- Embedded Systems Conference
- Moscone Center
- 04/23-25
- http://cmp.iconvention.com/sf/v33/index.cvn?id=10008&stab=2
- The Electrum Project
- Electrum is a sculpture that employs lightning as the major
component. Real lightning , which is very rarely seen up close, has the ability
to focus and clear the mind. The work stands 38 feet tall and is essentially a
column with a sphere on the top. Concealed within the sculpture is a 130,000
watt Tesla Coil. The Tesla Coil is the largest of its kind in the world.
Lightning discharges up to fifty feet in length emanate in all directions from
the top of the sphere.
- http://www.lod.org/electrum.html
- Survival Research Labs
- Producing the most dangerous shows on earth.
- http://www.srl.org/
- Users of Intuit's TurboTax income tax preparation
software are up in arms as a result of new DRM features which were added, with
no warning, to this year's product.
- http://www.extremetech.com/article2/0,3973,832413,00.asp
- Fully Informed Jury Association
- The FIJA mission is to inform all Americans about their
rights, powers and responsibilities when serving as trial jurors. FIJA also
seeks to restore the political function of the jury as the final check and
balance on our American system of government.
- http://www.fija.org/
- Beowolf clusters
- In the summer of 1994 Thomas Sterling and Don Becker, working
at CESDIS under the sponsorship of the ESS project, built a cluster computer
consisting of 16 DX4 processors connected by channel bonded Ethernet. They
called their machine Beowulf. The machine was an instant success and their idea
of providing COTS (Commodity off the shelf) base systems to satisfy specific
computational requirements quickly spread through NASA and into the academic
and research communities. The development effort for this first machine quickly
grew into a what we now call the Beowulf Project.
- Article in Scientific American -
http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?colID=1&articleID=000E238B-33EC-1C6F-84A9809EC588EF21
- Internet0
- Raffi Krikorian holds up a circuit board no bigger than a
matchbook, with just enough space for a couple of chips, a few threads of
wiring and a socket or two. "It costs maybe three dollars," he tells me. It's
so cheap and simple, Krikorian's team at the Massachusetts Institute of
Technology's new Center for Bits and Atoms expect their humble circuit not only
to change the way we wire our homes, but transform how we live in them too.
- According to Gershenfeld, these layers are the software
embodiment of human bureaucracy: each one has a sort of management committee to
administer it and much of its code exists simply to pass messages on to the
next layer. The only way to make this system small enough to fit onto a tiny
chip was to strip away redundant or non-essential features from each layer,
leaving only the code absolutely necessary to perform a specific task. If you
were to fully implement each layer, you might need a megabyte of code. But
Krikorian found enough waste and duplication for him to fit the essential
functions of all seven layers on a 4-kilobyte memory chip. "Our chip doesn't
have an operating system," he says. "It doesn't need to communicate with
printers or determine which version of software some other computer is
running." All it needs to do is send and receive simple commands that resemble
Web addresses.
- Internet0 is an infrastructure for networking large numbers
of small devices. Traditional Internet implementations are simply too
complicated for micro devices to understand and use -- we are working towards
creating new standardized physical and logical layers for networking that
allows small computationally restricted devices to self organize and cooperate
while still remaining fully functional with the Internet of today. Our devices,
in about 2K of code, are fully functional Internet nodes that can be
distributed and embedded in buildings and sensor networks.
- Raffi Krikorian - raffik@mit.edu
- SVFIG list
-
Here are the four lists that have been proposed:
-
svfig: collegial discussion of svfig's direct
interest - addresses and content kept confidential to subscribers -
subscription by approval
-
svfig-open: what anyone has to say about any part of
svfig - addresses and content available to all - open subscription
-
svfig-cabal: planning specific agenda/events -
addresses and content kept confidential to subscribers - subscription by
approval
-
svfig-herald: really low traffic, read-only, for
announcements - messages posted by list-moderator - open view, open
subscription
-
For more information on how to subscribe to any of these
lists, go to: http://zork.net/mailman/listinfo/svfig
or contact George Perry
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