All I can say is... Cool!!

<grin>

The real question is...would it correctly translate to and from "All your base are belong to us"?

What is "correctly" in this case?

All your secret are belong to us?

DISCLAIMER: I have NOT read any of the EULA for their service, and this may be covered therein.

<hat style="tinfoil"> An exaggeration, I know. Still, the cynic in me can't help but imagine that someone else has come up with the idea of using, say, a keyword list and filtering certain "interesting" communications aside for further scrutiny. They have the source and destination telephone numbers, too. Since they ARE a phone company, it would be easy enough to pre-populate a filter with phone numbers. Of course, they'd need to be circumspect about it, because if word got out, it might dry up business. Sure, there's also Google's translate service as well as Apple's Siri, and a host of others (email, voice mail, etc.)</hat>

IOW, Is it a wiretap when both parties voluntarily go through your service?

Hey now. I once wrote a 1200 line c program just to display "hello, worlf!

"yes, "worlf".

LOL! (Wipes coffee from screen)

Nice try at Klingon, but I think you misspelled the commander's name?!

If someone could look at that code and figure out what it does in 5 minutes, I would consider them a guru.

Sounds like fun! Can you provide a link so we can see? I'm struggling to imagine how in the world it could take 1200 lines! Long ago, I stumbled upon a huge hello world program that used "standard" code for arg parsing internationalization, localization, etc. but I don't recall it being anywhere near THAT large!

Thanks again for the laugh!

I would go with good ol` fashion "bunch o` lines" bar codes. Easy to make yourself, should be easy to attach to a book (or not, maybe just have it loose between the cover and first page), lots of cheap readers and most just emulate a keyboard so easy to interface with. From there I'd probably throw together a little home brew. What you are asking for does not really sound complicated, the software side sounds like a weekend project for just the basic requirements. Even if you just do it as a basic web app. Be sure to add a title based search for if the barcode gets lost, so the bar code just becomes a convenience and not a requirement to use,

Good suggestions!

For those books which lack a bar code on the jacket, make a book cover and apply the bar code to THAT. (Was a rite of passage every school year as a child that we'd make book covers for all our books. By ten-years-old, I was doing all my books unassisted. We just used paper grocery bags, but you could certainly use some kind of low-acid paper if you'd prefer.)

As for constructing a bar code, there's free bar-code software out there (I've used pbmupc). The basic format is a 1-digit type, a 5-digit manufacturer code, a 5-digit product code, and a check digit. Create a manufacturer code that's reserved for your non-UPC'd books (31337 would be cool, but I think it might already be taken), and then just use a sequence number to identify the individual books.

Lastly, have fun! It's certainly a more interesting project than writing a "hello world" program!

The article suggests that ad hoc collaboration was important for their success.

Not especially noted, though, and far more important in my mind, is that workers had their own "huts" where they could customize their work space to their liking and which provided isolation from distractions. This, to my mind, facilitates concentration.

There are times when I want to bounce a problem off someone and get a fresh perspective. More frequently, though, I just want a few hours without interruption or distraction. A 2-minute question from a coworker can require me to take 20-30 minutes to get back into the zone and get my mind back around all the details that I am trying to sort out.

Providing separate spaces for concentration and for collaboration is the key.

so the 100,000 tons, times 2000 pounds per ton, divided by 13 (as per article only half the yield of dry corns 26 lbs. per gallon ethanol), gives 15 million gallons of ethanol. the USA uses 380 million gallons of gasoline per day.

If the yield is half that of corn, and you need 26 lbs. of corn for one gallon of ethanol, then you'd need 52 lbs. of this waste for one gallon of ethanol. So, divide by 52 instead of 13. This would reduce the yield you calculated by 4.

This could still (pun intended) be used by the vintner to potentially reduce their operating costs, and maybe produce a surplus. Depends on cost of the equipment, efficiency, etc.

There's (at least) two sides to this:

Personal:

Credit agencies: So, this is a tech site, but before getting down-and-dirty with trying to fix his computer I would strongly suggest contacting the credit bureaus and put a hold on things. This will protect him from someone trying to open a new credit account in his name.

Credit cards and Banks: Depending on your level of paranoia, have him contact his credit card companies and banks and ask them to issue new cards. Of course, that may in turn require updating any pre-authorized billing he may have set up.

Authorities: Consider contacting the police and/or your Attorney General. They may be interested to hear a report of this.

Technical:

Forensics. If there's any question about needing to retain documentation about this, consider pulling the compromised drive and storing it. If access to existing data is necessary, put in an external enclosure, mount it read-only under Linux, and copy data from it.

Passwords: change passwords on all on-line accounts from a non-compromised system.

History: Look in whatever history information you can get. Take a look at his browser history, firewall log, command line history, registry, etc. This may help you to assess what level of damage you're dealing with.

Clean or Fresh? One can probably get away with formatting the drive and reinstall. But, in full paranoia mode, have him buy a new PC (cost of this provides reinforcement of prior warnings that were ignored.) Restore data from malware-scanned backups or from read-only access from pulled drive. I've read reports about malware hiding in USB keyboards and printers, so a reformat and restore onto the original machine may not be sufficient.

Family:

Possibly the hardest part of this is the fact that you're dealing with a parent. They were (hopefully) patient when you were learning all about the world as a child. It's helpful to try and bring an attitude of patience and tolerance to this situation. Let him face the consequences of his actions by having him make the phone calls to banks, credit agencies, etc. Let him pay for the cost of a new drive or PC. (Negative reinforcement) But also thank him for being honest with you about what he had done. Better this than to find out later he'd been scammed out of thousands of dollars because he was afraid to tell you what he had done. (Positive reinforcement.)

Finally: good luck!

Clock mesh technology produces a much lower clock skew compared to a conventional clock tree and, more importantly, is inherently OCV tolerant. On-chip variations (OCV) derated clock mesh designs generally have both lower skew and higher performance than clock tree designs. source: http://www.design-reuse.com/articles/21019/clock-mesh-benefits-analysis.html

Many thanks! Great article! Looks like getting the clock signal across the chip is an understood problem.

Which leads me to a question I'm not sure how to phrase, so please bear with me. At a high level, there's "data" and there's "processing". It seems to me that as we crank up the clock rate, latencies in accessing the data can be problematic unless the data is "nearby" I recall that Intel was working on Knight's (bridge? landing? something-or-other) which had lots of smaller cores on one die. IOW, it gets the processing and the data closer together. Is that the shape of things to come? What other technologies, if any, are available to keep the flow of processing at its peak?

Thanks again for the clock mesh info!

To avoid clock skew, you regenerate the clock. You can use a phase locked loop to sync to another clock, and generate a new clock signal synced with this clock but with an adjustment to the phase.

That makes sense! Thanks for the reply!

P.S. Editors - Please, more articles like this one! I *really* appreciate having a chance to ask questions, and learn from, experts in the field instead of relying upon dumbed-down, PR fluff pieces.

Any increase in performance without reducing size is a step forwards.If speed increases, for example, we'd go from 4GHz to 120GHz, which is at the low end of the scale mentioned in the summary (ie, it goes up to a few Terahertz in theory)So we'd be at the start of a whole new clock speed race.

That sounds great, but at those speeds the distance traveled per tick gets *much* smaller. I see a challenge in trying to propogate(sp?) a clock signal across the chip to have things work in concert with each other. I'm more a software guy than HW so I may be missing something obvious? ISTR an article here about a year or two ago about clockless logic. Would we need something like that in order to make a modern CPU out of this tech?

tl;dr How do you keep the clock from getting skewed up?

Have you considered astronomy or sub-atomic physics?

For example, Kepler, which examines a vast amount of data trying to find slight dips in stars' brightness to detect exoplanets. Contact the folks at planethunters.org for info and ideas.

Most any large-scale telescope's operation entails finding needles of information in haystack of data. VLT, SKA, etc.

Also take a look at particle physics ala CERN and the search for the Higg's particle. Again, analysis of vast amounts of data that I'd think CUDA skills would be of great help.

For starters, I'd search Wikipedia for telescopes and spider out from there on all the different kinds, and the projects they are used on. Ditto for sub-atomic particles.

Best wishes on your pursuits!