• When will these aliens roll out their subspace frequency high bandwidth internet access so we can dispense with cable, ISDN, and ADSL?
• Are they currently working on an awesome multithreaded IP stack for the kernel?
• Will these aliens donate some of their idle CPU cyles to the SETI@HOME project?
  

  ----

  Pickup, vim, vitality and punch..... That's pep!

Why donate cycles? Just step forward and say "Hi!". -> ETI found, so S terminated. ;-)

Regards, Ulli

-- Give him Head? Be a Beacon?
(If you can't figure out how to E-Mail me, Don't. :P)

It does work though, but the energy requirements are ridiculous

Basic premise is you get an umberella, coat it in metal, and where the handle is, put a sphere, about 3" across (size may or may not be important)

Then stick a ridiculous voltage potential between the sphere and the 'keeps the rain off your head' bit of the umberella. If you measure it, it will start to get 'lighter'

Lotsa things actually work, just that you're not allowed to know about them.

bibi

-- Give him Head? Be a Beacon?
(If you can't figure out how to E-Mail me, Don't. :P)

Someone's been on the pipe again, methinks.

We have no idea where the drawings from which we derived our TCAP came from.

Bwahaha. Right.

I find it pathetic that such crap has made it through /. filtering. Things like this wouldn't even be funny at Segfault.

My feeling is that /. has been becoming less and less reliable those last three months. When I first came here 10 months ago, it seems that articles and reactions were much less childish and much more dependable. What's happening?

--
Quotes 'R' Us is way cool. 'Least, I think so.

Using redundant circuitry, you have some capacity to fix defects in the wafer. This is more useful for regular architectures composed of small functional components, or at least those composed of several instances of each functional component.

If one ignores both power consumption and the possibility of errors in the portions of the wafer containing redundant circuits, redundancy looks like a panacea - simply add as much as you like until you can almost always fix the defects that will occur.

It's never that simple. Those redundant circuits are also likely to contain some defects of their own. You can partly mitigate this by reducing the amount of extra circuitry by moving the detection functionality off the wafer (for manufacturing at least). Since this only has to be done once, there's no point wasting silicon on that. This idea helps, but doesn't solve the problem.

The next step might be to use cleverly designed redundant circuits can tolerate some defects without malfunction, but there is still an associated portion where any defect of sufficient size will break the entire wafer. The more redundancy you add, the more likely there is to be such a defect.

In the end (to a very simple first approximation), it's a tradeoff between redundancy improving the yield of the original circuitry, and decreasing yield due to the possibility of fatal defects in the redundant circuitry - but you're much better off using redundancy than not.

The other point is that most of the algorithms designed to detect and correct defects for most architectures are NP-complete or computationally infeasible (i.e. exponential time complexity or worse). That means they are really hard problems, but also that advances in heuristics might also bring about incremental yield gains.

Cheers, DrMazz.

--
Quotes 'R' Us is way cool. 'Least, I think so.

-- Give him Head? Be a Beacon?
(If you can't figure out how to E-Mail me, Don't. :P)

The funniest stuff is actually on the rest of ACC's site. Check out their history, for a look at their founder visionary's mugshot and learn how they invented "A very potent cypher system which even today can not be decoded using any existing code breaker but itself (tech item 'm').

I particularly like item 'r' (Office of the Future), of which MacOS and Windows are apparently derivative products and items 'w' (Eurodollars and Wall Street's automatic trading system).

Oh yeah, and item 'a' (a programming language which turned calculators into true minicomputers in 1968 was apparently invented by ACC before they were even founded in 1970.

a little fish in a big pond
there is no .sig here... it is a .figment of your imagination

The e4 staff recently learned that IBM DEEP BLUE may soon have a serious computational competitor: a newly designed supercomputer, "Debbi-1", is reportedly being readied by American Computer Company. Debbi-1 is said to be based on AMERICAN COMPUTER's "XB-70 Valkyrie" supercomputer, a design which uses the latest INTEL technology, reputed to be similar in nature to the largest supercomputer on earth -- which is presently located at Sandia National Laboratories.

1. Save some money
2. Buy shares in this company
3. Sleep for a couple of years
4. Sell the shares for about 100 times as much as I payed for them.
5. Sit back and laugh while the complany goes down in flame as even the really stupid investors realizes it's a scam.

If there is one single thing I regret, it is that I did not buy shares in Opticom a couple of years ago.

I have changed my mind, after realizing that this is a joke, not a scam. My new TODO-list is now:

1. Save some money
2. Use them to buy pizza,cola,new computers and cartoons
3. GOTO 1

-- Give him Head? Be a Beacon?
(If you can't figure out how to E-Mail me, Don't. :P)

THIS REALLY WORKS!!

Send 10^30 deuterium atoms to each of the five planets on this list. Then, remove the entry at the #1 position of this list, move all the other entries one level up the list, and enter the name of your planet at the #5 position. Within 50 planetary revolutions, you will be supplied with enough deuterium to power an entire industrial civilization!

Act NOW and receive a free Illudium Q-36 Explosive Space Modulator!!

Remember, this plan depends on your honesty to work!
/.
If the government wants us to respect the law, it should set a better example.

-- Wishing that modern PCs had vector monitors.

The article does state that this is 90gb storage, plus error correction, but gives no details. Note that modern hard drives would be useless without all sorts of error correction going on internally -- the native media error rates are already high enough to render them unusable in a "raw" state. The question ask about any high-density storage is: How much storage is left after applying error correction sufficient to the intended application?

But! I spent some time reading their "forum" section. This is a truly frightening place; there seem to be three or four posts daily asking for corroborative links, which are responded to by "avatars" flaming the bejeezus out of the querant. I'm bothered by this; I'm so used to /.'s freewheeling, the-ones-that-know-tell-everyone-else-what-the-real-deal-is nature of slashdot forums. The conscensus of this /. forum is to dismiss it; this is a joke or publicity stunt. In fact it isn't. These guys take themselves very seriously, and are openly hostile to any and all references to actual (peer-reviewed) research.

Ask Ed Gehrman what he's experienced with this site. He's posted several comments on their site, but then gets childishly (and publicly) ridiculed by the maintainers of the forum, not on the merit of his posts, but the size of his genitalia, literacy, family, etc. This from the supposed CS/EE's, makers of Tommorow's Tommorrow's Technology who can't even spell "teraherz" or "dialectrics" (sic).

I sent Ed a link to Third Voice, and did a touch of debunking myself. If we all went to the site & tore apart their claims, perhaps we can rescue the idiots who're listening to their claims (and sending $$ and equipment to further research, believe it or not. I saw the posts on the forum today).

Anyway, that's my perfect scenario, now that this snake oil operation as once again resurfaced on /.: what if 1000's of /.ers descend on their little party armed with facts and reason... "what a wonderful world it would be..."

So go forth, my fellow Knights of Reason and Heroines of Truth (or vice/versa :) ). Take up your expertise, your passion, your wit, and take these goons to task! Yield no quarter, take no prisoners, kick ass, forget names, and have fun with it!

jaz 'guevera'

I smoke sigs, period.