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In an unknown location, a handful of Australia's best known companies and government agencies are undertaking secret tests in a mock cyberwar, as the country's infrastructure comes under attack in a simulated online war named Cyber Storm II.

Several government agencies are taking part in the exercise, including the Australian Federal Police, the Office of the Attorney General and Department of Defence. Of the 50 Australian organisations taking part in the international exercise, only 28 were willing to reveal their involvement.
From the financial sector are Commonwealth Bank, National Australia Bank, Westpac, ANZ, Bank of Queensland, Bendigo Bank and Citigroup. The Australian Stock Exchange and the Reserve Bank of Australia also participated.
The energy sector is well represented too, with Woodside Energy, Country Energy, Energex, Energy Networks Association, Ergon Energy as well as South Australia's Department of Transport, Energy and Infrastructure.
Participants from the IT vendor community include Cisco and Microsoft, along with smaller organisations such as ISP Internode, and domain registry organisations Ausregistry, AU Domain Administration and Melbourne IT -- owner of WebCentral.
Australia's Computer Emergency Readiness Team (AusCERT), is also taking part in the exercise, three years after its director criticised the Federal government for lacking a strategy to deal with a cyberattack.
"We don't have a national cyber response plan -- if something happened tomorrow, nobody has a clue who does what," Graham Ingram said at the time.
Australia's two largest telcos, Telstra and Optus, are also involved.
Ask not what we can do for our country but what we can't...
MelbourneIT participated in the Cyber Storm exercise for the first time this year. Of the dozen or so tests that have been specific to Australia, it has been involved in four, according to its chief technology officer, Bruce Tonkin.
"A lot of the exercises have involved sharing information and finding the right people in a time of emergency," Tonkin told ZDNet.com.au.
"The US [which is also taking part, alongside New Zealand, the UK and Canada] was trying to have some global scenarios but also at the same time each country is running its own scenarios," he said.
Although the US government has provided the infrastructure for the exercise, such as the control centre in Victoria, it has not dominated the exercise, said Tonkin. "There has been close liaison with the US. They've sent people to our meetings and we've sent our people to theirs."
The tests have also attempted to uncover the limits of responsibilities under an attack to ensure that people don't pursue the wrong channels under time-critical attack conditions.
"The exercise is helping educate people on what MelbourneIT can and cannot do in an emergency," Tonkin noted. "Some things we can help with -- we might control a domain name but that doesn't mean we control the Web site," he added.


http://www.zdnet.com.au/news/softwar...0.htm?feed=rss

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Dual Core Processing: Over-simplified, demystified and explained.
by Doug Kronlund published Sep 9, 2004
OR
The spare cores theory
The latest buzz in the processor industry is about dual core processors. AMD may be the first to take the limelight with their announcement of dual core AMD Opteron processors set to launch in mid-2005 but Intel and IBM are cueing up their dual core processors as well.
A dual core processor is exactly what it sounds like. It is two processor cores on one die essentially like having a dual processor system in one processor. AMD's Opteron processor has been dual processor capable since its inception. Opteron was designed with an extra HyperTransport link. The relevance of it was mostly overlooked. HyperTransport Technology simply means a faster connection that is able to transfer more data between two chips. This does not mean that the chip itself is faster. It means that the capability exists via the HyperTransport pathway for one chip to "talk" to another chip or device at a faster speed and with greater data throughput.
We knew that HyperTransport Technology would provide for a faster connection to system memory, the GPU and the rest of the motherboard but back in the fall of 2003 we thought of the extra HyperTransport link as a connection to another physical processor.


It didn't dawn on us that the "extra" processor could be on the same die. While some will say "I knew that" most didn't pick up on it.
AMD have the added punch of being able to drop their dual core Opteron processors into existing 940-pin sockets. This upgrade path is extremely favorable as all it will require is a processor swap and, perhaps, a BIOS update.
Intel are continuing with their Pentium 4 cores by releasing two flavors codenamed Paxville and Dempsey. The codenames will very likely change once the marketing department gets their hands on it as "Introducing the new Dempsey" has a very lackluster ring to it.
MAC orientated Think Secret posted IBM plans on the PowerPC 970MP codenamed Antares and rumored to clock in at 3GHz with a 1GHz EI (Elastic Interface) bus.
The horses are now in the paddock. AMD, INTEL and MAC loyalists are beginning to group at the fence to eye up their favorite and the competition. The post parade is still a ways off and with post time now set at mid-2005 it's anybody's guess who will be out of the gate first.
Why dual core?
Why the shift to dual core and how will this impact the gigahertz performance race? Who or what will dual core processing benefit and will it be sought after by enthusiasts or left buried deep inside the dark recesses of server rooms?
The broad brush paints a processor as a device that executes a series of instructions to tell it what to do which, in turn, tells everything else it interacts with what to do. The faster it can do this the better. "Faster" can be directly related to clock speed but don't make the mistake of thinking that INTEL's higher clock speeds make it "faster" than AMD.
Both AMD and INTEL scaled up the clock speeds of their processors in a very short amount of time but have recently slowed the curve. AMD moved from the 1GHz "Thunderbird" to the Athlon64 FX53 in In a little less than 4 years which is impressive considering from 1997 until 2000 the K6 processor family saw a mere 4-500 MHz clock speed increase.
It is the flattening of the clock speed curve that some are reasoning why a shift to dual core. Some have surmised that AMD and INTEL have hit clock speed walls and another route is being taken to continue the performance curve and stay top of mind with new product releases. The problem with winding up clock speeds is heat. At present the processor engine can operate at only so much RPM before the engine will seize. Heat is the enemy of any processor and high clock speeds mean high heat and that means errors. A Windows PC running at 10GHz isn't much good if it can't make it past booting up before crashing.
That heat comes from power. It takes a lot of juice to crank up a processor to high clock speeds and a processor with that much electricity running around the die is prone to noise. It's not audible noise like a high RPM cooling fan but electrical noise otherwise akin to interference. The pathways on a processor are microscopically close together. The more power that runs through these pathways due to the requirement of higher clock speeds means that there will be a small amount of electrical radiation from one pathway to the next. That leakage could corrupt the data in another pathway. Corrupted data means errors which means a program could get cranky.
Think of it like a hot element on a stove. A hand can be placed fairly close with the burner on low. Turn the burner up to high and it get's pretty uncomfortable to keep a hand at the same distance it was when the burner was on low. It may even burn a hand. The radiated heat from the burner "corrupts" the hand resulting in a burn. In a processor the thermal heat is an issue but it's also the electrical noise like a radio station that isn't quite tuned in. The data is "dirty" and the song isn't clear enough to understand.
Are two cores better than one?
There will most likely be three terms that come up to fuel the dual core debate; pipeline, cache and bus.
This is the most basic of explanations of what a processor pipeline is. First the data instruction set is needed.


A processor loads instructions into the pipeline. Think of the pipeline like a conveyor belt. The data is processed sequentially one after another.


The AMD processor pipeline is shorter than the INTEL processor pipeline and this is one of the reasons why AMD runs at a lower clock speed.
Pipelining, like most things in life, is good in moderation. Making a processor's pipeline too short causes a longer minimum clock period which hinders the manufacturer's ability to ramp up the clock speed. Making the pipeline very long allows faster clock speeds however it also increases the cost of stalls and flushes which negatively affects performance and also increases the amount of resources required to pipeline the processor.
This is discussed in-depth in Short-Media's Pipelining Explained article.
A shorter pipeline means that more work has to be done in the pipeline per clock cycle thus the clock speed cannot be as high compared to a processor with a longer pipeline. However, with a shorter pipeline, the data gets through it faster thus balancing the equation. This is one of the reasons why an AMD processor can compete with higher clocked INTEL processors.


Data that that is continually used in preparation for the pipeline is stored in the processor's cache and a processor is smart enough to anticipate what data it may require.


If the processor needs to reach outside of the cache then it does so through the bus to system RAM. Now remember that the processor cache is running at the same clock speed as the processor itself. If it is a 2 GHz processor then the speed limit on the highway between cache and the rest of the processor is 2GHz. If the processor has to reach out through the bus to main system memory then it must slow down to that bus speed. A bus speed of 400 MHz is five times slower than the 2 GHz example.
In layman's terms think of the processor as a carpenter. The carpenter's truck is system memory and the cache are the tools he's packed into the house for the job. The carpenter has anticipated what tools he may need to do the job. If the tool is not at hand then he must go back to the truck to get the right tool thus slowing down the job at hand.
Putting it all together
Two pairs of hands make the work go faster. This is quite true in computers with dual processors especially with SMP (Symmetric Multiprocessing) software. Not all software is SMP aware. In fact only a small percentage of it is. SMP capability is something that must be written into the code. The program must know that it can utilize two processors to complete processes simultaneously. This is known as multithreading.
A dual core processor is between a single core processor and a dual processor system for architecture. A dual core processor has two cores but will share some of the other hardware like the memory controller and bus. A dual processor system has completely separate hardware and shares nothing with the other processor.
A dual core processor won't be twice as fast as a single core processor nor will it be as fast as a dual processor system.
It will fall somewhere in the middle but there are going to be specific advantages.
There will be two pipelines and that means there can be two sets of instructions being carried out simultaneously.


There will also be two processor caches to keep more of the necessary "tools" or data on the processor die for faster access.
The trick will be the bus. If everyone wants on the bus at the same time then there will be the Keystone Cops comedy of errors as everyone tries to squeeze through the door at the same time. The two processor cores have to be designed to be smart enough to "wait" for the other to finish accessing the bus.
Now all of this is happening at the nanosecond level so don't think there's time for a coffee. Nanosecond wait states means there's not even enough time to THINK about thinking about having a coffee.
To SMP or not to SMP?
The processor engineers have probably already thought about tackling the SMP situation. What good is a dual core processor if the software only recognizes and then uses only one of the cores? The majority of software is not written to utilize multithreading at present. This breaks open a whole new can of worms in concepts of parallel computing.
Intel's Hyper-Threading is a single processor logical variation of dual core processors. AMD has just taken it one step further with two physical cores on one processor die. Could AMD's engineers have cracked the hardware problem of a dual core processor and load balancing a program that isn't written for multithreading?
This is where dual core processors could fall short of expectations for mainstream users. If the software cannot "see" the second processor then it will not benefit from it. Programs, such as Adobe Photoshop, are SMP aware and are much faster on a dual processor system. There is no doubt that a program like Photoshop will be much faster on a dual core system than its single core counterpart. The majority of operating systems do recognize and support at least two processors. There is some load balancing of non-SMP applications but not as efficiently as those written for multithreading.


http://icrontic.com/articles/dual_core

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University of Saskatchewan Canada Research Chair John Tse and colleagues in Germany have identified a new family of superconductors – research that could eventually lead to the design of better superconducting materials for a wide variety of industrial uses.

In an article published in the journal Science, the team has produced the first experimental proof that superconductivity can occur in hydrogen compounds known as molecular hydrides.
“We can show that if you put hydrogen in a molecular compound and apply high pressure, you can get superconductivity,” said Tse. “Validation of this hypothesis and understanding of the mechanism are initial steps for design of better super-conducting materials.”

Dr. John Tse and colleagues in Germany have identified
a new family of superconductors -- research that could
eventually lead to the design of better superconducting
materials for a wide variety of industrial uses.
(Credit: Image courtesy of University of Saskatchewan)

Superconductors conduct electricity without creating friction or heat loss. An electric current can therefore flow in a loop of superconducting wire indefinitely with no power source. Examples of existing superconducting materials include magnets used in MRI machines and the magnets that enable high-speed trains to float above the track without friction or energy loss as heat.
Team member Mikhail Eremets of the Max Plank Institute in Germany did the laboratory work in detecting superconductivity in the hydrogen compound silane, while Tse and his graduate student Yansun Yao provided the theoretical basis for understanding the mechanism involved and identified the key chemical structures.
Most commercial superconducting materials have to operate at very low temperatures which requires expensive super-cooling equipment.
“Our research in this area is aimed at improving the critical temperature for superconductivity so that new superconductors can be operated at higher temperatures, perhaps without a refrigerant,” said Tse.
It has long been hypothesized that hydrogen, the simplest of the elements, may be able to conduct electricity without creating friction or heat loss (superconductive behavior) if it’s compressed into a very dense solid form. Though many researchers have tried using pure hydrogen, they have not been able to achieve the necessary hydrogen density to produce superconductivity.
Instead of using pure hydrogen, the Germany-Canada team, following an earlier suggestion by Prof. Neil Ashcroft at Cornell University, compressed hydrogen-rich molecules (hydrides). They were able to reach the necessary density for superconductivity at much lower pressure than with pure hydrogen – an achievement that will shed greater understanding on the fundamental nature of superconductivity.
The U of S work, funded by NSERC and the Canada Research Chairs program, involved extensive calculations – some taking as long as a month – at the WestGrid computing facility and with the Canada Foundation for Innovation-funded high-performance computing facility at the U of S.
In related research, Tse’s team is using the Canadian Light Source synchrotron to study high pressure structures of other hydrides systems on potential superconductivity and making use of them to store hydrogen for fuel cells.


http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases...0318223250.htm

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Windows XP Troubleshooting Tutorial


Though Windows XP is Microsoft's most popular desktop operating system, it is not without its challenges. Like with any OS or application, troubleshooting Windows XP can be frustrating for Windows administrators. Fortunately, with the right tips any admin can troubleshoot Windows XP desktop issues with relative ease, and our Windows XP Troubleshooting Tutorial is desgined to help IT pros do just that. This tutorial provides troubleshooting tips that every admin should know, with advice on troubleshooting Windows XP startup problems and the dreaded Blue Screen of Death. You'll also find info on how to troubleshoot features such as Windows XP System Restore and Device Manager, network and printer problems and more.

Troubleshooting Windows XP

How to troubleshoot Windows XP startup problems
One of the most common troubleshooting problems in Microsoft Windows XP involves the failure of a system to start up properly. These failures can be caused by a number of issues, including poorly written or malicious software, faulty device drivers, hardware incompatibilities, corrupt or missing system files and incorrect system configurations. Determining the source of the problem -- and fixing it -- is easier if you use a methodical, step-by-step approach.
Where to start
The first question that should be asked when troubleshooting Windows XP startup problems is: What changed? If a user has just loaded new software, added new hardware, updated drivers or made a change to the Windows XP system configuration, you should assume this was the cause of the issue until you have ruled it out by undoing the change. This includes operating system updates from Microsoft, which have been known to cause an occasional issue. If a recent change is not a potential cause of the Windows XP startup failure, you should suspect hardware failure, viruses or malicious software or data corruption. Troubleshooting the issue will depend on the point at which startup fails. The further along in the startup process the failure occurs, the easier it is to troubleshoot and repair.
If the workstation starts normally and fails after logon, then the problem may be related to a user profile, network logon script, application, driver or service. If Windows XP produces an error message or blue screen, copy the message and check Microsoft's Knowledge Base to see if it is a known issue and if a workaround or patch exists. If the issue is not in Microsoft's database, try searching technical discussion groups, third-party sites or Usenet.
If you do not receive an error message, and the system simply hangs or continually restarts, there are several troubleshooting techniques you can try. For example, you can try logging in with a different account, or a local account. You can also perform a clean boot or try booting into Safe Mode.
When troubleshooting Windows XP, if the system will not start in Normal Mode or Safe Mode -- it's usually not a good sign. This may be the result of corrupt or missing system files, a corrupt registry, hardware drivers or failed services. Your first step is to press F8 during Windows XP Startup and select the Last Known Good Configuration option from the Windows Advanced Options Menu. If Windows XP boots normally, check the event logs and hardware manager for clues as to what may have caused the failure. You may also want to check the Add/Remove Programs menu for any new applications that may have contributed to the failure.
The Last Known Good Configuration and Chkdsk
If the Last Known Good Configuration fails, the next step is to start the Windows XP Recovery Console. The Windows XP Recovery Console is a command line utility that can be used to troubleshoot a number of issues in the event that Windows XP cannot start, including starting and stopping services and drivers. You can start the Recovery Console by booting from the Windows XP Startup CD and pressing "R" to repair when the "Welcome to System Setup" screen appears, then press "C" to start the Recovery Console. If you receive an error on startup stating that a system file is missing or corrupt, Recovery Console can be used to replace those files as well.
If you are unable to determine if a driver or service is responsible for the Windows XP startup failure, you should run the Windows XP Checkdisk utility from the Recovery Console by typing CHKDSK at the command prompt. This utility scans your hard drive and checks for problems with the disk or file system, which may result in corrupt or missing system files.
These Windows XP troubleshooting techniques should usually help you figure out the source of the startup problems. However, if you are still unable to determine the cause of startup failure at this point, you do have a few options left.
If your Windows XP machine won't boot at all, you can try using your emergency Windows XP boot floppy. If your hard drive's boot sector or Windows' basic boot files have been corrupted, this disk will circumvent the problem and boot you into Windows XP. If you don't have an emergency boot floppy, you may be able to use one created on another PC running Windows XP, but there's no guarantee that it will boot your machine.
Troubleshooting Windows XP slow startup issues
One way to troubleshoot Windows XP when the system is slow to startup is by disabling annoying and unnecessary Windows XP startup programs. By far the easiest way to temporarily disable startup programs is to boot the system into Safe Mode, as Safe Mode boots Windows XP using a bare configuration. It loads only the essential device drivers, and Windows does not load any startup programs. That way, if a particular device driver or startup program is causing problems, you can boot Windows XP without loading it. You are then free to disable or remove the driver, service or application that is causing the problem.
You can access Safe Mode by pressing the F8 key just before Windows XP begins to boot (you may have to press F8 repeatedly). Upon doing so, the Windows boot menu will be displayed, which gives you several different boot modes to choose from, such as Safe Mode with Networking, Safe Mode with Command Prompt and Directory Services Restore Mode.
Using the Shift key
You can also prevent some Windows XP startup programs from running by simply using the Shift key. When you boot Windows XP, enter your username and password and click OK. Immediately after that, hold down on the Shift key until all of your desktop icons appear. However, be aware that this troubleshooting trick will not give you quite as clean of a boot as booting to Safe Mode, and all of the usual device drivers will be loaded. Holding the Shift key down only prevents Windows XP applications from launching automatically from certain locations.
Editing the registry in Windows XP
One of the more advanced techniques for troubleshooting Windows XP startup problems involves editing the registry, as the Windows registry can be configured to launch applications at startup. While many processes that are launched from a call in the registry are related to malware, many legitimate Windows XP applications are launched through the registry as well. This is particularly true of antivirus software and other applications that run in the background.
As far as troubleshooting goes, the most effective way to prevent an application from running on startup is to simply delete the registry key that calls it. Before you do, though, it is extremely important that you know exactly what it is that you are deleting. Also, remember that editing the Windows registry is dangerous. Making an incorrect modification to the registry can destroy Windows XP and/or your applications, so it is highly recommended that users make a full system backup before attempting this troubleshooting technique.
For users working in large networks, Group Policy can be used to prevent the registry from launching applications on system startup in Windows XP. Keep in mind though that using Group Policy settings as a troubleshooting technique here is usually an all or nothing proposition, as the Group Policy Object Editor isn't flexible enough to allow users to selectively enable and disable various processes. You have the option of preventing Windows XP from using the registry to launch processes at startup, but, by doing so, you may disable desirable processes as well as unwanted ones. You do, however, have the option of specifying the processes you want to run when a user logs in directly through the Group Policy rather than through the registry.
The Windows XP System Configuration Utility
Other ways to disable Windows XP startup programs include making changes to the Startup folder and WIN.INI file. For example, any application placed in the Startup folder will load automatically when Windows XP is booted. Although you can edit the Startup folder and the WIN.INI file manually, it's sometimes easier to use the System Configuration Utility when troubleshooting Windows XP instead, because it allows you to enable or disable commands by simply selecting or deselecting check boxes. This is handy since sometimes you might see an entry for a startup program that you don't recognize.
The System Configuration Utility allows you to temporarily disable such an entry -- and learn the effects of doing so -- without making a permanent configuration change to your system. Once you are confident in the changes that you have made, you can then make them permanent. You can access the System Configuration Utility by entering the MSCONFIG command at the Run prompt.
Troubleshooting the Blue Screen of Death
When Windows XP encounter a serious system problem, the result is what has become known as the Blue Screen of Death, which is an error displayed in a full-screen, non-windowed text mode, with white text on a blue background providing information about why Windows XP crashed.
The first step in troubleshooting the Windows XP Blue Screen of Death is figuring out what is causing the error to occur. Whenever a Blue Screen of Death error is displayed, the error contains a Stop message -- a short error message meant to give you a clue as to the cause of the problem. When troubleshooting Windows XP, it's important to knwo that the Stop message is broken into four different parts, each of which has its own purpose. These parts include Bug Check Information, Recommended User Action, Driver Information and Debug Port and Status Information.
How to troubleshoot a Windows XP Stop message
The Bug Check Information is made up of a stop error number immediately followed by four additional parameters that are listed in parenthesis. From a Windows administrator's standpoint, the four numbers found in parenthesis are almost always unimportant, as knowing the stop error code is typically sufficient.
The second part of the Stop message in Windows XP is the Recommended User Action, which is usually a generic message telling you to try disabling or removing whatever hardware or software was recently installed. While this is good advice, it won't always fix the problem. By far the most important part of the Recommended User Action is the very first line. This line directly corresponds to the stop error number. Using this bit of text in conjunction with the stop error number can give admins a lot of insight into what the problem is.
The Driver Information section tells you which file triggered the stop error. By looking at the driver listed in this section and the information provided in the Bug Check Information and Recommended User Action sections, you can usually gain a fairly clear picture of what has happened.
The Debug Port and Dump Status Information section tells you few things. First, it tells you is which COM port is being used by the debugger and what speed the COM port is running at (information that can be ignored with Windows XP). The other thing that this section tells you is that a dump file was created. Essentially this means that the entire contents of the system's memory were written to a file and placed on the hard drive. Some Windows administrators like to use this file as a tool for troubleshooting the problem, though it is usually possible to fix the problem without delving into that level of complexity.
Different types of Stop messages
There are five different Stop messages that are commonly displayed when a Windows XP Blue Screen of Death error is disk-related.
One example is the inaccessible boot disk error message, which means that Windows XP either was unable to initialize the disk hardware, or it did, but did not recognize the data found on the system volume. You can troubleshoot this Blue Screen of Death error by trying the Last Known Good Configuration utility. If that doesn't work, the next step would be to boot your Windows XP recovery CD to repair the problem in Recovery Console Mode. Typing chkdsk drive: /F /R at the command prompt windows should fix the error.
In most cases, stop errors will occur immediately after installing a piece of hardware or software, or changing some aspect of Windowsx XP's configuration. If you notice this type of cause and effect pattern, then a good Windows XP troubleshooting best practice would be to boot Windows XP into Safe Mode and then troubleshoot whatever action it was that caused the problem (or remove the new hardware).
If the problem just starts happening for no apparent reason, then there are two things that you should look for; file corruption and memory problems. Try reinstalling the latest Windows XP service pack (to refresh the system files) and download the latest versions of all of the device drivers that are used by the system. If that doesn't work, then try removing the computer's memory and replacing it with known good memory. Nine times out of ten this will fix the problem.
How to recover from changes to Windows XP
As a Windows administrator, there are times when changes are made to Windows XP that cause serious system problems. Fortunately, troubleshooting Windows XP to recover from these configuration changes can be easier than you might think -- depending on the changes that have been made.
The first troubleshooting trick for Windows XP involves the Last Known Good Configuration feature. This will reverse the most recent system and driver changes within the hardware profile, and If you are lucky and able to boot Windows XP using the Last Known Good Configuration, then there is nothing else that you need to do (i.e. Windows should boot successfully on the next attempt without you having to do anything special).
While that may seem simple enough, some admins still prefer to try and boot the system into Safe Mode and manually troubleshoot the problem. This involves booting Windows XP using a minimal set of drivers, making any necessary configuration repairs, and then booting Windows XP normally. The disadvantage to using Safe Mode is that it is only effective if you know how to fix the problem that rendered the system unbootable in the first place. The Last Known Good Configuration feature, on the other hand, usually fixes the problem even if you don't know what caused it.
Device driver rollback
Another troubleshooting technique for recovering from changes to Windows XP involves device driver rollback. This is usefull when someone installs an invalid device driver, which can result in anything from a single hardware device not working to the entire Windows XP system being rendered unbootable.
It's difficult to protect against faulty device drivers because they pose so many potential problems. For example, although some are built into Windows XP, most are supplied by third-parties, and they require intimate contact with the guts of the system. They can also interact in odd ways, and a faulty one can cause problems at a point far removed from the applications it services. In short, like dynamic link libraries, device drivers don't just affect the application they are intended for. They can affect many other applications that are performing quite different tasks but occasionally use the services of the particular device driver in question.
To use the device driver rollback technique with Windows XP, simply boot into Safe Mode and open the Control Panel. Then click on the Performance and Maintenance link, followed by the System link. When you do, Windows will open the System Properties sheet. Select the sheet's Hardware tab and click the Device Manager button to open it. When the Device Manager opens, scroll through the list of devices until you find the device that has an invalid driver associated with it. Next, right-click on that device and choose the Properties command from the resulting shortcut menu to access the device's properties sheet. Finally, select the sheet's Driver tab and click the Roll Back Driver button. Windows XP will now revert the device driver to the previous version.
Windows XP System Restore
There are a number of activities ranging from registry changes to software installations that can cause Windows XP configuration problems. In such situations, often you can troubleshoot with Windows XP System Restore to take your computer back to where it was prior to the change. Basically, Windows XP creates system restore points just prior to various types of configuration changes. If the change is catastrophic, then you can revert back to the system restore point.
Simple boot to Safe Mode, log in as an admin and select the following commands from the Start menu: All Programs | Accessories | System Tools | System Restore. When the Windows XP System Restore application loads, choose the Restore My Computer to an Earlier Time option and click Next. You will be taken to a screen that allows you to choose a point in time that you want to revert the system to.
It's important to remember that while System Restore can be very a helpful troubleshooting tool, it also isn't perfect, and is not a good substitute for a normal backup. System Restore information is stored on the drive that System Restore is protecting. Therefore, if a hard drive goes bad, then the System Restore information may be lost as well.
You also might need to troubleshoot Windows XP System Restore itself. If you find that you are unable to create or roll back system restore points, then the suggested troubleshooting technique is to reinstall System Restore. The one drawback to doing this is that all existing System Restore points will be deleted. If you need to get System Restore working, however, this may be a relatively small price to pay. Remember that if you have a virus or malware infection and System Restore still seems to be working properly (i.e., you can create restore points), do not attempt to reinstall System Restore until after you have dealt with the other issues. Reinstalling System Restore will delete all your existing restore points, and those restore points may be the only way to get back what's been damaged in Windows XP.
Windows XP Automated System Recovery
The last resort for troubleshooting Windows XP changes would be to use the Automated System Recovery feature. In Windows XP Professional, Automated System Recovery is much more powerful than restore points and requires careful use. Microsoft recommends that it only be used as a last resort before going through the process of wiping the disk and restoring everything from the installation CDs on up.
Recovery with Automated System Restore in Windows XP is a two-step process. In the boot recovery process, a new copy of Windows XP is installed on the system from the original CD. Next, restore a previously saved copy of the installation you're trying to recover. This overwrites some of the files installed in the boot recovery process and restores the system state. To make this work, you need three things: an Automated System Recovery recovery floppy (which you create and keep current yourself), an Automated System Recovery backup and the original Windows XP installation CD. Microsoft provides instructions on using Automated System Recovery, but the fact is, you're much better off if you can avoid using it entirely.
Troubleshooting Windows XP hardware issues
The Windows XP Device Manager is a centralized console for configuring system hardware. If a piece of hardware is malfunctioning, the Device Manager will usually let you know about it. While that may seem simple enough, Windows XP Device Manager errors tend to consist of error codes and a brief, often cryptic description of the problem, and the tricky part involves deciphering and troubleshooting those error codes.
Some Device Manager errors are fairly simple and straightforward. Error codes 1, for example, usually mean that an incorrect device driver is associated with the device. Troubleshooting this particular error in Windows XP is relatively easy, simply visit the hardware manufacturer's Web site and downloading the correct driver for the device.
Other errors, however, can be a bit more complicated to troubleshoot in Windows XP, such as Device Manager error code 12. The most common cause of this error code is a resource conflict. Essentially, this means that two hardware devices have been assigned overlapping resources. The overlapping resources might be IRQs, DMAs or even memory address ranges. Troubleshooting and correcting resource overlaps in Windows XP is a very tedious process. For a quick and dirty fix, you can disable one of the devices that is using overlapping resources, at which point the other device that requires those resources will usually begin to function.
Manually troubleshooting hardware issues is a more in-depth way to go. In fact, this technique can be used to troubleshoot any hardware resource conflict. However, it is not without risk, as it can result in a Blue Screen of Death error message, making it necessary to then install Windows XP from scratch. That being said, it is still worth looking into for some occasions. Of course, there are also other steps admins can take for troubleshooting a wide variety of Device Manager errors in Windows XP.
USB and printer problems
Universal Serial Bus is the standard for connecting USB devices from printers to external USB hard drives on Windows XP computers. Unfortunately, transferring files between a USB 2.0 hub and a Windows XP system can fail in several strange ways. For example, if you are using a USB keyboard, the transfer may fail. Troubleshooting problems like this is fairly simple, as Microsoft has issued a hotfix to solve the issue. For most hardware related problems, though, it's not that easy.
Printer driver and hardware incompatibilities are often at the heart of many printer problems, especially if you are using the 64-bit edition of Windows XP. Most often, the issues involve hardware drivers since so many low-end or inexpensive hardware devices that have 32-bit drivers for Windows XP do not have a corresponding 64-bit version. This problem can be solved failty easily with printers that use PCL or PostScript, but printers that use the driver to perform the actual rasterization but have no 64-bit driver, it creates a problem, as in this case 32-bit hardware drivers cannot be used at all. Fortunately there is a workaround (though a rather elaborate one) for troubleshooting this Windows XP printer problem.
Troubleshooting print queue overload and network congestion
Common network printer problems involve print queue overload, which is caused by too many users trying to print at the same time. For admins using Windows XP with Windows Server 2003, one way to troubleshoot this problem is by creating a printer pool, which is a group of printers attached to a common print queue, allowing multiple documents to be printed at the same time. Once the printer pool is created, users can print to the pool by connecting to it using a defined share, immediately reducing print queue overload.
There is more than one cause of network printer congestion, too. For example, frivolous users send out large and unnecessary print jobs, it can slow everything down. If you notice that a particular user has a reputation for printing large jobs and creatibg problems, you can troubleshoot the problem be creating a priority print queue just for that user. If you are looking for freeware to put an end to printer congestion, there are several usefull options out there, such as PaperCut.


http://searchwincomputing.techtarget...c=RSS_RSS-2_43

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Multicore Boom Needs New Developer Skills
Or
For Sale: Two Unused Conroe Cores
Like New Condition!

More than charity lies behind Microsoft and Intel's announcement this week that they will donate US$20 million to a pair of U.S. colleges in the hope of spurring advances in parallel, or multicore, programming research, as a Microsoft research scientist readily acknowledged.
"There is a worldwide shortage of people experienced in parallel computing experience, for sure," said Dan Reed, director of scalable and multicore computing at Microsoft. "One of the collateral reasons is to raise awareness in the academic community, because that's where the next generation of developers will come from."
While for years, ever-higher clock speeds almost guaranteed that application code would run faster and faster, the rules are different for the multicore processors of today.
The difference has been compared to a sports car and a school bus. While the first is capable of blazing speed, the other moves more slowly but can move far more people at once.
The problem is, simply adding more cores to a computer's CPU doesn't increase the speed or power of conventional application code, as a recent Forrester Research report notes.
"To gain performance from quad-core processors and prepare for the denser multicore CPUs that will follow, application developers need to write code that can automatically fork multiple simultaneous threads of execution (multithreading) as well as manage thread assignments, synchronize parallel work, and manage shared data to prevent concurrency issues associated with multithreaded code," the authors wrote.
In other words, complex work is required to fill all those seats on the bus.
And the quad-core processors common today will soon give way to radically more advanced designs, Forrester notes. "Expect x86 servers with as many as 64 processor cores in 2009 and desktops with that many by 2012."
The situation has had chip makers and major software vendors making broad-based efforts to raise awareness of both the promise and challenges of programming for multiple cores.
TopCoder, a software development company that invites its membership to work on various aspects of a project through competitions, just began a series of special contests, along with chipmaker AMD, that focuses on multithreading.
Mike Lydon, TopCoder's chief technology officer, said multicore programming remains the province of an elite few. "What we've seen from the skill set perspective is, it varies quite a bit," he said. "As you would expect, the high-end developers are familiar with threading. After that it drops off pretty quickly."
"It's surprising to me because multithreading programming isn't new," he added. Indeed, one instructional article available on a Microsoft's MSDN Web site dates to 1993.
"I think it stems primarily from the collegiate level," Lydon said. "I've heard very little about colleges teaching multithreaded programming, but I would think and hope that it's changing very quickly."
However, Forrester's report suggests the urgency isn't being felt across the board. It notes that major operating systems and most middleware products are already prepared for multithreaded operation and for "near term" multicore processors, and that corporate development shops may look to ISVs (independent software vendors) to solve the problem through development tools and platforms that can better handle multicore-related tasks.
But Microsoft's Reed believes that multithreading over time will become "part of the skill set of every professional software developer."
In the meantime, most of the parallel computing resources available now don't necessarily hide the complexity of coding for multiple threads. "Development pros have options today, but most of them are low-level language extensions and libraries," Forrester said.
For example, in February AMD open-sourced more than 3,200 software routines under a project called Framewave, which it said will help coders build multithreaded applications for x86-type processors.
"Libraries can't provide a complete answer, but we see these as iterative steps," said Margaret Lewis, director of commercial solutions and software strategy at AMD. "There's things that you can do today as you're waiting for those [more advanced] tools that can increase the multi-threadedness of your applications," she said.
There are some higher-level products already on the market, such as the platform sold by RapidMind, which takes single-threaded C++ code and then, through an abstraction layer, "parallelizes" it across a number of cores.
However, it would be "fairly idealistic" to think that better tools alone will be enough, Lydon argued. "When you actually get into the points in code where you're going to leverage performance by spawning multiple threads, it takes a human mind to see where the benefits could take place."


http://www.pcworld.com/article/id,14...1/article.html

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Software Developers Must Prepare for Multi-Core Microprocessors

The amount of cores inside central processing units (CPUs) is projected to skyrocket in the coming years, according to analysts, which will enable unprecedented performance potential. However, to take advantage of that potential software makers need to have skills that many do not own right now.
“Expect x86 servers with as many as 64 processor cores in 2009 and desktops with that many by 2012,” analysts from Forrester Research wrote in a paper last month.
While the era of multi-core computing is here, application development teams must embrace new programming approaches to reap the full performance and economic benefits of the new hardware. The new “multi-core programming” approach will combine multithreading and parallel/concurrent designs that allow simultaneous processing of threads and/or tasks by multiple cores. Concurrent computing is familiar to some app development professionals, but most have little or no experience with parallel computing, believe analysts of Forrester Research as well as specialists from Microsoft Corp.
“There is a worldwide shortage of people experienced in parallel computing experience, for sure. One of the collateral reasons is to raise awareness in the academic community, because that’s where the next generation of developers will come from,” said Dan Reed, director of scalable and multi-core computing at Microsoft.
Earlier this week Intel Corp. and Microsoft kicked off a program under which they would help to create two Universal Parallel Computing Research Centers (UPCRC), aimed at accelerating developments in mainstream parallel computing, for consumers and businesses in desktop and mobile computing.
“Application development professionals will need a strategy for adopting these new approaches, frameworks, and tools as they emerge, adapting the patterns and methods they use today, and evolving their application portfolios to ride the performance curve promised by Moore’s Law in the multi-core era,” analysts from Forrester Research indicated.
Back in the days only server and workstation machines featured more than one processing engine, whereas desktops and notebooks were based on single-core CPUs. Therefore, performance of client machines was conditioned by clock-speed and micro-architecture of processors installed. Partly, this explains why there are not enough software developers experienced in parallel computing.
But this does not automatically mean that performance of next-generation microprocessors will rise exponentially along with the number of cores. Both Advanced Micro Devices and Intel Corp. announced that in several years time their CPUs will come wither integrated stream processors (AMD Fusion project) or other types of application targeted accelerators, which will bring new challenges to software developers, as then they will have to take advantage not only of homogeneous multi-core design, but of heterogeneous multi-core designs.



http://www.xbitlabs.com/news/cpu/dis...Get_Ready.html

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A major boost in the effectiveness of a material that transforms waste heat into electricity could significantly boost energy efficiency in anything from air conditioners to car engines. It is the first major improvement in such "thermoelectric" materials in 50 years, say researchers.
Thermoelectric materials can also work in reverse to convert electricity into differences in temperature, allowing cooling without pipes, pumps or coolants.
Since the 1950s, engineers have used a semiconductor alloy called bismuth antimony telluride in niche applications, such as solid state cooling for precision medical equipment. But although it is the best material around for the job, the alloy is far from efficient. The new efficiency boost could see thermoelectric materials used in many more areas.
Rip it up and start again
The dramatic 40% boost is relatively simple to achieve. Grinding bismuth antimony telluride into fine particles and then pressing it back together again using heat transforms its thermoelectric properties, according to researchers from Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and Boston College, both Boston, US.
Sticking the nanoscale particles back together increased the alloy’s peak figure of merit, a term used to measure metals’ relative thermodynamic performance, by 40% from 1.0 to 1.4.
The researchers say the jump happens because the reincarnated alloy has a finer-grained crystalline structure. The new structure offers greater resistance to the quantum vibrations called phonons that transport heat within solids, making it a better thermal insulator.
This is crucial because thermoelectric materials work by maintaining differences in temperature while letting electricity flow freely. If less of the incoming heat can escape through heat conduction, more will be used to drive electrons, and the material will be more efficient.
Heat hurdles
For phonons carrying heat, having more crystal grains to cross "is like the difference between running the 100-metre dash and running the same distance with hurdles every 10 metres," says study author Zhifeng Ren.
Prior, unsuccessful, attempts to shrink the crystal structure of thermoelectric alloys tried to build the new materials from scratch, layer by layer, in an expensive method called thin-film deposition.
"That's more like artists making fine art," Ren says. "Our [process] is like a copy machine, making much larger quantities much faster."
Cooler cars
One promising application for the improved material is transforming waste heat from car engines into electricity to help power the vehicles. The US Department of Energy (DOE) has set a goal of demonstrating a 10% increase in vehicle fuel economy through waste heat capture by 2014, according to John Fairbanks of the DOE.
No commercially available vehicle uses the technology today, but tests by car manufacturers including BMW suggest a 6-8% fuel efficiency increase is possible, Fairbanks says.
"Adding a 40% efficiency increase in thermoelectrics to that might meet that target," Jeff Snyder, of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, US, says.
The same approach could harvest human body heat to power medical implants although designing less power hungry devices is important too, Snyder notes.
Alternatively the improved alloy could be used in reverse for solid state cooling, without bulky pipes of gas or liquid coolant, in new areas. "We're not yet at the point where we will see air conditioning systems or large refrigerators with solid state cooling, but it's a significant advance," says Snyder.


http://environment.newscientist.com/...Id=earth_rss20

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Carbon cages can hold super-dense volumes of nearly metallic hydrogen

Hydrogen could be a clean, abundant energy source, but it's difficult to store in bulk. In new research, materials scientists at Rice University have made the surprising discovery that tiny carbon capsules called buckyballs are so strong they can hold volumes of hydrogen nearly as dense as those at the center of Jupiter.
The research appears on the March 2008 cover of the American Chemical Society's journal Nano Letters.

"Based on our calculations, it appears that some buckyballs are capable of holding volumes of hydrogen so dense as to be almost metallic," said lead researcher Boris Yakobson, professor of mechanical engineering and materials science at Rice. "It appears they can hold about 8 percent of their weight in hydrogen at room temperature, which is considerably better than the federal target of 6 percent."
The Department of Energy has devoted more than $1 billion to developing technologies for hydrogen-powered automobiles, including technologies to cost-effectively store hydrogen for use in cars. Hydrogen is the lightest element in the universe, and it is very difficult to store in bulk. For hydrogen cars to be competitive with gasoline-powered cars, they need a comparable range and a reasonably compact fuel system. It's estimated that a hydrogen-powered car with a suitable range will require a storage system with densities greater than those found in pure, liquid hydrogen.
Yakobson said scientists have long argued the merits of storing hydrogen in tiny, molecular containers like buckyballs, and experiments have shown that it's possible to store small volumes of hydrogen inside buckyballs. The new research by Yakobson and former postdoctoral researchers Olga Pupysheva and Amir Farajian offers the first method of precisely calculating how much hydrogen a buckyball can hold before breaking.
Buckyballs, which were discovered at Rice more than 20 years ago, are part of a family of carbon molecules called fullerenes. The family includes carbon nanotubes, the typical 60-atom buckyball and larger buckyballs composed of 2,000 or more atoms.
"Bonds between carbon atoms are among the strongest chemical bonds in nature," Yakobson said. "These bonds are what make diamond the hardest known substance, and our research showed that it takes an enormous amount of internal pressure to deform and break the carbon-carbon bonds in a fullerene."
Using a computer model, Yakobson's research team has tracked the strength of each atomic bond in a buckyball and simulated what happened to the bonds as more hydrogen atoms were packed inside. Yakobson said the model promises to be particularly useful because it is scalable, that is it can calculate exactly how much hydrogen a buckyball of any given size can hold, and it can also tell scientists how overstuffed buckyballs burst open and release their cargo.
If a feasible way to produce hydrogen-filled buckyballs is developed, Yakobson said, it might be possible to store them as a powder.
"They will likely assemble into weak molecular crystals or form a thin powder," he said. "They might find use in their whole form or be punctured under certain conditions to release pure hydrogen for fuel cells or other types of engines."
The research was supported by the Office of Naval Research and the Department of Energy.


http://www.media.rice.edu/media/News...=VIEW&ID=10750

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Nvidia told analysts that that the conversion of Ageia’s physics application interface to CUDA is almost complete. To demonstrate the technology’s horsepower, Nvidia ran a particle demo similar to what have been showcased by Intel on Nehalem – at more than 10 times the speed.
We can’t really recall how long and how often true physics capability has been promised by various parties over the past three, four years. But there are more signs that stunning physics visualization in fact is becoming a reality and it appears that Nvidia is taking the lead for now. With Ageia on board, the company has a key technology and Manju Hegde, co-founder and former CEO of Ageia, confirmed that the port of Ageia’s technology to Nvidia’s CUDA is almost done.
We were not really surprised to hear that it took just a month to convert PhysX from a stand-alone API to CUDA. After all, PhysX is a well-known multi-platform physics engine, as it is used in more than 140 games in development and number of registered developers tops out 25.000 figures. CUDA is supported by the GeForce 8 series and up (in all seriousness, don't go below 8800 if you want to play with CUDA), Ageia is now looking into expanding its user base from 150.000 to more than eight million, we heard.
In order to demonstrate the physics horsepower of the GeForce 8800/9800 series, Hegde took aim at Intel's eight-core Nehalem particle demo, which can be seen in one of our IDF articles. Back in Shanghai for IDF Spring 2008, our own Humphrey Cheung filmed Intel's demo and a statement from Intel's engineer, who talked about the fact that CPUs could soon be strong enough so that you wouldn’t need a GPU in the future. While Intel told us later on that the engineer’s remarks did not reflect the company’s opinion, the statement made waves at Nvidia and prompted the company to create a physics demo with 65,000 simulated particles.
While Intel's Nehalem demo had 50,000-60,000 particles and ran at 15-20 fps (without a GPU), the particle demo on a GeForce 9800 card resulted in 300 fps. If the very likely event that Nvidia’s next-gen parts (G100: GT100/200) will double their shader units, this number could top 600 fps, meaning that Nehalem at 2.53 GHz is lagging 20-40x behind 2006/2007/2008 high-end GPU hardware. However, you can’t ignore the fact that Nehalem in fact can run physics.
There was also a demonstration of cloth: A quad-core Intel Core 2 Extreme processor was working in 12 fps, while a GeForce 8800 GTS board resulted came in at 200 fps. Former Ageia employees did not compare it to Ageia's own PhysX card, but if we remember correctly, that demo ran at 150-180 fps on an Ageia card.
Hegde stressed that the PhysX engine does not include quantum mechanics because the company "focuses on physics for fun and entertainment". The executive believes that in-game physics will be the “second biggest thing” in 2008, only trumped by video processing and transcoding from one video format to another (Blu-ray or a DVD to iPod).


http://www.tgdaily.com/content/view/36915/135/

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The European Space Agency and Thales Alenia Space today signed a €305 million contract to provide the first Sentinel-3 earth observation satellite, devoted to oceanography and land-vegetation monitoring, as part of the European GMES programme. As prime contractor, Thales Alenia Space is responsible for the satellite’s design, development and integration.
The contract was signed today in Paris by Volker Liebig, ESA Director of Earth Observation, and Pascale Sourisse, President and CEO of Thales Alenia Space, in the presence of Jean-Jacques Dordain, ESA Director General, officials from the European Commission, the French Ministry of Research and Higher Education and Dominique Bussereau, French Secretary of State for Transport at the Ecology, Energy, Sustainable Development & Land Management Ministry.
Underlining the value of this mission for Europe, Volker Liebig commented: "This satellite is an important element of GMES and will enable Europe to observe important ocean parameters".
Global Monitoring for Environment and Security (GMES) aims at delivering environment and security monitoring services and is being led by the European Commission. It is Europe’s response to the ever-increasing demands of effective environmental policies and is at the same time the European contribution to the Global Earth Observation System of Systems (GEOSS).
ESA is responsible for the implementation of the GMES Space Component, a package of earth observation missions involving ESA, EU/ESA Member States and other partners. Central elements of this Space Component are the five families of Sentinel missions.
Sentinel-3 will provide crucial data for information services to the European Union and its Member States as part of GMES. The services to be fed data cover areas such as climate change, sustainable development, environmental policies, European civil protection, development aid, humanitarian aid and the European Common Foreign & Security Policy.
The Sentinel-3 mission will produce a consistent, long-term set of remotely-sensed marine and land data for (operational) ocean state analysis, forecasting and service provision. A comprehensive measurement system facilitating global ocean and land observation is required in order to provide data for advanced numerical forecasting models.
Sentinel-3 will determine parameters such as sea surface topography, sea/land surface temperature, ocean colour and land colour with high-end accuracy and reliability. For this purpose, it carries an advanced radar altimeter and a multi-channel optical imaging instrument.
To achieve near-global coverage and meet all scientific requirements, Sentinel-3 will be placed in a high-inclination, sun-synchronous polar orbit. Near-realtime data processing and delivery will allow operational services to continuously profit from the mission.
ESA carried out the Sentinel-3 definition phase in 2005/6, drawing on an industrial consortium led by Thales Alenia Space. The implementation phase started in autumn 2007 and the launch of the first Sentinel-3 satellite is planned for 2012.



http://www.esa.int/esaCP/SEMYZS3XQEF_index_0.html

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MUNICH, Germany — Scientists of the Aachen university clinic and the Fraunhofer Institute for Microelectronic Circuits have developed a retina implant that that wirelessly receives optical signals from the outside. The development aims at a technology to restore eyesight for blind persons.
Worldwide, about 3 million persons suffer from Retina Pigmentosa, an eye disease which slowly leads to complete blindness. While retina cells die off, some nerve cells in many cases remain intact. These cells can be stimulated through technical seeing aids such as retina implants. However, power supply and signal transmission through wires incorporate significant hurdles for the patient as well as for designers.
Now the Aachen university clinic and the Fraunhofer Institute for Microelectronic Circuits (Duisburg, Germany) have developed an implant that not only receives the optical signal through radio waves; also the energy required to supply the circuitry is fed into the implant using electromagnetical fields.
Presently, the device is equipped with 25 stimulating electrodes that are connected with ganglion cells. While the researchers admit that this is far from providing an actual eyesight experience, test persons said they were able to "see" electronically generated patterns or a coarse impression of the images they received.
The technology also helps eye specialist to simplify the implantation of such devices into the human eye. In comparison to wire-bound implants, the wireless device is much easier to implant into the eye and to wear, the university clinic said.
The long-term objective of the researchers is a device that completely restores eyesight. Several local medical technology companies have already launched EpiRet GmbH, a joint venture that plans to commercialize the technology. The next steps will be a device with higher resolution and a camera that feeds its signals to the implant.


http://www.eetimes.com/news/latest/s...leID=206903101

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Pilots will compete head to head in the world's first race featuring rocket-powered planes on 1 August 2008, says the Rocket Racing League, which is organising the event.
The Rocket Racing League is a company founded in 2005 by X-Prize Foundation chairman Peter Diamandis and Granger Whitelaw, who has won two Indy 500 races as a team owner. But although the company has made some test flights of rocket planes, no actual races have been held yet.
The company announced on Monday that it has scheduled a demonstration race for 1-2 August in front of thousands of spectators at the EAA AirVenture air show in Oshkosh, Wisconsin, US.
Two pilots will fly in the race using identical vehicles built by Velocity Aircraft of Sebastian, Florida, US, a company that the Rocket Racing League today announced it has acquired.
Earlier failures
Some of the vehicles, called Rocket Racers, will be powered by rocket engines built by Armadillo Aerospace, based in Mesquite, Texas, US. Armadillo nearly won $350,000 in prize money with flights of a mock lunar lander at the 2007 X-Prize Cup near Alamogordo in New Mexico, US, but its vehicle ran out of fuel just a few seconds shy of its goal. The engine of another of its vehicles exploded on the launch pad in a later attempt for the prize.
Armadillo president John Carmack says the engines used for the Rocket Racers are safer. They are made of tough stainless steel rather than the graphite used in the engines flown at the X Prize Cup.
"I would never claim that anything is foolproof, but we feel pretty good about the engine design and it has some intrinsic safety advantages," he told New Scientist. "We are going to put something like 20 tonnes of propellant through it in all sorts of crazy run sequences before a person flies on it."
Armadillo's engines for the Rocket Racers burn liquid oxygen and ethanol, and provide 8900 newtons (2000 pounds) of thrust. The racers can fly at speeds of up to 560 kilometres per hour.
Spectacular show
"Flying people on our rockets has been our goal from day one," says Carmack. "We are excited to work with the Rocket Racing League to provide a system that will be safe for the pilots, cost-effective and robust for the teams, and spectacular for the crowds."
Teams can also choose an alternative engine, built by XCOR Aerospace of Mojave, California, US. The XCOR engine burns liquid oxygen and kerosene, and has a 4.5-metre flame.
The Rocket Racing League says it is following safety guidelines that the US Federal Aviation Administration set out for air shows. To protect spectators, the planes will fly at a safe distance and never directly towards the crowd.
The pilots will follow a virtual track in the sky that they will view with a 3D display mounted in their helmets.
The league is also planning exhibition races in Nevada, US. These will take place during 10-14 September at the Reno National Championship Air Races and on 8-9 November at the Aviation Nation event, Nellis Air Force Base, Las Vegas.
Six teams have registered to compete in the league when competitive races begin.


http://space.newscientist.com/articl...Id=space_rss20

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A 4.1-metre diameter primary mirror, a vital part of the world's newest and fastest survey telescope, VISTA (the Visible and Infrared Survey Telescope for Astronomy) has been delivered to its new mountaintop home at Cerro Paranal, Chile. The mirror will now be coupled with a small camera for initial testing prior to installing the main camera in June. Full scientific operations are due to start early next year. VISTA will form part of ESO's Very Large Telescope facility.
The mirror arrived over the Easter weekend at the Paranal Observatory where the telescope is being assembled at an altitude of 2518m, in Chile's Atacama Desert.
VISTA Project Manager Alistair McPherson from STFC's UK Astronomy Technology Centre (UK ATC) accompanied the mirror on its journey to Chile: "This is a major milestone for the VISTA project. The precious mirror was loaded on to a plane in a special cradle that used tennis balls to cushion it from impact for its arduous journey across three continents. "
The 4.1-m coated VISTA mirror inside the telescope at Paranal.

The ESO Very Large Telescope will consist of an array of four 8-meter telescopes which can work in single
or combined mode. In combined mode the VLT will provide the total light collecting power of a 16-meter
single telescope. The telescope light signals may also be combined in an interferometric mode to provide
high-resolution imaging. This image shows an artist's conception of the site layout,
including several other related elements.

"The mirror had a difficult four-day journey, by air and by road. It arrived in perfect condition and now that it has been coated, we will install the mirror in the telescope with a small test camera for about four weeks testing. We plan to install the main camera in June," said the Project Scientist on VISTA, Will Sutherland of Queen Mary, University of London, UK.
The VISTA 4.1-metre diameter primary mirror is the most strongly curved large mirror ever polished to such a precise and exacting surface accuracy - deviations from a perfect surface of less than 1/3000th of the thickness of a human hair. On arrival at Cerro Paranal it was safely craned into the telescope dome where it was washed and coated with a thin layer of protected silver in the facility's coating plant. Silver is the best metal for the purpose since it reflects over 98% of near-infrared light, better than the more commonly used aluminium. To date, the reflectivity produced by the silver coating- a relatively new venture - is well above that specified and exceeds all other telescopes.
VISTA will survey large areas of the southern sky at near infrared wavelengths (2 to 4 times the wavelength of visible light) to study objects that are not seen easily in optical light either because they are too cool (such as brown dwarfs), or are surrounded by interstellar dust which infrared light penetrates much better than optical, or whose optical light is redshifted into the near infrared by the expansion of the Universe. Amongst other things VISTA's surveys will help our understanding of the nature and distribution and origin of known types of stars and galaxies, map the 3-D structure of our galaxy, and help determine the relation between the 3-D structure of the universe and the mysterious 'dark energy' and dark matter'. Samples of objects will be followed up in detail with further observations by other telescopes and instruments such as the nearby Very Large Telescope.
"The delivery of the last component of VISTA is a significant milestone and we are delighted with the progress made since the mirror arrived. Now astronomers can really look forward to being able to perform unparalleled observing of our Southern skies," said Richard Wade, President of the ESO Council and STFC Chief Operating Officer.


http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releas...-prn041708.php

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I don't know Eric Ligman, but he seems like a nice enough person. Yet you get a different picture from headlines like "Microsoft Exec Rages Against Vista Upgrade 'Hack' " and "Microsoft exec loses his cool on Vista upgrades." Ligman's problem isn't that he's some spittle-spraying madman, but he's trying to defend Microsoft's Windows licensing policies, which would make anybody seem a little crazy.
The computer press seems to be piling on. Jason Mick wrote in DailyTech, "In an openly sarcastic blog entry, Microsoft's Eric Ligman tore into users who have been exploiting a workaround to allow a Vista upgrade to install on a computer that did not previously have a Windows OS, such as a new PC."
And from Kevin McLaughlin in ChannelWeb, "Sarcasm can be a powerful tool, and a Microsoft executive recently wielded it against industry sources who claim that a loophole exists in one of the software giant's licensing policies."
The root cause of all this contumely is old news. More than a year ago in the Windows Secrets blog Brian Livingston described an 11-step technique for doing a clean install of Windows Vista from the upgrade version of the operating system. The reason you might want to do that was clear. Money. Livingston spelled it out in his article: the upgrade version was cheaper than the full version of Vista by $72 to $155.
Livingston didn't devote a lot of time to the ethical dilemma of using the upgrade in a way it wasn't intended for, but he did point out that a Microsoft Knowledge Base article, number 930985, that says an upgrade version of Vista can't perform a clean install when a PC is booted from the Vista DVD – which is obviously wrong, because Livingston was doing it. "It'll be interesting," he wrote, "to see whether MS ever explains why these steps were programmed in."
Earlier this month Scott Dunn wrote in Windows Secrets Vista Service Pack 1 didn't change the situation. Livingston writes in the current edition of his newsletter, "The fact that the trick still exists in SP1 — more than one year later — is strong evidence that at least some high Microsoft officials wanted it left in."
That's where the Ligman hit the fan.
Eric Ligman is Microsoft's US Senior Manager for Small Business Community Engagement, and he writes the Microsoft SMB Community Blog. Over the past couple of weeks he's written a couple of blog entries that took aim at Dunn and Livingston. He wrote in the first entry:
So if you see any of these people writing that buying an upgrade by itself (Windows Vista Upgrade for instance) without having a full license first gets you the rights to run the software, just realize that what the person is actually stating is, “I clearly have no clue what I am talking about and so I am writing a bunch of gibberish that proves this hoping people will think I have a clue, even though I obviously don’t.”
If they continue to tell you that, “But I can get it to physically install, so it must be legal,” this further shows their complete lack of comprehension. Just because something will install does not make it legal. For example, a pirated piece of software will (usually) physically install; however, running pirated software is 100 percent illegal (and who knows what else it will install on or do to your computer).
I tend to agree with his disagreement on ". . . I can get it to physically install, so it must be legal." But is doing doing a clean install with an upgrade version the same as running pirated software? He sort of lost me there. I can see the absolutist argument, but Ligman's out on a limb by himself. Livingston may have a little self-interest at stake, but he makes an interesting point: if Microsoft thought it was so wrong, why didn't they fix it in SP-1?
The problem is Microsoft's positions on licensing issues like this one are shrouded in ambiguity.
What, for example, did Microsoft intend when it turned off the Windows Genuine Advantage kill-switch in Vista SP-1? At least one blogger opined that WGA had presented Microsoft with an unintended side effect: it was boosting the use of Linux. He spun out a theory that Microsoft scaled WGA back to a nag screen because it would rather have people run pirated copies of Vista than legitimate copies of competing OSes.
Here's another example, a not-so-hypothetical case for Ligman: Let's say I've got Windows XP Pro running on an old, slow PC, something from 2001 with a Pentium III 1-GHz CPU, 512 MB of RAM and two hard drives, an 80GB main drive and and an 80GB secondary drive. I jack up the two hard drives and slip in a new motherboard under them with an Intel Core 2 Duo E4500 CPU and 2GB of RAM.
My question is, should I buy a new copy of XP Pro? The OS installed on the hard drive was the OEM version, which means I can't transfer it to a different PC, according to the End User License Agreement (EULA). But I didn't transfer the OS to a new PC. In effect I transferred a new PC to the OS, right?
In any case, I'm not worrying too much about it because I figure Windows Genuine Advantage will let me know if the PC configuration has changed to such an extent that the copy of XP no longer validates, and until that happens I'm OK, right?
Or am I running a legitimate copy of Windows XP Pro that is actually pirated software by Ligman's definition?
I'm awash in the ambiguities of Microsoft's Windows licensing. So, apparently are Brian Livingston and Scott Dunn. Ligman may be right that we're all pirates. He's even more likely to be right that we haven't got a clue, though not in the rather rude sense he used that description. The problem is, it's his company that put us in that position, and it's going to take more than calling us names to resolve the situation.


http://blogs.computerworld.com/windows_licensing

[bbmf]

Press Release
WEST LAFAYETTE, Ind. - The largest supercomputer on a Big Ten campus will be installed at Purdue in a single-day, electronic "barn-raising.”
More than 200 employees will gather May 5 to help build the massive machine, which will be about the size of a semitrailer when installed. It will be the largest Big Ten supercomputer that is not part of a national center.
Purdue’s computer is being built in a single day to keep the university's science and engineering researchers from facing a lengthy downtime, says Gerry McCartney, vice president for information technology and chief information officer.
"Our staff thought we were insane when we challenged them to build such a big computer in a single day," McCartney says. "But now there’s real excitement to be a part of this."
To generate interest on campus, the organizers created a spoof movie trailer called “Installation Day,” which is a take off of the movie “Independence Day.” The video can be seen below.

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Supercomputers are ranked by their performance in running a complex benchmarking system. The results of the tests are published twice each year at www.top500.org. Purdue’s new supercomputer would rank in the top 40 of the current Top 500 list, which was published in Nov. 2007.
The current campus leader in supercomputing in the Big Ten is Indiana University’s Big Red, which ranks 42nd in the world. (The National Center for Supercomputing Applications’ “Abe” cluster, which is based in Urbana, Ill. and operated by the University of Illinois, offers computing resources to researchers across the nation and is the largest supercomputer installed at a Big Ten university.)
The world’s largest supercomputer is BlueGene/L, which is located at Lawrence Livermore (Calif.) National Laboratory.
The Purdue supercomputer will consist of 812 Dell dual quad-core computer nodes and is predicted to have a peak performance of more than 60 teraflops, which means it could perform more than 60 trillion operations in one second.
A group of more than 25 university scientists and engineers pooled research grant funds to contribute to the purchase of the machine; less than 25 percent of the purchase is funded from the university's IT budget.
“The community approach is a new and cost-effective way to fund cyberinfrastructure on campuses,” McCartney says. “This approach not only maximizes resources at Purdue, but researchers across the nation will benefit from the unused cycles which will be available on the TeraGrid.”
Rudolf Eigenmann, professor of electrical and computer engineering and interim director of Purdue’s Computing Research Institute, says the computer will be used for a wide variety of research.
“Faculty using this computer will be designing new drugs and materials, modeling weather patterns and the effects of global warming, engineering future aircraft, and making many more discoveries,” Eigenmann says. “High performance computing is an essential to conducting research and development, so having one of the world’s largest supercomputers here on campus will be a real benefit to our faculty.”
The three computing clusters that previously served university researchers were taken off-line and removed from the basement of Purdue’s Mathematics Building on April 28. A small number of the nodes for the new computer were then installed to serve as a “bridge” for continuing research until the new computer is fully installed.
An additional 154 nodes will be installed in Mann Hall. These nodes have already started practice computing runs for an international high-energy physics project that will begin this summer.
"We didn't set out to acquire the largest supercomputer in the Big Ten. Our intent was to design a computer that would allow Purdue researchers to take the next step in discovery," McCartney says.
The new computer will be named “Steele,” after John Steele, the former director of the Purdue University Computing Center, and a member of the Computer Science faculty, who retired in 2003.
“I appreciate that I can continue to be a part of high performance computing at Purdue and our efforts to remain at the forefront of this type of computing,” Steele says. “This machine will keep us on the high performance computing map.”
McCartney says Purdue plans to continue naming its major computers after faculty, staff or students who have made significant contributions to the university's computing infrastructure.
"This isn't the same as naming a building after someone; these machines have a lifecycle of about five years. But it is a way to salute members of the Purdue community who have worked so long and hard to help Purdue achieve the world-famous reputation it now enjoys," McCartney says.
Purdue has a long history of leadership in information technology. In 1962, Purdue founded the first department of Computer Science. In 1967, Purdue became one of the first institutions to acquire a supercomputer, a Control Data Corp. 6500 (which had a performance of one-third of a megaflop). In 1982, Purdue.edu was the second URL registered for the Internet.



Source: Purdue University