predator by an OFLC release. However in December 2009, "Ghost Recon: Future Soldier" was trademarked by Ubisoft, raising speculation that this could be the name for the upcoming Ghost Recon 4. This was subsequently confirmed by an official announcement.

The release of Future Soldier was initially targeted for the 2009-2010 fiscal year, however Ubisoft later announced that the release date would be pushed back until the 2010-2011 fiscal year to "strengthen" its video game line-up. In May 2010, Ubisoft announced that the release of Future Soldier would be delayed until the "March quarter of 2011".

Connection Machine

2010-07-02T14:17:00.000-07:00

The Connection Machine was a series of supercomputers that grew out of Danny Hillis's research in the early 1980s at MIT on alternatives to the traditional von Neumann architecture of computation. The Connection Machine was originally intended for applications in artificial intelligence and symbolic processing, but later versions found greater success in the field of computational science.

Danny Hillis and Sheryl Handler founded Thinking Machines in Waltham, Massachusetts (it was later moved to Cambridge, Massachusetts) in 1983 and assembled a team to develop the CM-1 Connection Machine. This was a "massively parallel" hypercubic arrangement of thousands of microprocessors, each with its own 4 kbits of RAM, which together executed in a SIMD fashion. The CM-1, depending on the configuration, had as many as 65,536 processors. The individual processors were extremely simple, processing one bit at a time.

The CM-1 and CM-2 took the form of a cube 1.5 meters on a side, divided equally into eight smaller cubes. Each sub-cube contained 16 printed circuit boards and a main processor called a sequencer. Each printed circuit board contained 32 chips. Each chip contained a communication channel called a router, 16 processors, 16 RAMs. The CM-1 as a whole had a hypercubic routing network, a main RAM, and an input/output processor. It was connected to a switching device called a nexus.

In order to improve its commercial viability, the CM-2, launched in 1987, added Weitek 3132 floating-point numeric co-processors and more RAM to the system. 32 of the original one-bit processors shared each numeric processor. The CM-2 could be configured with up to 512 MB of RAM, and a RAID hard disk array, called a DataVault, of up to 25 GB.

Two later variants of the CM-2 were also produced, the smaller CM-2a with either 4096 or 8192 single-bit processors, and the faster CM-200.
The light panels of FROSTBURG, a CM-5, on display at the National Cryptologic Museum. The panels were used to check the usage of the processing nodes, and to run diagnostics.

Due to its origins in AI research, the software for the CM-1/2/200 single-bit processor was influenced by the Lisp programming language and a version of Common Lisp, *Lisp (spoken: "Star-Lisp"), was implemented on the CM-1. Other early languages included Karl Sims' IK and Cliff Lasser's URDU. Much system utility software for the CM-1/2 was written in *Lisp.

With the CM-5, announced in 1991, Thinking Machines switched from the CM-2's hypercubic architecture of simple processors to an entirely new MIMD architecture based on a fat tree network of SPARC RISC processors. The later CM-5E replaced the SPARC processors with faster SuperSPARCs.

Qubit

2010-07-02T13:21:00.001-07:00

In quantum computing, a qubit or quantum bit is a unit of quantum information —the quantum analogue of the classical bit —with additional dimensions associated to the quantum properties of a physical atom. The physical construction of a quantum computer is itself an arrangement of entangled atoms, and the qubit represents both the state memory and the state of entanglement in a system. A quantum computation is performed by initializing a system of qubits with a quantum algorithm —"initialization" here referring to some advanced physical process that puts the system into an entangled state.

The qubit is described by a state vector in a two-level quantum-mechanical system, which is formally equivalent to a two-dimensional vector space over the complex numbers.

Quantum Computer

A quantum computer is a device for computation that makes direct use of quantum mechanical phenomena, such as superposition and entanglement, to perform operations on data. Quantum computers are different from traditional computers based on transistors. The basic principle behind quantum computation is that quantum properties can be used to represent data and perform operations on these data. A theoretical model is the quantum Turing machine, also known as the universal quantum computer.

Although quantum computing is still in its infancy, experiments have been carried out in which quantum computational operations were executed on a very small number of qubits (quantum bit). Both practical and theoretical research continues, and many national government and military funding agencies support quantum computing research to develop quantum computers for both civilian and national security purposes, such as cryptanalysis.

If large-scale quantum computers can be built, they will be able to solve certain problems much faster than any current classical computers (for example Shor's algorithm). Quantum computers don't allow the computations of functions that are not theoretically computable by classical computers, i.e. they do not alter the Church–Turing thesis. The gain is only in efficiency.

Tetris

2010-07-02T04:49:00.001-07:00

Tetris is a puzzle video game originally designed and programmed by Alexey Pajitnov in the Soviet Union. It was created on June 6, 1984, while he was working for the Dorodnicyn Computing Centre of the Academy of Science of the USSR in Moscow. He derived its name from the Greek numerical prefix tetra- (all of the game's pieces, known as Tetrominoes, contain four segments) and tennis, Pajitnov's favorite sport.

The Tetris game is a popular use of tetrominoes, the four element special case of polyominoes. Polyominoes have been used in popular puzzles since at least 1907, and the name is given by the mathematician Solomon W. Golomb in 1953. However, even the enumeration of pentominoes is dated to antiquity.

The game (or one of its many variants) is available for nearly every video game console and computer operating system, as well as on devices such as graphing calculators, mobile phones, portable media players, PDAs, Network music players and even as an Easter egg on non-media products like oscilloscopes. It has even inspired Tetris serving dishes and been played on the sides of various buildings, with the record holder for the world's largest fully functional game of Tetris being an effort by Dutch students in 1995 that lit up all 15 floors of the Electrical Engineering department at Delft University of Technology.

While versions of Tetris were sold for a range of 1980s home computer platforms, it was the hugely successful handheld version for the Game Boy launched in 1989 that established the reputation of the game as one of the most popular ever. Electronic Gaming Monthly's 100th issue had Tetris in first place as "Greatest Game of All Time". In 2007, Tetris came in second place in IGN's "100 Greatest Video Games of All Time". It has sold more than 70 million copies. In January 2010, it was announced that Tetris has sold more than 100 million copies for cell phones alone since 2005.

Voxel

2009-10-31T01:36:00.001-07:00

A voxel (a portmanteau of the words volumetric and pixel) is a volume element, representing a value on a regular grid in three dimensional space. This is analogous to a pixel, which represents 2D image data in a bitmap (which is sometimes referred to as a pixmap). As with pixels in a bitmap, voxels themselves do not typically have their position (their coordinates) explicitly encoded along with their values. Instead, the position of a voxel is inferred based upon its position relative to other voxels (i.e., its position in the data structure that makes up a single volumetric image). In contrast to pixels and voxels, points and polygons are often explicitly represented by the coordinates of their vertices. A direct consequence of this difference is that polygons are able to efficiently represent simple 3D structures with lots of empty or homogeneously-filled space, while voxels are good at representing regularly-sampled spaces that are non-homogeneously filled.

Voxels are frequently used in the visualization and analysis of medical and scientific data. Some volumetric displays use voxels to describe their resolution. For example, a display might be able to show 512×512×512 voxels.

Voxel Data

A voxel represents the sub-volume box with constant scalar/vector value inside which is equal to scalar/vector value of the corresponding grid/pixel of the original discrete representation of the volumetric data. The boundaries of a voxel are exactly in the middle between neighboring grids. Voxel data sets have a limited resolution, as precise data is only available at the center of each cell. Under the assumption that the voxel data is sampling a suitably band-limited signal, accurate reconstructions of data points in between the sampled voxels can be attained by low-pass filtering the data set. Visually acceptable approximations to this low pass filter can be attained by polynomial interpolation such as tri-linear or tri-cubic interpolation.

The value of a voxel may represent various properties. In CT scans, the values are Hounsfield units, giving the opacity of material to X-rays.[1]:29 Different types of value are acquired from MRI or ultrasound.

Voxels can contain multiple scalar values - essentially vector data; in the case of ultrasound scans with B-mode and Doppler data, density, and volumetric flow rate are captured as separate channels of data relating to the same voxel positions.

Other values may be useful for immediate 3D rendering, such as a surface normal vector and color.

High-Speed Downlink Packet Access

2009-10-03T08:04:00.001-07:00

HSDPA Wikipedia
HSDPA Official Site

High-Speed Downlink Packet Access (HSDPA) is an enhanced 3G (third generation) mobile telephony communications protocol in the High-Speed Packet Access (HSPA) family, also coined 3.5G, 3G+ or turbo 3G, which allows networks based on Universal Mobile Telecommunications System (UMTS) to have higher data transfer speeds and capacity. Current HSDPA deployments support down-link speeds of 1.8, 3.6, 7.2, 14.0 Mbit/s. Further speed increases are available with HSPA+, which provides speeds of up to 42 Mbit/s downlink.

The first phase of HSDPA has been specified in the 3rd Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) release 5. Phase one introduces new basic functions and is aimed to achieve peak data rates of 14.0 Mbit/s (see above). Newly introduced are the High Speed Downlink Shared Channels (HS-DSCH), the adaptive modulation QPSK and 16QAM and the High Speed Medium Access protocol (MAC-hs) in base station.

The second phase of HSDPA is specified in the upcoming 3GPP release 7 and has been named HSPA Evolved. It can achieve data rates of up to 42 Mbit/s. It will introduce antenna array technologies such as beamforming and Multiple-input multiple-output communications (MIMO). Beam forming focuses the transmitted power of an antenna in a beam towards the user’s direction. MIMO uses multiple antennas at the sending and receiving side. Deployments are scheduled to begin in the second half of 2008.

After HSPA Evolved, the roadmap leads to E-UTRA (Previously "HSOPA"), the technology specified in 3GPP Release 8. This project is called the Long Term Evolution initiative. The first release of LTE offers data rates of over 320 Mbit/s for downlink and over 170 Mbit/s for uplink using OFDMA modulation.

Lunokhod

2009-01-26T02:34:00.001-08:00

Lunokhod 1 (Луноход, moon walker in Russian) was the first of two unmanned lunar rovers landed on the Moon by the Soviet Union as part of its Lunokhod program. The spacecraft which carried Lunokhod 1 was named Luna 17. Lunokhod was the first roving remote-controlled robot to land on another world.

Rover description

Lunokhod 1 was a lunar vehicle formed of a tub-like compartment with a large convex lid on eight independently powered wheels. Its length was 2.3 metres. Lunokhod was equipped with a cone-shaped antenna, a highly directional helical antenna, four television cameras, and special extendable devices to impact the lunar soil for soil density and mechanical property tests. An X-ray spectrometer, an X-ray telescope, cosmic ray detectors, and a laser device were also included. The vehicle was powered by batteries which were recharged during the lunar day by a solar cell array mounted on the underside of the lid. During the lunar nights, the lid was closed and a Polonium-210 heat source kept the internal components at operating temperature. Lunokhod was intended to operate through three lunar days (approximately 3 Earth months) but actually operated for eleven lunar days.

Luna 17 was launched on November 10, 1970 at 14:44:01 UTC. After reaching earth parking orbit, the final stage of Luna 17's launching rocket fired to place it into a trajectory towards the Moon (1970-11-10 at 14:54 UTC). After two course correction maneuvers (on November 12 and 14), it entered lunar orbit on November 15, 1970 at 22:00 UTC.

During its 322 Earth days of operations, Lunokhod traveled 10540 metres and returned more than 20000 TV images and 206 high-resolution panoramas. In addition, Lunokhod 1 performed twenty-five soil analysis with its RIFMA x-ray fluorescence spectrometer and used its penetrometer at 500 different locations.

Mustafa Kemal Ataturk

2008-11-07T13:01:00.001-08:00

Mustafa Kemal Atatürk was in İstanbul University Faculty of Law with students. December 15, 1930.

Mustafa Kemal Atatürk (19 May 1881 – 10 November 1938) was an army officer, revolutionary statesman, and founder of the Republic of Turkey as well as its first President.

Mustafa Kemal established himself as an intelligent and extremely capable military commander while serving as a division commander at the Battle of Gallipoli. He later fought with distinction on the eastern Anatolian and Palestinian fronts, making a name for himself during World War I. Following the defeat of the Ottoman Empire at the hands of the Allies, and the subsequent plans for its partition, Mustafa Kemal led the Turkish national movement in what would become the Turkish War of Independence. Having established a provisional government in Ankara, he defeated the forces sent by the Entente powers. His successful military campaigns led to the liberation of the country and to the establishment of the Republic of Turkey.

As the first President of Turkey, Atatürk embarked upon a major programme of political, economic and cultural reforms. An admirer of the Enlightenment, Atatürk sought to transform the ruins of the Ottoman Empire into a modern, democratic, secular, nation-state. The principles of Atatürk's reforms are often referred to as Kemalism and continue to form the political foundation of the modern Turkish state.

"Peace at home, peace in the world."

M.K.ATATURK

Lumsk

2008-10-04T09:57:00.001-07:00

www.lumsk.com

Lumsk is a folk metal band from Trondheim, Norway. It combines traditional Norwegian folk music and folklore with rock, progressive rock and metal. The group has both male and female vocals with violin, guitar and drums.

After having released a self-produced demo, the band released an EP called Åsmund Frægdegjevar in 2001 under contract with the record company Spikefarm Records. The next year, the band moved to Tabu Recordings and released their debut album, which had the same title as the previously released EP. The album was characterized by its blend of classical instruments and heavy metal. The songs make up a narrative about the saga of Åsmund, who in Lumsk's interpretation sails from Ireland to rescue a king's daughter from a group of trolls.

Several years later, and with a new vocalist, the band released its second album, called Troll. The album was a departure in many ways from its predecessor - the band had gotten a new vocalist and guitarist, and as a whole the music was not as heavy or dark as on the debut album. There were also fewer songs, and together they didn't compose one narrative, but were rather stories in and of themselves; stories which were based on Nordic mythology and were written by the saga author Birger Sivertsen and his wife Kristin.

The same year the band released the single Nidvisa, which, in addition to the song Allvis from Troll, contained a song written for the action group Give Us Back Christmas (Gi oss jula tilbake in Norwegian) in protest against department stores' early Christmas decorating. The profits from the sale of the single also went to the group.

On February 26, 2007, Lumsk released their third full-length album, entitled Det Vilde Kor. On this album, Lumsk have added music to Det Vilde Kor, which is a collection of poems written by the famous Norwegian poet Knut Hamsun. With this album the music departed from its folk metal sound and incorporated a calmer and slightly more progressive nature.

In July 2007 Espen announced on Lumsk's website that Ketil and Siv Lena would be leaving the band due to a baby being born. They were replaced by Swedish musicians Håkan Lundqvist and Jenny Gustafsson. As of 2008 they are still looking for a replacement for vocalist Stine Mari Langstrand, who also left the band in 2007.

Current members

* Vidar Berg - drums (2005-)
* Espen Warankov Godø - Synthesizer and Male vocals (2000-)
* Eystein Garberg - Guitar (2001-)
* Håkan Lundqvist - Guitar (2007-)
* Jenny Gustafsson - Violin (2007-)
* Espen Hammer - Bass guitar (2002-)

Albums

* Åsmund Frægdegjevar (2003)
* Troll (2005)
* Det Vilde Kor (2007)

Intel Itanium

2008-10-04T09:47:00.001-07:00

Itanium is the brand name for 64-bit Intel microprocessors that implement the Intel Itanium architecture (formerly called IA-64). Intel has released two processor families using the brand: the original Itanium and the Itanium 2. Starting November 1, 2007, new members of the second family are again called Itanium. The processors are marketed for use in enterprise servers and high-performance computing systems. The architecture originated at Hewlett-Packard (HP) and was later developed by HP and Intel together.

Itanium's architecture differs dramatically from the x86 architectures (and the x86-64 extensions) used in other Intel processors. The architecture is based on explicit instruction-level parallelism, with the compiler making the decisions about which instructions to execute in parallel. This approach allows the processor to execute up to six instructions per clock cycle. By contrast with other superscalar architectures, Itanium does not have elaborate hardware to keep track of instruction dependencies during parallel execution - the compiler must keep track of these at build time instead.

After a protracted development process, the first Itanium was released in 2001, and more powerful Itanium processors have been released periodically. HP produces most Itanium-based systems, but several other manufacturers have also developed systems based on Itanium. As of 2007, Itanium is the fourth-most deployed microprocessor architecture for enterprise-class systems, behind x86-64, IBM POWER, and SPARC. Intel released its newest Itanium, codenamed Montvale, in November 2007.

Intel has extensively documented the Itanium instruction set and microarchitecture, and the technical press has provided overviews. The architecture has been renamed several times during its history. HP called it PA-WideWord. Intel later called it IA-64, then Itanium Processor Architecture (IPA), before settling on Intel Itanium Architecture, but it is still widely referred to as IA-64. It is a 64-bit register-rich explicitly-parallel architecture. The base data word is 64 bits, byte-addressable. The logical address space is 2^64 bytes. The architecture implements predication, speculation, and branch prediction. It uses a hardware register renaming mechanism rather than simple register windowing for parameter passing. The same mechanism is also used to permit parallel execution of loops. Speculation, prediction, predication, and renaming are under control of the compiler: each instruction word includes extra bits for this. This approach is the distinguishing characteristic of the architecture.

The architecture implements 128 integer registers, 128 floating point registers, 64 one-bit predicates, and eight branch registers. The floating point registers are 82 bits long to preserve precision for intermediate results.

Top Gear

2008-08-01T04:54:00.001-07:00

www.bbc.co.uk/topgear

Top Gear is a BAFTA, multi-NTA and International Emmy Award-winning BBC television series about motor vehicles, mainly cars. It began in 1977 as a conventional motoring magazine show. Over time, and especially since a relaunch in 2002, it has developed a quirky, humorous style. The show is presented by Jeremy Clarkson, Richard Hammond, James May and The Stig, an anonymous test driver. The programme is estimated to have 385 million viewers worldwide. In 2007 it was one of the most pirated television shows in the world.

The show has received considerable acclaim for its visuals and presentation, as well as a number of criticisms for its content and comments made by presenters. Columnist A. A. Gill described the show as, "a triumph of the craft of programme-making, of the minute, obsessive, musical masonry of editing, the french polishing of colourwashing and grading." Groups such as the Environmental Investigation Agency have criticised the BBC for allowing Top Gear to film in environmentally sensitive areas such as the Makgadikgadi salt pan in Botswana.

New episodes are initially broadcast in the United Kingdom on BBC Two. Episodes of Top Gear are also broadcast on Dave, BBC America, and a number of other television channels around the world. The popularity of the show has led to the creation of two international versions, with local production teams and presenters, for Australia and the United States. Initial episodes of the Australian version is scheduled to be broadcast in the second half of 2008 while NBC is holding the American version for broadcast in February or March, 2009, as a possible mid-season replacement.

Awards and nominations

In November 2005, Top Gear won an International Emmy in the Non-Scripted Entertainment category. In the episode where the presenters showed the award to the studio audience, Clarkson joked that he was unable to go to New York to receive the award since he was too busy writing the script for the show.

Top Gear has also been nominated in three consecutive years (2004–2006) for the British Academy Television Awards in the Best Feature category. Clarkson was also nominated in the best "Entertainment Performance" category in 2006. In 2004 and 2005, Top Gear was also nominated for a National Television Award in the Most Popular Factual Programme category; it won the award in 2006 and 2007. Accepting the award in October 2007, Richard Hammond made the comment that they really deserved it this year, because he didn't have to crash to get some sympathy votes. Also, in Series 10, Richard Hammond won the award for the 'Best TV Haircut' and James May won the award for the worst, while James May also won an award for Heat magazine's "weirdiest celebrity crush" revealed during the news.

Phoenix

2008-07-20T13:25:00.001-07:00

MRO (Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter) imaged Phoenix suspended from its parachute during descent through the Martian atmosphere.

phoenix.lpl.arizona.edu

Phoenix is a robotic spacecraft on a space exploration mission on Mars under the Mars Scout Program. The scientists conducting the mission are using instruments aboard the Phoenix lander to search for environments suitable for microbial life on Mars, and to research the history of water there. The multi-agency program is headed by the Lunar and Planetary Laboratory at the University of Arizona, under the direction of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory. The program is a partnership of universities in the United States, Canada, Switzerland, Denmark, Germany, the United Kingdom, NASA, the Canadian Space Agency, the Finnish Meteorological Institute, Lockheed Martin Space Systems, MacDonald Dettwiler & Associates (MDA) and other aerospace companies.

Phoenix is the sixth successful landing on Mars, out of twelve total attempts (seven of which were American). It is the third successful static lander and the first since Viking 2, and as of 2008 the most recent spacecraft to land successfully on Mars. It is also the first successful landing on a polar region of Mars.

My Dying Bride

2008-07-18T10:56:00.001-07:00

mydyingbride.org

My Dying Bride is a British death/doom metal band formed in 1990. My Dying Bride was formed in June 1990 after lead guitarist Andrew Craighan left his former band Abiosis to join Aaron Stainthorpe (vocals), Calvin Robertshaw (guitar) and Rick Miah (drums). Adrian Jackson would join later on bass. After six months of rehearsing, the band recorded and released their demo, Towards the Sinister. Its title was taken from a line in the song "Symphonaire Infernus Et Spera Empyrium".

In the early 1990s My Dying Bride were part of what was known as the Peaceville Three with Paradise Lost and Anathema - all three bands hailing from the north of England. They also toured in 1995 with Iron Maiden as part of their European tour.

Their music is characterised by romantic, sensual lyrics and an obsessive attention to atmospheric detail. Early demos were death metal in a traditional sense, though much slower than most. However, their debut album As the Flower Withers saw the addition of violins and keyboards. Turn Loose the Swans built on that foundation, utilising clean as well as death grunts and, unusually, lead violin on several tracks. Trinity is a compilation of the three early EPs and a 7". The Angel and the Dark River saw the abandonment of death grunts altogether, this added a more traditional Doom feel to the songs. Like Gods of the Sun continued in that direction.

The somewhat experimental 34.788%...Complete was next, which along with the following The Light at the End of the World polarized fans over the band's new direction. My Dying Bride entered something of a hiatus after this, releasing two retrospective albums Meisterwerk 1 and Meisterwerk 2. These albums lay halfway between best of albums and rarity compilations.

It was not until 2001's The Dreadful Hours that My Dying Bride managed to win round the bulk of their former fans. More innovative than The Light at the End of the World, yet retaining all the key elements of the My Dying Bride sound, The Dreadful Hours was a slightly darker release. 2004's follow-up Songs of Darkness, Words of Light showed a band continuing to expand and refine their sound and purpose. A substantial increase in live performances - once an unheard-of rarity - has led to much greater recognition by a new generation of fans.

Between 2003 and 2004, the band's label, Peaceville, re-released their entire back-catalogue in digipak format, with rare bonus tracks (demos, remixes, live performances etc.) added to each release. The band's next release came in May 2005, when they released the fancifully-titled Anti-Diluvian Chronicles, a fully-fledged best of box set featuring three discs and thirty tracks.

My Dying Bride toured the UK in November 2005, playing shows at London Astoria and Bradford Rio. The band spent the winter of 2005/2006 writing material for new studio album A Line of Deathless Kings. The album was released on October 9, 2006. It was preceded by the EP Deeper Down on September 18. Shortly before the release of A Line of Deathless Kings, Shaun Taylor-Steels announced his permanent departure from the band due to persistent problems with his ankle.

In early 2007, Jackson announced his departure and session-drummer John Bennett could no longer stay, citing a lack of time due to work commitments. Replacements were found in Lena Abé on bass and Dan Mullins on drums.

Pre-production has begun for My Dying Bride's next album. The band has entered the Futureworks studio in Manchester. Andrew Craighan stated that there are no song or album titles yet, but the feel of the album is, in his words, 'heading for empty and bleak with flashes of rage.'

Due to Sarah's pregnancy she has been replaced on keyboards by Katie Stone, announced on June 28th as an official member of the band. Katie is also a trained violinist and will play the parts Martin Powell used to play in live performances. It has been confirmed that she will perform violin on the upcoming album as well.

Current members

* Aaron Stainthorpe - Vocals (1990-)
* Hamish Glencross - Guitar (1999-)
* Andrew Craighan - Guitar (1990-)
* Sarah Stanton - Keyboards (2002-)
* Lena Abé - Bass (2007-)
* Dan Mullins - Drums (2007-)
* Katie Stone - Violin, Keyboards (live) (2008-)

One-time pad

2008-07-17T10:25:00.001-07:00

In cryptography, the one-time pad (OTP) is an encryption algorithm where the plaintext is combined with a random key or "pad" that is as long as the plaintext and used only once. A modular addition is used to combine the plaintext with the pad. (For binary data, the operation XOR amounts to the same thing.) It was invented in 1917 and patented a couple of years later. If the key is truly random, never reused, and kept secret, the one-time pad provides perfect secrecy. It has also been proven that any cipher with perfect secrecy must use keys with the same requirements as OTP keys. The key normally consists of a random stream of numbers, each of which indicates the number of places in the alphabet (or number stream, if the plaintext message is in numerical form) which the corresponding letter or number in the plaintext message should be shifted. For messages in the Latin alphabet, for example, the key will consist of a random string of numbers between 0 and 25; for binary messages the key will consist of a random string of 0s and 1s; and so on.

The "pad" part of the name comes from early implementations where the key material was distributed as a pad of paper, so the top sheet could be easily torn off and destroyed after use. For easy concealment, the pad was sometimes reduced to such a small size that a powerful magnifying glass was required to use it. Photos accessible on the Internet show captured KGB pads that fit in the palm of one's hand, or in a walnut shell. To increase security, one-time-pads were sometimes printed onto sheets of highly flammable nitrocellulose.

The one-time pad is derived from the Vernam cipher, named after Gilbert Vernam, one of its inventors. Vernam's system was a cipher that combined a message with a key read from a paper tape loop. In its original form, Vernam's system was not unbreakable because the key could be reused. One-time use came a little later when Joseph Mauborgne recognized that if the key tape was totally random, cryptanalytic difficulty would be increased.

There is some term ambiguity due to the fact that some authors use the term "Vernam cipher" synonymously for the "one-time-pad", while others refer to any additive stream cipher as a "Vernam cipher", including those based on a cryptographically secure pseudorandom number generator (CSPRNG).

Doris Lessing

2008-07-11T10:39:00.001-07:00

dorislessing.org

Doris Lessing CH OBE (born Doris May Tayler in Kermanshah, Persia, (now Iran) on 22 October 1919) is a British writer, author of works such as the novels The Grass is Singing and The Golden Notebook.

In 2007, Lessing won the Nobel Prize in Literature. She was described by the Swedish Academy as "that epicist of the female experience, who with scepticism, fire and visionary power has subjected a divided civilisation to scrutiny". Lessing is the eleventh woman to win the prize in its 106-year history, and also the oldest person ever to win the literature award.

Writing career

Because of her campaigning against nuclear arms and South African apartheid, Lessing was banned from that country and from Rhodesia for many years. Lessing moved to London with her youngest son in 1949 and it was at this time her first novel, The Grass Is Singing, was published. Her breakthrough work, written in 1962, was The Golden Notebook.

In 1984, she attempted to publish two novels under a pseudonym, Jane Somers, to demonstrate the difficulty new authors faced in trying to break into print. The novels were declined by Lessing's UK publisher, but accepted by another English publisher, Michael Joseph, and in the US by Alfred A. Knopf.

She declined a damehood, but accepted a Companion of Honour at the end of 1999 for "conspicuous national service". She has also been made a Companion of Literature by the Royal Society of Literature.

On 11 October 2007, Lessing was announced as the winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature. At 87, she is the oldest person to have received the literature prize and the third oldest Nobel Laureate in any category. She also stands as only the eleventh woman to be awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature by the Swedish Academy in its 106-year history. She told reporters outside her home "I've won all the prizes in Europe, every bloody one, so I'm delighted to win them all. It's a royal flush."In a 2008 interview for the BBC's Front Row, she stated that increased media interest following the award had left her without time for writing.

Awards

* Somerset Maugham Award (1954)
* Prix Médicis étranger (1976)
* Austrian State Prize for European Literature (1981)
* Shakespeare-Preis der Alfred Toepfer Stiftung F. V. S., Hamburg (1982)
* W. H. Smith Literary Award (1986)
* Palermo Prize (1987)
* Premio Internazionale Mondello (1987)
* Premio Grinzane Cavour (1989)
* James Tait Black Memorial Prize for biography(1995)
* Los Angeles Times Book Prize (1995)
* Premi Internacional Catalunya (1999)
* Order of the Companions of Honour (1999)
* Companion of Literature of the Royal Society of Literature (2000)
* David Cohen British Literary Prize (2001)
* Premio Príncipe de Asturias (2001)
* S.T. Dupont Golden PEN Award (2002)
* Nobel Prize in Literature (2007)

F-8 Crusader

2008-07-06T08:53:00.001-07:00

The F-8 Crusader (originally F8U) was a single-engine aircraft carrier-based fighter aircraft built by Chance-Vought of Dallas, Texas, USA. It replaced the Vought F-7 Cutlass. The first F-8 prototype was ready for flight in February 1955, and was the last American fighter with guns as the primary weapon. The RF-8 Crusader was a photo-reconnaissance development and operated longer in U.S. service than any of the fighter versions. RF-8s played a crucial role in the Cuban Missile Crisis, providing essential low-level photographs impossible to acquire by other means. Naval Reserve units continued to operate the RF-8 until 1987.

In September 1952, United States Navy announced a requirement for a new fighter. It was to have a top speed of Mach 1.2 at 30,000 ft (9,150 m) with a climb rate of 25,000 ft/min (127 m/s), and a landing speed of no more than 100 mph (160 km/h). Korean War experience had demonstrated that 0.50 in (12.7 mm) machine guns were no longer sufficient and as the result the new fighter was to carry a 20 mm (0.8 in) cannon. In response, the Vought team led by John Russell Clark created the V-383. Unusual for a fighter, the aircraft had a high-mounted wing which allowed for short and light landing gear.

NASA's F-8C digital fly-by-wire testbed.

The most innovative aspect of the design was the variable-incidence wing which pivoted by 7° out of the fuselage on takeoff and landing. This afforded increased lift due to a greater angle of attack without compromising forward visibility because the fuselage stayed level. Simultaneously, the lift was augmented by leading-edge slats drooping by 25° and inboard flaps extending to 30°. The rest of the aircraft took advantage of contemporary aerodynamic innovations with area ruled fuselage, all-moving stabilators, dog-tooth notching at the wing folds for improved yaw stability, and liberal use of titanium in the airframe. Power came from the Pratt & Whitney J57 afterburning turbojet and the armament, as specified by the Navy, consisted of four 20 mm cannon, a retractable tray with 32 unguided Mighty Mouse FFARs, and cheek pylons for two AIM-9 Sidewinder air-to-air missiles. Vought also presented a tactical reconnaissance version of the aircraft called the V-382. The F-8 Crusader would be the last U.S. fighter designed with guns as its primary weapon.

Major competition came from Grumman with the F-11 Tiger, McDonnell with upgraded twin-engine F3H Demon (which would eventually become the F-4 Phantom II), and North American with their F-100 Super Sabre adopted for carrier use and dubbed the Super Fury.

In May 1953, the Vought design was declared a winner and in June, Vought received an order for three XF8U-1 prototypes (after adoption of the unified designation system in September 1962, the F8U became the F-8). The first prototype flew on 25 March 1955 with John Konrad at the controls. The aircraft exceeded the speed of sound during its maiden flight. The development was so trouble-free that the second prototype, along with the first production F8U-1, flew on the same day, 30 September 1955. On 4 April 1956, the F8U-1 performed its first catapult launch from USS Forrestal.

IBM Roadrunner

2008-06-22T12:24:00.001-07:00

Roadrunner is a supercomputer built by IBM at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, USA. Currently the world's fastest computer, the US$133-million Roadrunner is designed for a peak performance of 1.7 petaflops, achieving 1.026 on May 25, 2008,and to be the world's first TOP500 Linpack sustained 1.0 petaflops system. It is a one-of-a-kind supercomputer, built from commodity parts, with many novel design features.

A Cell Processor

IBM built the computer for the U.S. Department of Energy's (DOE) National Nuclear Security Administration. It is a hybrid design with 12,960 IBM PowerXCell 8i CPUs and 6,480 AMD Opteron dual-core processors in specially designed server blades connected by Infiniband. The Roadrunner uses the Red Hat Enterprise Linux operating system and is managed with xCAT distributed computing software. It occupies approximately 6,000 square feet (560 m²) and became operational in 2008.

The DOE plans to use the computer for simulating how nuclear materials age in order to predict whether the USA's aging arsenal of nuclear weapons is safe and reliable. Other uses for the Roadrunner include the sciences, financial, automotive and aerospace industries.

Racetrack Memory

2008-04-19T02:02:00.001-07:00

Racetrack Memory is an experimental non-volatile memory device under development at IBM's Almaden Research Center by a team led by Stuart Parkin, as well as teams at various other locations. In early 2008 a 3-bit version was successfully demonstrated.

IBM's version of racetrack uses spin-coherent electric current to move the magnetic domains along an U-shaped nanoscopic wire. As current is passing through the wire, the domains move over the magnetic read/write heads positioned at the bottom of the U, which alter the domains to record patterns of bits. A memory device is made up of many such wires and read/write elements. In general operational concept, racetrack memory is similar to the earlier twistor memory or bubble memory of the 1960s and 70s, but uses much smaller magnetic domains and dramatic improvements in magnetic detection capabilities to provide far higher areal densities.

One limitation of the early experimental devices was that the magnetic domains could only be pushed slowly through the wires, requiring current pulses on the orders of microseconds to move them successfully. This was unexpected, and led to performance roughly equal to hard drives, as much as 1000 times slower than predicted. Recent research at the University of Hamburg has traced this problem to microscopic imperfections in the crystal structure of the wires which led to the domains becoming "stuck" at these imperfections. Using an x-ray microscope to directly image the boundaries between the domains, their research found that domain walls would be moved by pulses as short as a few nanoseconds when these imperfections were absent. This corresponds to a macroscopic speed of about 110 m/s.

To Kill a Mockingbird

2008-04-06T10:38:00.000-07:00

To Kill a Mockingbird is a Pulitzer Prize-winning novel by Harper Lee published in 1960. Upon its release, it was instantly successful and has become a classic of modern American fiction. The novel is loosely based on the author's observations of her family and neighbors, as well as an event that occurred near her hometown in 1936, when she was 10 years old.

The novel is renowned for its warmth and humor, while still dealing with the serious issues of rape and racial inequality. Atticus Finch, the narrator's father, has served as a moral hero for many readers, and a model of integrity for lawyers. One critic explained its impact by writing, "in the twentieth century, To Kill a Mockingbird is probably the most widely read book dealing with race in America, and its protagonist, Atticus Finch, the most enduring fictional image of racial heroism."

As a Southern gothic novel and a bildungsroman, the primary themes of To Kill a Mockingbird involve racial injustice and the destruction of innocence, but scholars have also noted that Lee addresses the issues of class tensions, courage and compassion, and gender roles in the American Deep South. The book is widely taught in schools in English-speaking countries with lessons that emphasize tolerance and decry prejudice. Despite its themes, To Kill a Mockingbird has been the target of various campaigns to have it removed from public classrooms. Often the book is challenged for its use of racial epithets, and writers have noticed that while white readers react favorably to the novel, black readers tend to respond less positively.

Lee's novel was initially reviewed by at least 30 different newspapers and magazines, which varied widely in their assessment of the novel. More recently, it has been ranked by librarians next to the Bible as a book "every adult should read before they die".The book was adapted into an Oscar-winning film by director Robert Mulligan, with a screenplay by Horton Foote, in 1962. In 1990 it was adapted as a play that is performed annually in Harper Lee's hometown of Monroeville, Alabama and has transformed the town into a tourist destination. To date, it is Lee's only published novel, and though she continues to respond to the book's impact, she has refused any personal publicity for herself or the novel since 1964.

Antares

2008-04-06T06:13:00.000-07:00

Antares is a star in the Milky Way galaxy and the sixteenth brightest star in the nighttime sky (sometimes listed as fifteenth brightest, if the two brighter components of the Capella quadruple star system are counted as one star). Along with Aldebaran, Spica, and Regulus it is one of the four brightest stars near the ecliptic. The similarly colored Aldebaran lies almost directly opposite Antares in the Zodiac.

Antares is a class M supergiant star, with a diameter of approximately 700 times that of the sun; if it were placed in the centre of our solar system, its outer surface would lie between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter. Antares is approximately 600 light years from our solar system. Its visual luminosity is about 10,000 times that of the Sun, but because the star radiates a considerable part of its energy in the infrared part of the spectrum, the bolometric luminosity equals roughly 65,000 times that of the Sun. The mass of the star is calculated to be 15 to 18 solar masses. Its large size and relatively small mass give Antares a very low average density.

The best time to view Antares is on or around May 31 of each year, when the star is at "opposition" to the Sun. At this time, Antares rises at dusk and sets at dawn, and is thus in view all night (depending on your position on Earth). For approximately two to three weeks on either side of November 30, Antares is not visible at all, being lost in the Sun's glare; this period of invisibility is longer in the Northern Hemisphere than in the Southern Hemisphere, since the star's declination is significantly south of the celestial equator.

LINA

2008-03-29T23:22:00.001-07:00

LINA is a thin virtual layer that enables developers to write and compile code using ordinary Linux tools, then run that code on a variety of operating systems. For users, LINA runs invisibly in the background, enabling them to install and run these Linux applications as if they were native to that users' operating system.

LINA enables Linux applications to run on Windows, Mac OS X, and UNIX operating systems with native look and feel. GUI applications running on LINA are indistinguishable from the other applications on the user's machine because they utilize the native libraries of the underlying operating system. LINA integrates native Linux command line applications directly into the DOS, Mac OS X, or UNIX console. The configuration files of Web applications that run on LINA are fully accessible and editable.

Openfiler

2008-03-13T14:09:00.001-07:00

Openfiler is an operating system that provides file-based network-attached storage (NAS) and block-based Storage area network (SAN). It was created by Xinit Systems, and is based on the rPath Linux distribution. It is free software licensed under the GNU General Public License version 2. Its software stack interfaces with open source third-party software.

Features

Networking protocols supported by Openfiler include: NFS, SMB/CIFS, HTTP/WebDAV, FTP and iSCSI (initiator). Network directories supported by Openfiler include NIS, LDAP (with support for SMB/CIFS encrypted passwords), Active Directory (in native and mixed modes), Windows NT 4 domain controller and Hesiod. Authentication protocols include Kerberos 5. Openfiler includes support for volume-based partitioning, Ext3, JFS and XFS as on-disk native filesystems, point-in-time snapshots with scheduling, quota-based resource allocation, and a single unified interface for share management which makes allocating shares for various network file-system protocols easy.

The following are just some of the features currently available in Openfiler:

A. Block-based virtualization
1. Point-in-time snapshot support with scheduling
2. Online volume size expansion (testing)
3. Volume usage reporting
4. Support for multiple volume groups for optimal storage allocation
5. iSCSI initiator (manual currently)
6. Volume migration & replication (manual currently)

B. Accounts management
1. Authentication using Pluggable Authentication Modules, configured from the web-interface
2. NIS, LDAP, Hesiod, Active Directory (native and mixed modes), NT4 domain controller
3. Guest/public account support

C. Quota / resource allocation
1. Per-volume group-quota management for space and files
2. Per-volume user-quota management for space and files
3. Per-volume guest-quota management for space and files
4. User and group templates support for quota allocation

D. Share management
1. Per-volume based share creation
2. Multi-level share directory tree
3. Multi-group based access control on a per-share basis
4. Multi-host/network based access control on a per-share basis
5. Per-share service activation (NFS, SMB/CIFS, HTTP/WebDAV, FTP)
6. Support for auto-created SMB home directories

E. Industry-standard protocol suite
1. CIFS/SMB support for Microsoft Windows-based clients
2. NFSv3 support for all UNIX clients with support for ACL protocol extensions
3. NFSv4 support (testing)
4. FTP support
5. WebDAV and HTTP 1.1 support
6. Linux distribution back-end for any other customizations
7. Open source provides you the power to modify and deploy software if you want to do so

Hyper-V

2008-03-10T10:53:00.001-07:00

Hyper-V, codenamed Viridian, formerly known as Windows Server Virtualization, is a hypervisor based virtualization system for x64 versions of Windows Server 2008, to be made available 180 days after the OS is released to manufacturing. The Hyper-V hypervisor will also be available as a stand-alone offering, without the Windows Server functionality, as Microsoft Hyper-V Server. Release candidates of Windows Server 2008 include a preview of Hyper-V.

Architecture

Hyper-V supports isolation in terms of a partition. A partition is a logical unit of isolation, supported by the hypervisor, in which operating systems execute. A hypervisor instance has to have at least one root partition, running Windows Server 2008. The virtualization stack runs in the root partition and has direct access to the hardware devices. The root partition then creates the child partitions which hosts the guests OSs. A child partition can also spawn further child partitions of their own. A parent partition creates child partitions using the hypercall API, which is the application programming interface exposed by Hyper-V.

A virtualized partition does not have access to the physical processor, nor does it handle its real interrupts. Instead, they have a virtual view of the processor and run in Guest Virtual Address, which depending on the configuration of the hypervisor, may or may not be the entire virtual address space. A hypervisor may choose to expose only a subset of the processors to each partition. The hypervisor handles the interrupts to the processor, and redirects them to the respective partition using a logical Synthetic Interrupt Controller (SynIC). Hyper-V can hardware accelerate the address translation between various Guest Virtual Address-spaces by using an IOMMU (I/O Memory Management Unit) which operates independent of the memory management hardware used by the CPU.

Child partitions do not have direct access to hardware resources, instead they have a virtual view of the resources, in terms of virtual devices. Any request to the virtual devices is redirected via the VMBus to the devices in the parent partition, which will manage the requests. The VMBus is a logical channel which enables inter-partition communication. The response is also redirected via the VMBus. If the devices in the parent partition are also virtual devices, it will be redirected further till it reaches the root partition, where it will gain access to the physical devices. Parent partitions run a Virtualization Service Provider (VSP) which connects to the VMBus and handles device access requests from child partitions. Child partition virtual devices internally run Virtualization Service Consumer (VSC) which redirect the request to VSPs in the parent partition via the VMBus. This entire process is transparent to the guest OS.

Virtual Devices can also take advantage of a Windows Server Virtualization feature, named Enlightened I/O, for storage, networking and graphics subsystems, among others. Enlightened I/O is specialized virtualization-aware implementation of high level communication protocols like SCSI to take advantage of VMBus directly, bypassing any device emulation layer. This makes the communication more efficient but requires the guest OS to support Enlightened I/O.

Appleseed Ex Machina

2008-03-09T12:56:00.001-07:00

Appleseed Ex Machina

Appleseed Ex Machina IMDb

Appleseed EX Machina is an anime film and is the sequel to the 2004 Appleseed film, similarly directed by Shinji Aramaki. It was released on 20th October 2007 in Japan and fully involved Hong Kong director and producer John Woo. The film made its American premiere at The Jules Verne Adventures Film Festival in Los Angeles on December 15th, 2007.

Plot summary

Following the non-nuclear war that killed half the world's population, the city-nation of Olympus stands as a beacon of hope in a world of chaos and conflict. The utopian metropolis is governed by Gaia, a vast artificial intelligence, and administered by genetically engineered humanoids known as bioroids, whose designer DNA suppresses strong emotions. With Bioroids being half of its population, peace and order are easily maintained.

Deunan Knute, a young female warrior, and Briareos, a veteran cyborg-soldier, are both partners and lovers. As members of E.S.W.A.T., the elite special forces serving Olympus, they are deployed whenever trouble strikes. The two fighters find their partnership tested in a new way by the arrival of a new member to their ranks — an experimental bioroid named Tereus.

Created by Gaia using DNA from Briareos, Tereus uncannily resembles Briareos before the wartime injuries that led to his becoming a cyborg. Not only does this trouble Deunan, but Briareos's DNA gives Tereus more than top-notch fighting skills; this battle-ready bioroid is like Briareos in another way — he also has strong romantic feelings for Deunan.

Manchester Small-Scale Experimental Machine

2008-03-03T10:53:00.001-08:00

The Manchester Small Scale Experimental Machine

The Manchester Small-Scale Experimental Machine (SSEM), nicknamed Baby, was the world's first stored-program computer. Developed by Frederic C. Williams and Tom Kilburn at the University of Manchester, it ran its first program on June 21, 1948.

The computer was built around a Williams tube, a particular type of cathode ray tube (CRT) which had been developed by Williams at the Telecommunications Research Establishment in July-November 1946, before he joined the University of Manchester in December 1946. Working with Kilburn at the university they increased the storage capacity of the CRT from one bit to 2048 by October 1947 using a 64 by 32 array. This could be used for a computer's memory, with the advantage of allowing random access to memory, rather than the sequential access of the delay line memory units.

The SSEM was a very limited machine, designed to test the Williams tube and other hardware rather than as a practical computer. The SSEM had a single 32 by 32-bit word store, a second CRT to hold a single 32-bit accumulator, and a third CRT to hold the current instruction and its address. A fourth CRT was the output device, displaying the bit pattern of any chosen storage tube. The inputdevice was a set of 32 buttons with manual switches to set the bit pattern of any word.

A whole word was used for any instruction, with bits 0–12 representing the address and bits 13–15 the code defining the function. An instruction was executed in 1.2 milliseconds and the main store was refreshed every 16 instructions.

It was limited because it could store a total of only 32 numbers and instructions, and the instruction set was very limited. The initial seven instructions were:

* jump indirect
* relative jump indirect
* take a number from memory, negate it, and load it into the accumulator
* write the number in the accumulator back to memory
* subtract a value from the accumulator
* skip next if accumulator is negative
* stop

A division program was written, using pencil-and-paper method, operating on one bit at a time. It was used to divide 230-1 by 31, giving the answer in about 1.5 seconds. Then this routine was used in a program to show that 314,159,265 and 217,828,183 are relatively prime. Finally, a program was written to find the largest divisor of integers, by testing all numbers from a starting point down as possible divisors, with repeated subtraction used for division. This program consisted 17 instructions and it was written by Kilburn. (A 19-instruction amended version of it has been published.) It ran successfully on June 21, 1948, first on small integers. Within a few days it was run on 230-1 by trying every number from 218-1 down. It ran for 52 minutes, executing 3.5 million accesses to memory and 2.1 million instructions, and produced the correct answer.

The SSEM developed into the Manchester Mark I, which led to the Ferranti Mark I, the world's second commercially available general-purpose computer. At around the same time EDSAC was being developed at the University of Cambridge Mathematical Laboratory.

A working replica of the SSEM was created in 1998 to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the running of its first program. This is on display at the Museum of Science and Industry in Manchester.

Hiberno-English

2008-03-03T10:20:00.001-08:00

Hiberno-English

Hiberno-English Wikipedia

Hiberno-English — also known as Anglo-Irish and Irish English — is the form of English spoken in the Republic of Ireland and, to a lesser degree, some parts of Northern Ireland. It is the result of the interaction of the English and Irish languages. English was mainly brought to Ireland during the Plantations of Ireland in the sixteenth century and established itself in Dublin and in the area of Leinster known as the Pale. It was later introduced into Ulster during the Plantation of Ulster through Belfast and the Lagan Valley in the seventeenth century. The linguistic influence of the Irish language is most evident in Gaeltachtaí, areas where Irish is still spoken, as well as in areas where, before the complete adoption of English, Irish continued to be spoken for longer than in other areas.

The standard spelling and grammar of Irish-English are largely the same as common British English. However, some unique characteristics exist, especially in the spoken language, owing to the influence of the Irish language on the pronunciation of English. Due in most part to the influence of the US media abroad, many words and phrases of American English have become interchangeable with their Hiberno-English equivalents, most especially with the youngest generations. British English, however, remains the greatest influence on grammar, spelling and lexicon on English in Ireland.

Grammar

...Conditionals have a greater presence in Hiberno-English due to the tendency to replace the simple present tense with the conditional (would) and the simple past tense with the conditional perfect (would have).

* John asked me would I buy a loaf of bread ('John asked me to buy a loaf of bread')
* How do you know him? We would have been in school together. ('We went to school together')...

Riemann Hypothesis

2008-02-24T11:12:00.001-08:00

The real part (red) and imaginary part (blue) of the Riemann zeta-function along the critical line Re(s) = 1/2. You can see the first non-trivial zeros at Im(s) = ±14.135, ±21.022 and ±25.011.

The Riemann hypothesis (also called the Riemann zeta-hypothesis), first formulated by Bernhard Riemann in 1859, is one of the most famous and important unsolved problems in mathematics. It has been an open question for almost 150 years, despite attracting concentrated efforts from many outstanding mathematicians. Unlike some other celebrated problems, it is more attractive to professionals in the field than to amateurs.

The Riemann hypothesis (RH) is a conjecture about the distribution of the zeros of the Riemann zeta-function ζ(s). The Riemann zeta-function is defined for all complex numbers s ≠ 1. It has zeros at the negative even integers (i.e. at s = −2, s = −4, s = −6, ...). These are called the trivial zeros. The Riemann hypothesis is concerned with the non-trivial zeros, and states that:

The real part of any non-trivial zero of the Riemann zeta function is ½.

Thus the non-trivial zeros should lie on the so-called critical line, ½ + it, where t is a real number and i is the imaginary unit. The Riemann zeta-function along the critical line is sometimes studied in terms of the Z-function, whose real zeros correspond to the zeros of the zeta-function on the critical line.

The Riemann hypothesis is one of the most important open problems of contemporary mathematics, mainly because a large number of deep and important other results have been proven under the condition that it holds. Most mathematicians believe the Riemann hypothesis to be true. (J. E. Littlewood and Atle Selberg have been reported as skeptical. Selberg's skepticism, if any, waned from his young days. In a 1989 paper, he suggested that an analogue should hold for a much wider class of functions, the Selberg class.) A $1,000,000 prize has been offered by the Clay Mathematics Institute for the first correct proof.

A value graph of zeta, that is, Re(zeta) vs. Im(zeta), along the critical line s = it + 1/2, with t running from 0 to 34.

Double Pendulum

2008-02-24T11:00:00.001-08:00

In horology, a double pendulum is a system of two simple pendulums on a common mounting which move in anti-phase.

In mathematics, in the area of dynamical systems, a double pendulum is a pendulum with another pendulum attached to its end, and is a simple physical system that exhibits rich dynamic behavior. The motion of a double pendulum is governed by a set of coupled ordinary differential equations. Above a certain energy its motion is chaotic.

The double pendulum undergoes chaotic motion, and shows a sensitive dependence on initial conditions. The image to the right shows the amount of elapsed time before the pendulum "flips over", as a function of initial conditions.

BSDF

2008-02-24T01:10:00.001-08:00

The definition of the BSDF (Bidirectional scattering distribution function) is not well standardized. The term was probably introduced in 1991 by Paul Heckbert. Most often it is used to name the general mathematical function which describes the way in which the light is scattered by a surface. However in practice this phenomenon is usually split into the reflected and transmitted components, which are then treated separately as BRDF (Bidirectional reflectance distribution function) and BTDF (Bidirectional transmittance distribution function).

* BSDF is a superset and the generalization of the BRDF and BTDF. The concept behind all BxDF functions could be described as a black box with the inputs being any two angles, one for incoming (incident) ray and the second one for the outgoing (reflected or transmitted) ray at a given point of the surface. The output of this black box is the value defining the ratio between the incoming and the outgoing light energy for the given couple of angles. The content of the black box may be a mathematical formula which more or less accurately tries to model and approximate the actual surface behavior or an algorithm which produces the output based on discrete samples of measured data. This implies that the function is 4 (+1) dimensional (4 values for 2 3D angles + 1 optional for wave length of the light), which means that it cannot be simply represented by 2D and not even by a 3D graph. Each 2D or 3D graph, sometimes seen in the literature, shows only a slice of the function.

* Some tend to use the term BSDF simply as a category name covering the whole family of BxDF functions.

* The term BSDF is sometimes used in a slightly different context, for the function describing the amount of the scatter (not scattered light), scatter being simply a function of the incident light angle. An example to illustrate this context: for perfectly lambertian surface the BSDF(angle)=const. This approach is used for instance to verify the output quality by the manufacturers of the glossy surfaces.

* Another recent usage of the term BSDF can be seen in some 3D packages, when vendors use it as a 'smart' category to encompass the simple well known cg algorithms like Phong, Blinn etc.

BDRF

2008-02-24T01:03:00.001-08:00

The bidirectional reflectance distribution function (BRDF) is a 4-dimensional function that defines how light is reflected at an opaque surface. The function takes an incoming light direction, and outgoing direction, both defined with respect to the surface normal, and returns the ratio of reflected radiance exiting along to the irradiance incident on the surface from direction. Physically based BRDFs have additional restrictions, including Helmholtz reciprocity, and energy conservation. The BRDF has units sr-1, with steradians (sr) being a unit of solid angle.

The BRDF is a fundamental radiometric concept, and accordingly is used in computer graphics for photorealistic rendering of synthetic scenes, as well as in computer vision for many inverse problems such as object recognition.

Piri Reis (1465 – 1554)

2008-02-24T00:52:00.001-08:00

Key to the Piri Reis' Map

Piri Reis (full name Hadji Muhiddin Piri Ibn Hadji Mehmed) (about 1465 – 1554 or 1555) was an Ottoman-Turkish admiral and cartographer born between 1465 and 1470 in Gallipoli on the Aegean coast of Turkey.

He is primarily known today for his maps and charts collected in his Kitab-ı Bahriye (Book of Navigation), a book which contains detailed information on navigation as well as extremely accurate charts describing the important ports and cities of the Mediterranean Sea. He gained fame as a cartographer when a small part of his first world map (prepared in 1513) was discovered in 1929 at Topkapı Palace in Istanbul. The most surprising aspect was the presence of the Americas on an Ottoman map, making it the first Turkish map ever drawn of the Americas -- although not the first ever, which was drawn by pilot and cartographer Juan de la Cosa in 1500 and is conserved in the naval museum (Museo Naval) in Madrid.

The most striking characteristic of the first world map (1513) of Piri Reis, however, is the level of accuracy in positioning the continents (particularly the relation between Africa and South America) which was unparalleled for its time. Even maps drawn decades later did not have such accurate positioning and proportions; a quality which can be observed in other maps of Piri Reis in his Kitab-ı Bahriye (Book of Navigation). Piri Reis' map is centered in the Sahara at the Tropic of Cancer latitude, and some believe it's also the oldest surviving map of Antarctica[citation needed], despite being drawn more than 3 centuries before the official discovery of that continent.

In 1528 Piri Reis drew a second world map, of which a small fragment showing Greenland and North America from Labrador and Newfoundland in the north to Florida, Cuba and parts of Central America in the south still survives.

8b/10b

2008-02-24T00:42:00.001-08:00

8b/10b

Original paper by Franaszek and Widmer

In telecommunications, 8b/10b is a line code that maps 8-bit symbols to 10-bit symbols to achieve DC-balance and bounded disparity, and yet provide enough state changes to allow reasonable clock recovery. This means that the difference between the count of 1s and 0s in a string of at least 20 bits is no more than 2, and that there are not more than five 1s or 0s in a row. This helps to reduce the demand for the lower bandwidth limit of the channel necessary to transfer the signal.

The code was described in 1983 by Al Widmer and Peter Franaszek in the IBM Journal of Research and Development. IBM was issued a patent for the scheme the following year. IBM's patent notwithstanding, the method, implementation and goals are very similar to Group Code Recording (GCR) used on floppy disks in some computers during late 1970s/early 80s.

Technologies that use 8b/10b

Now that the IBM patent has expired, the scheme has become even more popular and is the default DC-free line code for new standards.

Among the areas in which 8B/10B encoding finds application are

* PCI Express
* IEEE 1394b
* Serial ATA
* SAS
* Fibre Channel
* SSA
* Gigabit Ethernet (except for the twisted pair based 1000Base-T)
* InfiniBand
* XAUI
* Serial RapidIO
* DVI and HDMI (Transition Minimized Differential Signaling)
* DVB Asynchronous Serial Interface (ASI)
* HyperTransport

Anti-satellite

2008-02-24T00:32:00.001-08:00

Anti-satellite weapons (ASATs) are space weapons designed to destroy satellites for strategic military purposes. Currently, only the USA, the former USSR and the People's Republic of China are known to have developed these weapons, with India claiming the technical capability to develop such weapons. On January 11, 2007, China destroyed an old orbiting weather satellite, the world's first test since the 1980s.

USA-193 was an American spy satellite, which was launched on 14 December 2006 by a Delta II rocket, from Vandenberg Air Force Base. It was reported about a month after launch that the satellite had failed. In January 2008, it was reported that the satellite was decaying from orbit at a rate of 1,640 feet (500 m) per day. On 14 February 2008, it was reported that the US Navy had been instructed to fire an SM-3 ABM weapon at it, to act as an anti-satellite weapon.

This mission is different from "normal" ASAT operations in that the target vehicle is at a much lower altitude than would normally be the case. However, some analysts believes this is a coincidental, convenient reason for a passive response to the Chinese ASAT test carried out on January 11, 2007.

According to news media, the primary reason for destroying the satellite is the large amount of the highly toxic fuel hydrazine contained on board, which could pose environmental and health risks should any significant amount survive the reentry.

On Febuary 20, 2008, it was announced that the launch was carried out successfully and an explosion was observed consistent with the destruction of the hydrazine fuel tank.

WINDS

2008-02-24T00:19:00.001-08:00

WINDS / Kizuna

WINDS (Wideband InterNetworking engineering test and Demonstration Satellite, also known as Kizuna), is a Japanese communication satellite. Launch was originally scheduled for 2007. The launch date was eventually set for 15 February 2008, however a problem detected in a second stage manoeuvring thruster delayed it to 23 February. Lift-off occurred at 08:55 GMT on 23 February, and the satellite separated from the carrier rocket, into a Geosynchronous transfer orbit at 09:23, launched by an H-IIA carrier rocket from the Tanegashima Space Centre. It will be used to relay the internet to Japanese homes and businesses, through Ka-Band signals. It will also develop technologies to be utilised by future Japanese communication spacecraft. It is part of Japan's i-Space programme, and is to be operated by JAXA and NICT.

JAXA claim that WINDS will be able to provide 155 Mb/s download speed to home users with 45-centimetre diameter satellite dishes, whilst providing industrial users, via 5-metre diameter dishes, with 1.2 Gb/s speeds.

WINDS has a launch mass of 4,850 kg, reducing to around 2,750 kg when in orbit. The spacecraft is 8 m x 3 m x 2 m in size, and its solar panels have a span of 21.5 metres. It has three-axis stabilisation, and a design life expectancy of five years.

KIZUNA will lead to ultra-high speed international Internet-based communications. The technology takes advantage of the fact that satellite communications are far-reaching, multicasting, and disaster-resistant. It will enable high-speed, large-volume data transmission, allowing ultra-fast domestic and international Internet-based communications, in particular between Japan and its neighboring countries in the Asia-Pacific region.
Ultra-fast satellite-based Internet-based communications will remove the so-called digital divide by providing high-speed Internet service in areas where the terrestrial communications infrastructure is poor. Among other uses, this will make possible great advances in telemedicine, which will bring high-quality medical treatment to remote areas, and in distance education, connecting students and teachers separated by great distances.

Project Constellation

2008-02-08T09:20:00.001-08:00

NASA Project Constellation

Project Constellation is a NASA program to create a new generation of spacecraft for human spaceflight, consisting primarily of the Ares I and Ares V launch vehicles, the Orion crew capsule, the Earth Departure Stage and the Altair lunar lander. These spacecraft will be capable of performing a variety of missions, from Space Station resupply to lunar landings.

Most of the Constellation hardware is based on systems originally developed for the Space Shuttle, although Orion's two-part crew and service module system is heavily influenced by the earlier Apollo Spacecraft, and it uses engines derived from the Saturn V and Delta IV rockets. Proposed Constellation missions may employ both Earth Orbit Rendezvous and Lunar Orbit Rendezvous techniques.

Constellation Program

NASA has formed the Constellation Program to achieve the objectives of maintaining American presence in low Earth orbit, returning to the Moon for purposes of establishing an outpost, and laying the foundation to explore Mars and beyond in the first half of the 21st century. The Constellation Program's heritage rests on the successes and lessons learned from NASA’s previous human spaceflight programs: Mercury, Gemini, Apollo, Space Shuttle and the International Space Station (ISS).

Spacecraft

Orion will consist of two main parts, a Crew Module (CM) similar to the Apollo Command Module capable of holding four to six crew members, and a cylindrical Service Module (SM) containing the primary propulsion systems and consumable supplies. The Orion CM will be reusable for up to 10 flights, allowing NASA to construct a fleet of Orion CMs.

Current plans call for the phased introduction of Orion variants tailored for specific missions. The Block I Orion will be employed for ISS crew rotation and resupply and other Earth orbit missions, while the Block II and III variants will be designed for deep-space exploration.

Launch vehicles

As currently envisioned, the Orion spacecraft will be launched into a low earth orbit using the proposed Ares I rocket (the "Stick"). Formerly referred to as the Crew Launch Vehicle (CLV), the Ares I consists of a single Solid Rocket Booster (SRB) derived from the boosters used in the Space Shuttle system, connected at its upper end by an interstage support assembly to a new liquid-fueled second stage powered by an uprated Apollo-era J-2X rocket engine. The Orion spacecraft would be lifted into orbit atop this "stack", while a larger launch vehicle (the proposed Ares V) would be used to launch the heavier Earth Departure Stage and Altair.

In January 2007, NASA announced that a different launch vehicle design, the Ares IV, was actively under consideration for the program. If chosen, the Ares IV might replace both the Ares I and the Ares V launch vehicles for some Constellation launches at later dates, or all of them altogether.

Lockheed YF-12

2008-02-06T12:31:00.001-08:00

National Museum of USAF Lockheed YF-12

The Lockheed YF-12 was an American prototype interceptor aircraft, which the United States Air Force evaluated as a development of the CIA's highly-secret A-12 OXCART that also spawned the now-famous SR-71 Blackbird.

Design and development

The United States Air Force (USAF) YF-12 program was a development of the Lockheed A-12 OXCART spy plane designed for the CIA and first flown 26 April 1962, the first YF-12A flew on 7 August 1963. The existence of the aircraft was not officially revealed until 29 February 1964. Lockheed was able to interest the Air Force in the project after the United States Air Force had been forced to cancel the XF-108 Rapier, a Mach 3-capable interceptor intended to replace the F-106 Delta Dart in service. It was pointed out that an aircraft based on the A-12 would provide a less costly alternative to the XF-108, since much of the design and development work on the YF-12 had already been done and paid for. In 1960, the USAF agreed to take the 11th through 13th slots on the A-12 production line and have them completed in the YF-12A interceptor configuration.

The main changes involved modifying the aircraft's nose to accommodate the Hughes AN/ASG-18 fire-control radar originally developed for the XF-108, and the addition of a second cockpit for a crewmember to operate the fire control radar. The nose modifications changed the aircraft's aerodynamics enough to require ventral fins to be mounted under the fuselage and engine nacelles to maintain stability. Finally, bays previously used to house the A-12's reconnaissance equipment were converted to carry four Hughes AIM-47A (GAR-9) missiles.

SPECIFICATIONS:

Span: 55 ft. 7 in.
Length: 101 ft.
Height: 18 ft. 6 in.
Weight: 127,000 lbs. loaded
Armament: Three Hughes AIM-47A missiles
Engines: Two Pratt & Whitney J58s of 32,000 lbs. thrust each with afterburner
Crew: Two

PERFORMANCE:
Maximum speed: Mach 3+
Range: 2,000+ miles
Service ceiling: Above 80,000 ft.

Ghost In The Shell SAC: SSS

2008-02-02T23:09:00.001-08:00

Kôkaku kidôtai: Stand Alone Complex Solid State Society

Production I.G. GITS SAC SSS

Manga GITS SAC SSS

Ghost in the Shell: S.A.C. Solid State Society (S.A.C. Solid State Society, Kōkaku Kidōtai: Solid State Society) is the 2006 anime film based on the Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex series, which is based on Masamune Shirow's manga Ghost in the Shell. It was produced by Production I.G, who announced the film at the 2006 Tokyo Anime Fair, and was directed by Kenji Kamiyama.

In order to provide theatrical quality, the film premiered on the Japanese satellite PPV platform SKY PerfecTV! Perfect Choice ch160, on September 1, 2006. It also aired in Japan on the anime satellite TV network Animax starting May 27, 2007. The film was also released on DVD in Japan on November 24, 2006 and was released in the U.S. by Bandai Entertainment and Manga Entertainment, in a normal and limited edition on July 3, 2007. It was announced at Anime Expo 2006 that Solid State Society is not scheduled to be the final iteration of the Stand Alone Complex series.

A.D. 2034. It has been two years since Motoko Kusanagi left Section 9. Togusa is now the new leader of the team, that has considerably increased its appointed personnel. The expanded new Section 9 confronts a rash of complicated incidents, and investigations reveal that an ultra-wizard hacker named the Puppeteer is behind the entire series of events.

In the midst of all, Batou, who was stalking the case on a separate track, encounters Motoko. She goes away after saying, "Stay away from the Solid State Society." Batou is left with a doubt in his mind. Could Motoko be the the Puppeteer?

The series of intriguing incidents that Section 9 faces gradually link together almost artistically. Who is the Puppeteer? What will happen to Batou's relationship with Motoko? What is the full truth behind this carefully planned perfect crime? And what will the outcome be? Mysteries surround the Solid State Society...

i386

2008-02-02T22:53:00.001-08:00

Intel Museum

i386 at CPU-Info

The Intel386 is a microprocessor which has been used as the central processing unit (CPU) of many personal computers since 1986. During its design phase the processor was code-named simply "P3", the third-generation processor in the x86 line, but is normally referred to as either i386 or just 386. The 80386 operated at about 5 million instructions per second (MIPS) to 11.4 MIPS for the 33 MHz model. It was the first x86 processor to have a 32-bit architecture, with a basic programming model that has remained virtually unchanged for over twenty years and remains completely backward compatible. Successively newer implementations of this same architecture have become literally several hundred times faster than the original i386 chip during these years.

Designed and manufactured by Intel, the i386 processor was taped-out in October of 1985. Intel decided against producing the chip before that date, as the cost of production would have been uneconomical. Full-function chips were first delivered to customers in 1986. Motherboards for 386-based computer systems were highly elaborate and expensive to produce, but were rationalized upon the 386's mainstream adoption. The first personal computer to make use of the 386 was designed and manufactured by Compaq, and Andy Grove, Intel's CEO at the time, made the decision to single-source the processor, a decision that was ultimately crucial to both the processor's and Intel's success in the market.

The range of processors compatible with the 80386 is often collectively termed x86 or the i386 architecture; today, Intel prefers the name IA-32 however.

In May 2006 Intel announced that production of the 386 would cease at the end of September 2007. Although it had long been obsolete as a personal computer CPU, Intel, and others, had continued to manufacture the chip for embedded systems, including aerospace.

Everybody Loves Raymond

2008-01-31T16:02:00.001-08:00

Everybody Loves Raymond 1996 - 2005 IMDb

Everybody Loves Raymond is an Emmy, SAG, WGA winning and Golden Globe nominated American sitcom, originally broadcast on CBS from September 13, 1996 to May 16, 2005. Many of the situations from the show are based on the real-life experiences of Ray Romano (who is represented by the Ray Barone character he plays) and the writing staff. The main characters on the show are also loosely based on Romano's family members. It is one of the most critically acclaimed American sitcoms of its time. Everybody Loves Raymond was nominated for and won many awards.

Show background

The show revolves around the life of Italian-American Ray Barone, a newspaper sportswriter from Lynbrook, Long Island. Ray lives with his wife, Debra Barone, their daughter, Ally, and their identical twin sons, Michael and Geoffrey. Ray's parents and brother Robert frequently make their presence known to the frustration of Ray and especially Debra. Unfortunately for Ray, he always has to hear about it from Debra. A passive-aggressive woman, Debra particularly finds herself at odds with Ray's mother, Marie. Ray often finds himself in the middle of all the problems and arguments. His biggest nemesis is Robert, who is insecure about Ray being the favorite son. Although Robert and Ray are frequently seen fighting like children and picking on each other, the brothers are very devoted to each other. Robert frequently calls Ray "Cubby" and stands up for him, while Ray has a great admiration for Robert, who is a police officer. One very touching episode had Ray taking care of Robert after he was wounded in the line of duty. Their father, Frank, is very tough and does not like to show his feelings, but through the years several episodes were crafted to show how much he loves his family. Ray and Debra have their share of marital disagreements, with Debra frequently denying Ray sex, and Ray prefers watching sports television to talking to his wife. A recurring theme on the show has them having a long interaction each night while in bed, just before going to sleep, and sometimes there is a sweetness between them.

Main cast

* Ray Barone (Ray Romano)
* Debra Barone (Patricia Heaton)
* Robert Barone (Brad Garrett)
* Marie Barone (Doris Roberts)
* Frank Barone (Peter Boyle)

Achievements

Bravo placed the Barone family at number 41 on their list of 100 greatest TV icons of all time TV Land placed Frank's exclamation 'Holy Crap' at number 79 on their list of 100 greatest catchphrases of all time. TV Land and TV Guide placed Marie's vagina sculpture at number 62 on their list of 100 most unexpected moments in TV history. TV Guide placed Ray Barone at number 10 on their list of 50 greatest TV dads of all time.

Montauk, New York

2008-01-31T15:49:00.001-08:00

Montauk, New York 41°2′18″N 71°57′2″W
town.east-hampton.ny.us

Montauk is a hamlet (and census-designated place) in Suffolk County, New York on the South Shore of Long Island. As of the United States 2000 Census, the hamlet population was 3,851. It is the easternmost area in Long Island, and thus the easternmost area in New York State.

Strategically located on the tip of the South Fork, Suffolk County, New York peninsula it has been used as an Army, Navy, Coast Guard and Air Force base. Located 20 miles off the Connecticut coast, it is home to the largest commercial and recreational fishing fleet in New York State.

The Montauk Point Lighthouse was the first lighthouse in New York state and is the fourth oldest active lighthouse in the United States.

Montauk is a major tourist destination and it boasts six state parks. It is particularly famous for its fishing (claiming to have more world saltwater fishing records than any other port in the world) and surfing.

The Deep Hollow Ranch is the oldest cattle ranch in the United States.

Montauk is in the Town of East Hampton.

Maggie Cheung

2008-01-31T15:42:00.001-08:00

Maggie Cheung (born September 20, 1964) is a multi award-winning Chinese actress from Hong Kong. Raised in England, she has over 80 films to her credit since starting her career in 1983.

Biography

Born in Hong Kong, Maggie Cheung traces her ancestry to Shanghai, China. Her merchant-class family emigrated from Hong Kong to the United Kingdom when she was a child. Cheung spent part of her childhood and adolescence in the UK. She returned to Hong Kong in 1982 for vacation, but ended up staying for modeling assignments. Soon she got a salesgirl job at a Japanese department store as well. In 1983, she entered the Miss Hong Kong beauty pageant contest. She won second place and also bagged the Miss Photogenic award. She was a semi-finalist in the Miss World pageant the same year.

Prior to 1988, Maggie’s screen appearance was often limited to eye candy roles. One of Cheung's notable movie roles then is that of "Mei", the girlfriend of police detective "Kevin" Chan Ka Kui in Jackie Chan's Police Story movies (however, she did not reprise the role in Police Story 4: First Strike or New Police Story). Maggie frequently cited her performance in the movie As Tears Go By (1988), her first of many collaborations with film director Wong Kar-Wai 王家衛, as the piece that truly began her serious acting career. Maggie Cheung is famous for being a talented multi-lingual actress. In Centre Stage, she performed in Mandarin, Cantonese and Shanghainese fluently, switching languages with ease. In Clean, she performed in fluent English, Parisian French, Cantonese and a smattering of Mandarin. Unlike most traditional actors in Hong Kong who are Cantonese monolingual, she is a polyglot as a result of her cosmopolitan upbringing.

Audiences outside Asia have become increasingly familiar with her work, including her roles in Centre Stage (as Ruan Lingyu), In the Mood for Love, Irma Vep, 2046, Hero, and, most recently, Clean.

She married French director Olivier Assayas in 1998 but divorced him in 2001. Their relationship remained amicable, however, as in 2004 Cheung made her award-winning movie Clean with him. As part of her portrayal of the drug-addicted aspiring singer Emily Wang in Clean, Maggie Cheung performed songs written by David Roback of Mazzy Star.

On 7 February 2007, The New York Times rated Maggie Cheung as one of the 22 Great Performers in 2006 for her Cannes winning role Emily in Clean. After 25 years of making movies, Cheung is deciding to retire from acting and pursue a career as a film composer. She allows that there might be room for an occasional comedic role, but she would like to paint and compose music, after fulfilling her acting potential.

Awards

Hong Kong Film Awards
Best Actress
1989 A Fishy Story
1992 Centre Stage
1996 Comrades: Almost a Love Story
1998 The Soong Sisters
2001 In the Mood for Love

Golden Bauhinia Awards
Best Actress
1996 Comrades: Almost a Love Story

Hong Kong Film Critics Society Awards
Best Actress
1996 Comrades: Almost a Love Story

Golden Horse Awards
Best Actress
1989 Full Moon in New York
1990 Red Dust
1991 Centre Stage
1996 Comrades: Almost a Love Story
2000 In the Mood for Love

Other Awards

Berlin International Film Festival
Best Actress
1992 Centre Stage

Cannes Film Festival
Best Actress
2004 Clean

Hawaii International Film Festival
Award for Achievement in Acting

HDRI

2008-01-31T15:16:00.001-08:00

High Dynamic Range Image and Video Processing

In computer graphics and photography, high dynamic range imaging (HDRI) is a set of techniques that allows a greater dynamic range of exposures (the range of values between light and dark areas) than normal digital imaging techniques. The intention of HDRI is to accurately represent the wide range of intensity levels found in real scenes ranging from direct sunlight to shadows.

HDRI was originally developed for use with purely computer-generated images. Later, methods were developed to produce a high dynamic range image from a set of photographs taken with a range of exposures. With the rising popularity of digital cameras and easy-to-use desktop software, the term "HDR" is now popularly used to refer to the process of tone mapping together with bracketed exposures of normal digital images, giving the end result a high, often exaggerated dynamic range. This composite technique is different from, and generally of lower quality than, the production of an image from a single exposure of a sensor that has a native high dynamic range. Tone mapping is also used to display HDR images on devices with a low native dynamic range, such as a computer screen.

OpenGL

2008-01-31T15:12:00.001-08:00

OpenGL

OpenGL (Open Graphics Library) is a standard specification defining a cross-language cross-platform API for writing applications that produce 2D and 3D computer graphics. The interface consists of over 250 different function calls which can be used to draw complex three-dimensional scenes from simple primitives. OpenGL was developed by Silicon Graphics Inc. (SGI) in 1992 and is widely used in CAD, virtual reality, scientific visualization, information visualization, and flight simulation. It is also used in video games, where it competes with Direct3D on Microsoft Windows platforms.

History

In the 1980s, developing software that could function with a wide range of graphics hardware was a real challenge. Software developers wrote custom interfaces and drivers for each piece of hardware. This was expensive and resulted in much duplication of effort.

By the early 1990s, Silicon Graphics (SGI) was a leader in 3D graphics for workstations. Their IRIS GL API was considered the state of the art and became the de facto industry standard, overshadowing the open standards-based PHIGS. This was because IRIS GL was considered easier to use, and because it supported immediate mode rendering. By contrast, PHIGS was considered difficult to use and outdated in terms of functionality.

SGI's competitors (including Sun Microsystems, Hewlett-Packard and IBM) were also able to bring to market 3D hardware, supported by extensions made to the PHIGS standard. This in turn caused SGI market share to weaken as more 3D graphics hardware suppliers entered the market. In an effort to influence the market, SGI decided to turn the IrisGL API into an open standard.

SGI considered that the IrisGL API itself wasn't suitable for opening due to licensing and patent issues. Also, the IrisGL had API functions that were not relevant to 3D graphics. For example, it included a windowing, keyboard and mouse API, in part because it was developed before the X Window System and Sun's NeWS systems were developed.

In addition, SGI had a large number of software customers; by changing to the OpenGL API they planned to keep their customers locked onto SGI (and IBM) hardware for a few years while market support for OpenGL matured. Meanwhile, SGI would continue to try to maintain their customers tied to SGI hardware by developing the advanced and proprietary Iris Inventor and Iris Performer programming APIs.

As a result, SGI released the OpenGL standard.

The OpenGL standardised access to hardware, and pushed the development responsibility of hardware interface programs, sometimes called device drivers, to hardware manufacturers and delegated windowing functions to the underlying operating system. With so many different kinds of graphic hardware, getting them all to speak the same language in this way had a remarkable impact by giving software developers a higher level platform for 3D-software development.

In 1992, SGI led the creation of the OpenGL architectural review board (OpenGL ARB), the group of companies that would maintain and expand the OpenGL specification for years to come. OpenGL evolved from (and is very similar in style to) SGI's earlier 3D interface, IrisGL. One of the restrictions of IrisGL was that it only provided access to features supported by the underlying hardware. If the graphics hardware did not support a feature, then the application could not use it. OpenGL overcame this problem by providing support in software for features unsupported by hardware, allowing applications to use advanced graphics on relatively low-powered systems.

In 1994 SGI played with the idea of releasing something called "OpenGL++" which included elements such as a scene-graph API (presumably based around their Performer technology). The specification was circulated among a few interested parties – but never turned into a product.

Microsoft released Direct3D in 1995, which would become the main competitor of OpenGL. On 17 December 1997, Microsoft and SGI initiated the Fahrenheit project, which was a joint effort with the goal of unifying the OpenGL and Direct3D interfaces (and adding a scene-graph API too). In 1998 Hewlett-Packard joined the project. It initially showed some promise of bringing order to the world of interactive 3D computer graphics APIs, but on account of financial constraints at SGI, strategic reasons at Microsoft, and general lack of industry support, it was abandoned in 1999.

SU-37

2008-01-31T15:02:00.000-08:00

Sukhoi

Youtube.com SU-37 search

The Sukhoi Su-37 is a single-seat, all-weather, fighter and ground attack prototype aircraft, derived from the Su-27 'Flanker'. The Su-27 is a Russian fourth generation jet aircraft that has been exported to over 20 nations. The Su-37 test aircraft made its maiden flight in April 1996 from the Zhukovsky flight testing center near Moscow. The Su-37 is referred to as the Terminator.

The Su-37 includes several updates over the Su-27, including all-weather multi-mode passive electronically scanned array radar with synthetic aperture, terrain avoidance, terrain mapping and a rear facing radar. The airframe includes a percentage of parts made from composites, unlike the all-metal Su-27. Additionally, the Su-37 incorporates the AL-37FU engines equipped with thrust vectoring. The Su-37’s nozzles are variable in pitch only and travel plus or minus 15 degrees, but they can be operated differentially to provide a rolling moment.

In the cockpit the aircraft is the first Russian fighter aircraft with the Hands On Throttle and Stick, or HOTAS, system. The weapon system shares much with the Su-30"MK", but it lacks the large display in the back cockpit that is utilized by the weapons system officer. The cockpit features four multi-function cockpit displays instead of dial type analogue instruments and has an inclined (30 degree) pilot ejection seat. The two-grip flying control configuration was designed to prevent the pilot from flailing around when doing the manoeuvers associated with the vectored-thrust engines. Both the fixed throttle and the side-stick controller provide secure points for the pilot to brace his hands.

The Su-37 also stores a radar in the tailcone of the plane that allows it to fire missiles behind the plane.

The engine not only incorporates 2D TVC but also is tough and resistant to engine surge even during classic, inverted and flat spins, giving better reliability and maneuverability, such as when the AOA is as high as 180 degrees.

The Su-37 appeared at the 1996 Farnborough air show piloted by Sukhoi test pilot Eugeny Frolov. During the performance, the Su-37 was flipped on its back while flying at 350 km/h (217 mph) so that it faced the opposite direction, inverted and almost stationary. After pausing for two seconds the thrust vectoring was used to complete a 360 degree rotation and the aircraft moved off in its original direction of flight at only 60 km/h (37 mph).

The Su-37 can carry air-to-air and air-to-surface weapons on 12 stations. The number of missiles and bombs carried can be increased to 14 with the use of multi-payload racks.

Russia has not ordered Su-37s, but it might find customers abroad, a market that now constitutes a sizable share of Sukhoi’s income. Several prototypes have been built, but the aircraft is not in production.

SGI Indy

2008-01-31T05:23:00.001-08:00

SGI Indy Info

Introduced in 1993, the Indy was the fruit of SGI's effort to muscle into the market for desktop publishing, low-end CAD, and multimedia. At the time, the market was mostly dominated by Apple. The Indy was the first computer to include a digital video camera, and was built with a (then) forward-looking architecture including an on-board ISDN adapter. With the inclusion of analog and digital I/O, SCSI, and standard composite and S-Video inputs, the Indy really was a multimedia machine.

At the beginning of its life, the Indy came standard with 16MB of RAM. IRIX 5.1, the first OS for the Indy, did not take full advantage of the hardware due to inadequate memory management. SGI realized this and quickly increased the base specification to 32 MB, at considerable cost. Subsequent IRIX releases made huge improvements in memory usage. The latest release of IRIX available for the Indy workstations is 6.5.22.

CATIA

2008-01-31T05:14:00.001-08:00

CATIA Official

CATIA (Computer Aided Three dimensional Interactive Application) is a multi-platform CAD/CAM/CAE commercial software suite developed by French company Dassault Systemes and marketed world-wide by IBM. The software was originally intended for the development of Dassault's Mirage fighter jet, but became a runaway success and was subsequently adopted by numerous well known companies world-wide, such as Boeing and IBM. The software was also famously used by architect Frank Gehry in his building of the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao. CATIA is written in the C++ programming language. CATIA is the corner stone of the Dassault Systemes PLM software suite.

History

CATIA started as an in-house development by French aircraft manufacturer Avions Marcel Dassault, at that time customer of the CADAM CAD software.

The software name was initially CATI (Conception Assistée Tridimensionnelle Interactive - French for Interactive Aided Three Dimensional Design ), but was renamed to CATIA in 1981. At that time Dassault created a subsidiary responsible for the software development and marketing, and finalized a non exclusive distribution agreement with IBM.

In 1984, the Boeing Company chose CATIA as its main 3D CAD tool, making it the largest customer.

In 1988, with version 3, CATIA was ported from the mainframe to the UNIX platform.

In 1992 CADAM was purchased from IBM and the next year CATIA CADAM v4 was published. Subsequently in 1996 CATIA V4 was ported from one to four Unix operating systems, including IBM AIX, Silicon Graphics IRIX, Sun Microsystems SunOS and Hewlett-Packard HP-UX.

In 1998, an entirely rewritten version of CATIA, CATIA V5 was released, with support for both UNIX, Windows NT and Windows XP since 2001.

VF-1 Valkyrie

2008-01-31T05:01:00.001-08:00

Macross Mecha Manual

In the fictional series Macross and its English adaptation Robotech, the first mass-produced variable fighter (Macross) or Veritech fighter (Robotech) is called the VF-1 Valkyrie.

The VF-1 was initially designed by the legendary Japanese mecha designer Shoji Kawamori (with contributions by his Studio Nue partner Kazutaka Miyatake) in 1980-1982 to be the centerpiece mecha design of the anime series The Super Dimension Fortress Macross (1982-1983).

In Robotech, the VF-1 is most commonly referred to as the "Veritech Fighter", which is short for Variable Engineering and Robotic Integration TECHnology, but its official popular name "Valkyrie" is used in a few infrequent references.

Michael Galasso

2008-01-31T04:54:00.001-08:00

Michael Galasso

Composer, violinist and musical director Michael Galasso was born in Hammond, Louisiana in 1949, to a concert violinist father and an oboist mother. He began studying the violin at the age of 3 and had his solo debut performing Vivaldi’s Concerto in A minor with the New Orleans Philharmonic at age 11. Galasso continued his studies at Oberlin and Dartmouth Colleges.

A musician of classical formation influenced by his encounter with John Cage at the age of 18, born in the land of jazz, rock and rhythm n’blues, author for theater, cinema, dance and sound installations, this violin virtuoso has been experimenting for 30 years on a melodical and rhythmical synthesis in which his affinities with Baroque music are entwined with his American heritage as well as with Iranian and central Asia traditions.

Michael Galasso began his career composing music for Robert Wilson's "Ouverture"(1972), "The Life and Times of Joseph Stalin" (1973), "A Letter for Queen Victoria" (1974-5), and "The $ Value of Man" (1975). Also with Wilson, he has written the score for Ibsen's "Lady from the Sea" (1998), Strindberg's "A Dreamplay" (1998), voted the best foreign theater production for the 1999-2000 season by the French Theater and Music Critics Society after a performance in Paris in March 2000 at the Theatre National de Chaillot, Chekhov’s "Three Sisters" (2001), and for the theatrical version of Carl Mayer, Hans Janowitz and Robert Wiene's silent film, "The Cabinet of Doktor Caligari" (2002). In 2004, Wilson and Galasso collaborated on “Les Fables de La Fontaine” for the Comédie-Française, which premiered January 30, 2004 in Paris and has been an enormous critical and public success. In November 2004, Galasso and Wilson will premiere “2 Lips and Dancers in Space” with the Nederlands Dans Theater in Luxembourg. Galasso is presently finishing the score for “Peer Gynt”, directed by Wilson and premiering in Oslo in February 2005.

Recent film scores include Wong Kar-Wai’s “Chunking Express” and “In the Mood for Love”, Babak Payami’s Iranian film “Secret Ballot”, Tajikistan’s Djemsjed Osmonov’s “Angel on my Right Shoulder”, Sam Gabarski’s “The Tango Rashevski”, Darvish Zaim’s Turkish film, “Çamur” (Mud), and Mariana Otero’s documentary “Histoire d’un Secret” and Gabriele Salvatores’ “I am not afraid”.

Galasso also has made numerous sound/music installations, including the Giorgio Armani Retrospective at the Guggenheim Museum in New York in 2000 (the first sound installation in the New York Guggenheim's history) and the Guggenheim Bilbao in 2001. Subsequently the exhibition has traveled to the Neue National Galerie in Berlin in May 2003, followed by London’s Royal Academy of Arts in October 2003 and Rome at the Terme Diocleziano in May 2004. Other installations include the Swiss EXPO 2002, and the Basilique de Saint-Denis in Paris. Michael Galasso has also written and performed music for choreographers Karole Armitage, Andy DeGroat and Lucinda Childs.

Michael Galasso’s second album for ECM Records, “High Lines”, was released in March 2005.

Tenhi

2008-01-31T04:40:00.001-08:00

Tenhi Official

Tenhi is a Finnish band formed in 1996, playing melancholic, neofolk music. The word tenhi is an old Finnish word meaning a village elder, wise old man or seer.

The music of Tenhi is minimalistic and dark. Usually, the rhythm instrument lines follow the customs of modern rock music. The melodical instruments and vocals are however very heavily folk-influenced. The basic instrumentarium of the band consists of acoustic guitar, bass and drums. Frequent additional instruments include piano, violin, viola and flute and less frequent didgeridoo, mouth harp, harmonium, cello, udu and synthesizer.

Members

Corecrew

* Tyko Saarikko - vocals, piano, harmonium, synth, guitar, percussions, didgeridoo, mouth harp, udu
* Ilmari Issakainen - drums, piano, guitar, bass, percussions, backing vocals
* Ilkka Salminen - vocals, guitar, bass, harmonium, percussions

The corecrew writes all the material and is in charge of the cover artwork as well.

Additional/session musicians

* Inka Eerola - violin
* Janina Lehto - flute
* Jaakko Hilppö - backing vocals, live bass
* Tuukka Tolvanen - backing vocals, live guitar
* Paula Rantamäki - live violin in 2007
* Eleonora Lundell - violin, viola (1998-2001)
* Veera Partanen - flute (1999-2000)
* Kirsikka Wiik - cello (on the Väre album)

Discography

* Kertomuksia (demo, 1997)
* Hallavedet (mcd, 1998)
* Kauan (CD, 1999)
* Airut:ciwi (mcd, 2000)
* Väre (CD, 2002)
* Maaäet (CD, 2006)
* Airut:aamujen (CD, 2006)
* Folk Aesthetic 1996-2006 (3CD in book format, 2007)

Anette Olzon

2008-01-31T04:34:00.001-08:00

Anette Olzon at Nightwish.com

Anette Olzon (married name Anette Blyckert, born on June 21, 1971) is a Swedish musician and the new lead singer of Finnish symphonic power metal band Nightwish since 2007. Olzon was formerly the vocalist in the Swedish band Alyson Avenue.

Tuomas Holopainen has said that Olzon is more than just a singer, that she is a story teller in the way she sings.

Anette Olzon was raised in a musical family and has been singing since childhood. She began playing the oboe at age eight. She toured with her mother's band and sang with them at some occasions. Later, she started to take part in various talent shows and received applaudible recognition. The first band she joined (Take Cover) was a cover band at the time she was seventeen years of age. However, it was short-lived as she took part in several bands and projects. At twenty-one, she played the leading role in the rock opera/musical "Gränsland" in Helsingborg. After that she got in to the Balettakademien in Gothenburg. She sang in choirs, did studio work for various projects and occasionally performed as a wedding singer. Anette Olzon also sang a duet with Michael Bormann (ex-Jaded Heart-singer) on his album "Conspiracy". During her singing career, she has been exposed to a variety of musical genres and kinds; which reflects on the versatility of her talent on the 2007 Nightwish album "Dark Passion Play".

In her earlier days, Anette Olzon took singing lessons at the Copenhagen Music Conservatorie, in Helsingör, Denmark with a private teacher. Nowadays, when it's needed, she takes lessons from a private teacher at the Malmö Music University.

Discography

Studio albums

With Alyson Avenue

* 2000: Presence of Mind
* 2003: Omega

With Nightwish

* 2007: Dark Passion Play

Singles

With Nightwish

* 2007: Eva
* 2007: Amaranth
* 2008: Bye Bye Beautiful

Howl's Moving Castle

2008-01-31T03:20:00.001-08:00

Howl's Moving Castle Official

Hauru no ugoku shiro IMDb

Howl's Moving Castle is an Academy Award-nominated Japanese animated fantasy film, based on Diana Wynne Jones' novel of the same name, and directed by Hayao Miyazaki of Studio Ghibli. Mamoru Hosoda, director of two seasons and one movie from the Digimon series, was originally selected to direct but abruptly left the project, leaving the then retired Miyazaki to take up the director's role.

The film had its world premiere at the Venice Film Festival on September 5, 2004 and was released in Japanese theaters on November 20, 2004. It went on to gross $231,710,455 worldwide, making it one of the most financially successful Japanese films in history. The film was subsequently dubbed into English by Pixar's Peter Docter and distributed in North America by Walt Disney Pictures. It received a limited release in the United States and Canada beginning June 10, 2005 and was released nationwide in Australia on September 22 and in the UK the following September.

Awards

* Osella Awards for Technical Achievement; 61st Venice Film Festival
* Best Japanese Movie Overall; 2004 Mainichi Film Awards
* Excellence Prize, Animation; 2004 Japan Media Arts Festival
* Animation of the Year; 2005 Tokyo International Anime Fair
* Best Director (Hayao Miyazaki); 2005 Tokyo Anime Awards
* Best Voice Actor/Actress (Chieko Baisho); 2005 Tokyo Anime Awards
* Best Music (Joe Hisaishi); 2005 Tokyo Anime Awards
* Audience Award; 2005 Maui Film Festival
* 1st Runner Up, Golden Space Needle Award; 2005 Seattle International Film Festival
* Nomination, Best Animated Feature; 78th Academy Awards

Amstrad CPC

2008-01-27T10:20:00.001-08:00

amstrad.com

Amstrad CPC 464

The Amstrad CPC was a series of 8-bit home computers produced by Amstrad during the 1980s and early 1990s. CPC stood for 'Colour Personal Computer', although it was possible to purchase a CPC with a green screen (GT65/66) as well as with the standard colour screen (CTM640).

The Schneider CPC664

The first machine, the CPC 464 was introduced in 1984. It was designed to be a direct competitor to the Commodore 64 and Sinclair ZX Spectrum systems. The CPC range was very successful, and over 3 million were sold during the machine's lifespan.

Outwardly, the most distinguishing features of Amstrad's offering were the matt black console case with sharp corners and narrowly rectangular form factor (the latter due to the built-in cassette tape deck (CPC 464) or floppy disk drive (CPC 664 and CPC 6128), the keyboard's distinctly coloured special keys (all the non-typewriter-standard keys on the 464 and 664), and the unique power supply hookup with one lead going from the monitor to the computer (or RF modulator) and, on disc-based machines, one lead going the other way. A television could be used with an optional adapter, and an optional tuner was available to turn the monitor into a TV.

The CPC family

The original CPC was sold in the following configurations:

* CPC 464 – Tape deck, 64 KB RAM, square-edged keyboard
* CPC 472 – Tape deck, 72 KB RAM (although the extra 8 KB of RAM could not be used because the chip was not connected, only soldered to a dummy PCB); produced in small numbers for the Spanish market to avoid a legal ruling requiring that all computers with 64 KB or less RAM must be localized to the Spanish language, including the keyboard and screen messages. The law was subsequently changed to include machines with more than 64 KB RAM so a localised version of the 472 also exists.
* CPC 664 – 3" Floppy disk drive, 64 KB RAM, bowed keyboard; short-lived model, quickly replaced by the better-specified 6128
* CPC 6128 – 3" Floppy disk drive, 128 KB RAM (accessed using bank switching), more PC-like keyboard

An external disk drive (DDI-1) was available for the 464, incorporating the DOS in an interface unit. A second drive (FD-1) could be added to both this and 664/6128 machines. Cassette recorders could also be connected to the 664 and 6128. By and large, the later versions were compatible with earlier machines, though there were some incompatibilities in undocumented features. Third-party hardware add-ons such as Romantic Robot's popular Multiface allowed DIY backup of most tape software to disk.

Most games, especially in the early years, targeted the 64 KB RAM 464 and 664 models. However, an increasing number of applications and demos made use of the extra memory of the 6128 as time went on, to the extent that much CPC software from the 1990s will not run on an unexpanded 464/664. RAM expansions were available, the most popular being produced by dk'Tronics.

The memory layout of the system allowed the CPCs to run CP/M 2.2 and CP/M software adapted especially for the machines' terminal emulation was not uncommon. An Amstrad-specific variant of CP/M 3.1 (aka CP/M Plus) was shipped with the 6128.

Rosetta (ESA)

2008-01-26T03:00:00.000-08:00

Ariane 5 Launch of Rosetta spacecraft

Rosetta is a European Space Agency-led robotic spacecraft mission launched in 2004 intended to study the comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko. Rosetta consists of two main elements: the Rosetta space probe and the Philae lander. The probe is named after the Rosetta Stone, as it is hoped the mission will help unlock the secrets of how our solar system looked before planets formed. The lander is named after the Nile island Philae where an obelisk was found that helped decipher the Rosetta Stone.

3-D Reconstruction of Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko's nucleus from Hubble telescope observations

Timeline for the mission after its launch:

* First Earth fly-by (March 2005)
* February 25, 2007 Mars fly-by
* November 13, 2007 Second Earth fly-by
* September 5, 2008 - flyby of asteroid 2867 Šteins
* Third Earth fly-by (November 2009)
* July 10, 2010 - flyby of asteroid 21 Lutetia
* Deep-space hibernation (May 2011 - January 2014)
* Comet approach (January-May 2014)
* Comet mapping / Characterisation (August 2014)
* Landing on the comet (November 2014)
* Escorting the comet around the Sun (November 2014 - December 2015)

Einstein Ring

2008-01-26T02:52:00.000-08:00

In observational astronomy an Einstein ring is the deformation of the light from a source into a ring through gravitational deflection of the source's light by a lens. This occurs when the source, lens and observer are all aligned.

Gravitational lensing is a result from Albert Einstein's theory of General relativity. Instead of light from a source traveling in a straight line (in three dimensions), it is bent by the presence of a massive body, which distorts spacetime. An Einstein Ring is a special case of gravitational lensing, caused by the exact alignment of the source, lens and observer. This results in a symmetry around the lens, causing a ring-like structure.

Comet Shoemaker-Levy 9

2008-01-23T08:32:00.001-08:00

Hubble Space Telescope image of Comet Shoemaker-Levy 9, taken on May 17, 1994.

Comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 (SL9, formally designated D/1993 F2) was a comet that collided with Jupiter in 1994, providing the first direct observation of the collision of two solar system objects, not including collisions involving Earth. This generated a large amount of coverage in the popular media, and SL9 was closely observed by astronomers worldwide. The comet provided many revelations about Jupiter and its atmosphere and highlighted Jupiter's role in reducing space debris in the inner solar system.

The comet was discovered by astronomers Carolyn and Eugene M. Shoemaker and David Levy. Shoemaker-Levy 9 was located on the night of March 24, 1993, in a photograph taken with the 0.4-metre Schmidt telescope at the Mount Palomar Observatory in California. It was the first comet observed to be orbiting a planet rather than the Sun.

SL9 was in pieces ranging in size up to 2 kilometres in diameter, and is believed to have been pulled apart by Jupiter's tidal forces during a close encounter in July 1992. These fragments collided with Jupiter's southern hemisphere between July 16 and July 22, 1994, at a speed of approximately 60 kilometres per second. The prominent scars from the impacts could be seen on Jupiter for many months after the impact, and observers described them as more easily visible than the Great Red Spot.

One of the surprises of the impacts was the small amount of water revealed compared to prior predictions. Before the impact, models of Jupiter's atmosphere had indicated that the break-up of the largest fragments would occur at atmospheric pressures of anywhere from 300 kilopascals to a few megapascals (from three to a few tens bar), and most astronomers expected that the impacts would penetrate a hypothesised water-rich layer underneath the clouds.

Astronomers did not observe large amounts of water following the collisions, and later impact studies found that fragmentation and destruction of the cometary fragments in an 'airburst' probably occurred at much higher altitudes than previously expected, with even the largest fragments being destroyed when the pressure reached 250 kPa (2.5 bar), well above the expected depth of the water layer. The smaller fragments were probably destroyed before they even reached the cloud layer.

The visible scars from the impacts could be seen on Jupiter for many months after the impact. They were extremely prominent, and observers described them as more easily visible even than the Great Red Spot. A search of historical observations revealed that the spots were probably the most prominent transient features ever seen on the planet, and that while the Great Red Spot is notable for its striking colour, no spots of the size and darkness of those caused by the SL9 impacts have ever been recorded before.

Spectroscopic observers found that ammonia and carbon sulfide persisted in the atmosphere for at least fourteen months after the collisions, with a considerable amount of ammonia being present in the stratosphere as opposed to its normal location in the troposphere.

Counterintuitively, the atmospheric temperature dropped to normal levels much more quickly at the larger impact sites than at the smaller sites: at the larger impact sites, temperatures were elevated over a region 15,000–20,000 km wide, but dropped back to normal levels within a week of the impact. At smaller sites, temperatures 10 K higher than the surroundings persisted for almost two weeks. Global stratospheric temperatures rose immediately after the impacts, then fell to below pre-impact temperatures 2–3 weeks afterwards, before rising slowly to normal temperatures.

Fortran

2008-01-13T06:54:00.001-08:00

The Fortran Automatic Coding System for the IBM 704 (October 15, 1956), the first Programmer's Reference Manual for Fortran

Open Directory Fortran

Fortran (previously FORTRAN) is a general-purpose, procedural, imperative programming language that is especially suited to numeric computation and scientific computing. Originally developed by IBM in the 1950s for scientific and engineering applications, Fortran came to dominate this area of programming early on and has been in continual use for over half a century in computationally intensive areas such as climate modeling, Finite Element Analysis, computational fluid dynamics (CFD), computational physics, financial computing, and computational chemistry.

Fortran (a portmanteau derived from The IBM Mathematical Formula Translating System) encompasses a lineage of versions, each of which evolved to add extensions to the language while retaining compatibility with previous versions. Successive versions have added support for processing of character-based data (FORTRAN 77), array programming, module-based programming and object-based programming (Fortran 90 / 95), and object-oriented and generic programming (Fortran 2003).

The legacy of FORTRAN

Since Fortran has been in use for more than fifty years, there is a vast body of Fortran in daily use throughout the scientific and engineering communities. It is the primary language for some of the most intensive supercomputing tasks, such as weather and climate modeling, computational fluid dynamics, computational chemistry, quantum chromodynamics, simulations of long-term solar system dynamics, high-fidelity evolution artificial satellite orbits, and simulation of automobile crash dynamics. Indeed, one finds that even today, half a century later, floating-point benchmarks to gauge the performance of new computer processors are still written in Fortran.

deus ex machina

2008-01-12T01:00:00.001-08:00

deus ex machina

The phrase deus ex machina (literally "god out of a machine") describes an artificial, or improbable character, device, or event introduced suddenly in a work of fiction or drama to resolve a situation or untangle a plot (e.g. an angel suddenly appearing to solve problems).

Linguistic considerations

The Latin phrase "deus ex machina" has its origins in the conventions of Greek tragedy. It refers to situations in which a mechane (crane) was used to lower actors playing a god or gods onto the stage. Though the phrase is accurately translated as "God from a machine," in literary criticism, it is often translated to "God on a machine." The machine referred to in the phrase is the crane employed in the task. It is a calque from the Greek 'από μηχανής θεός' ápo mēchanēs theós.

The Greek tragedian Euripides is notorious for using this plot device as a means to resolve a hopeless situation. For example, in Euripides' play Alcestis, the eponymous heroine agrees to give up her own life to Death in exchange for sparing the life of her husband, Admetus. In doing so, however, she imposes upon him a series of extreme promises. Admetus is torn between choosing death or choosing to obey these unreasonable restrictions. In the end, though, Heracles shows up and seizes Alcestis from Death, restoring her to life and freeing Admetus from the promises. The first person known to have criticized the device was Aristotle in his Poetics, where he argued that the resolution of a plot must arise internally, following from previous action of the play.

Stephen R. Bourne

2008-01-09T09:31:00.001-08:00

Stephen Bourne

Steve Bourne is a computer scientist, most famous as the author of the Bourne shell (sh), which is the foundation for the standard command line interfaces to Unix.

Bourne has a Bachelor's degree in mathematics from King's College London. He has a Diploma in Computer Science and a Ph.D. in mathematics from Trinity College, Cambridge. Subsequently he worked on an ALGOL 68 compiler at the Cambridge University Computer Laboratory.

After Cambridge, Bourne spent nine years at Bell Labs with the Seventh Edition Unix team. As well as the Bourne shell, he wrote the adb debugger and The UNIX System, the second book on the UNIX system, intended for a general readership.

After Bell Labs, Bourne worked in senior engineering management positions at Silicon Graphics, Digital Equipment Corporation, Sun Microsystems and Cisco Systems. He is presently chief technology officer at El Dorado Ventures, a Menlo Park-based venture capital group in California. He is also the chair of the Editorial Advisory Board for ACM Queue, a magazine he helped found when he was President of the Association for Computing Machinery. Additionally, he is a Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery and of the Royal Astronomical Society.

ASUS Eee PC

2008-01-09T06:14:00.001-08:00

Asus EeePC

The ASUS Eee PC is a 'sub-notebook' designed by ASUS and Intel. ASUS describes the name Eee as deriving from "the three Es"; an abbreviation of their advertising slogan for the device: "Easy to learn, Easy to work, Easy to play".

Display: 7 in (17.8 cm) 800×480 TFT LCD with LED backlight
Graphics: Integrated Intel GMA 900 graphics processor (Shared Memory Architecture), additional VGA port (up to 1600×1280 pixels)
Storage: 2 GB Solid state drive (SSD) flash, 4 GB SSD, 8 GB SSD
Processor: 900 MHz Intel Celeron-M ULV 353 which has 512 kB L2 cache RAM, @ 630 MHz (70 MHz x 9) cooled by a fan
Memory: 512 MB DDR2-400 RAM, 512 MB DDR2-667, 1 GB RAM DDR2-667
Camera: 0.3 megapixel; up to 640×480, up to 30 fps

Operation: Bot Roast

2008-01-08T13:53:00.001-08:00

Operation: Bot Roast is an operation by the FBI to track down bot herders or hackers who install malicious software on computers through the Internet without the owners’ knowledge, which turns the computer into a zombie computer that then sends out spam to other computers from the compromised zombie computer, making a botnet or network of bot infected computers. The operation was launched because the vast size of the botnet poses a threat to national security.

Abilities of bot herders

* Steal the computer owner’s identity.
* Launch massive spam campaigns.
* Engage in click-fraud - schemes which artificially inflate the number of visitors to a website.
* Launch denial of service attacks that can cripple web servers and crash sites.

The operation was created to disrupt and disassemble bot herders. The FBI has identified about 1 million computers that were compromised, and to arrest the persons responsible for creating the malware, and notify the owners of infected computers.

Some early results of the operation include the charging:

* Robert Alan Soloway of Seattle, Washington, is accused of using botnets to send tens of millions of spam messages touting his website.
* James C. Brewer of Arlington, Texas, is accused of infecting tens of thousands of computers worldwide, including some at Chicago-area hospitals.
* Jason Michael Downey of Covington, Kentucky, is charged with using botnets to disable other systems.

HMAC

2008-01-07T12:33:00.001-08:00

RFC 2104 HMAC: Keyed-Hashing for Message Authentication

HMAC Algorithm in Detail

In cryptography, a keyed-Hash Message Authentication Code, or HMAC, is a type of message authentication code (MAC) calculated using a specific algorithm involving a cryptographic hash function in combination with a secret key. As with any MAC, it may be used to simultaneously verify both the data integrity and the authenticity of a message. Any iterative cryptographic hash function, such as MD5 or SHA-1, may be used in the calculation of an HMAC; the resulting MAC algorithm is termed HMAC-MD5 or HMAC-SHA-1 accordingly. The cryptographic strength of the HMAC depends upon the cryptographic strength of the underlying hash function, on the size and quality of the key and the size of the hash output length in bits.

An iterative hash function breaks up a message into blocks of a fixed size and iterates over them with a compression function. For example, MD5 and SHA-1 operate on 512-bit blocks. The size of the output of HMAC is the same as that of the underlying hash function (128 or 160 bits in the case of MD5 and SHA-1), although it can be truncated if desired. Truncating the hash image reduces the security of the MAC which is upper bound by the birthday attack.

where h is a cryptographic hash function, K is a secret key padded with extra zeros to the block size of the hash function, m is the message to be authenticated, ∥ denotes concatenation, ⊕ denotes exclusive or (XOR), and the outer padding opad = 0x5c5c5c...5c5c and inner padding ipad = 0x363636...3636 are two one-block–long hexadecimal constants.

The construction and analysis of HMACs was first published in 1996 by Mihir Bellare, Ran Canetti, and Hugo Krawczyk, who also wrote RFC 2104. FIPS PUB 198 generalizes and standardizes the use of HMACs. HMAC-SHA-1 and HMAC-MD5 are used within the IPsec and TLS protocols.

The following pseudocode demonstrates how HMAC may be implemented.

function hmac (key, message)
opad = [0x5c * blocksize] // Where blocksize is that of the underlying hash function
ipad = [0x36 * blocksize]

if (length(key) < blocksize) then
key = key || [0x00 * (blocksize - length(key))] // Pad the key if shorter than blocksize
end if

for i from 0 to length(key) - 1 step 1
ipad[i] = ipad[i] XOR key[i]
opad[i] = opad[i] XOR key[i]
end for

return hash(opad || hash(ipad || message)) // Where || is concatenation
end function

Denial of Service

2008-01-07T12:01:00.001-08:00

DoS

Understanding Denial-of-Service Attacks

ddos.org

RFC 4732 Internet Denial-of-Service Considerations

A denial-of-service attack (DoS attack) or distributed denial-of-service attack (DDoS attack) is an attempt to make a computer resource unavailable to its intended users. Although the means to, motives for and targets of a DoS attack may vary, it generally comprises the concerted, malevolent efforts of a person or persons to prevent an Internet site or service from functioning efficiently or at all, temporarily or indefinitely.

One common method of attack involves saturating the target (victim) machine with external communications requests, such that it cannot respond to legitimate traffic, or responds so slowly as to be rendered effectively unavailable. In general terms, DoS attacks are implemented by:

* forcing the targeted computer(s) to reset, or consume its resources such that it can no longer provide its intended service; and/or,
* obstructing the communication media between the intended users and the victim so that they can no longer communicate adequately.

Denial-of-service attacks are considered violations of the IAB's Internet proper use policy. They also commonly constitute violations of the laws of individual nations.

exFAT

2008-01-02T13:44:00.001-08:00

#define OEM_FLASH_PARAMETER_GUID 0A0C7E46-3399-4021-90C8-FA6D389C4BA2

msdn exFAT

msdn TFAT Overview

Extended file allocation table (exFAT) is a new file system that is better adapted to the growing needs of mobile personal storage. The exFAT file system not only handles large files, such as those used for media storage, it enables seamless interoperability between desktop PCs and devices such as portable media devices so that files can easily be copied between desktop and device. In addition, exFAT can be adopted with minimal effort. The exFAT file system encapsulates standard FAT and TFAT functionality.

# Enables the file system to handle growing capacities in media, increasing capacity to 32 GB and larger.
# Handles more than 1000 files in a single directory.
# Speeds up storage allocation processes.
# Removes the previous file size limit of 4 GB.
# Supports interoperability with future desktop OSs.
# Provides an extensible format, including OEM-definable parameters to customize the file system for specific device characteristics.

struct
{
GUID OemParameterType; //Value is OEM_FLASH_PARAMETER_GUID
UINT32 EraseBlockSize; //Erase block size in bytes
UINT32 PageSize;
UINT32 NumberOfSpareBlocks;
UINT32 tRandomAccess; //Random Access Time in nanoseconds
UINT32 tProgram; //Program time in nanoseconds
UINT32 tReadCycle; // Serial read cycle time in nanoseconds
UINT32 tWriteCycle; // Write Cycle time in nanoseconds
UCHAR Reserved[4];
}
FlashParameters;