Lunch With George!

January 3, 2002 - Anzio's

NEW! Lunch With George! Restaurant Reviews. Click here for this week's review!

Agenda

• Picture Frame
• PC Hardware in a Nutshell
• The Sopranos
• Vanilla Sky
• Jillian's
• Dreamcast Steering Wheel
• Science News: Quantum LEDs
• Science News: MegaPrimes
• Discover Card Update

High-Tech Picture Frame

When George arrived at Anzio's a little late (a true rarity!), he had a good excuse: he had stopped to buy his Mom a gift. He got her a new

George can periodically upload new pictures to a web site maintained by the manufacturer. Once a day, the picture frame checks the web for new photos and downloads them.

So even if George is here in Arizona and his Mom's clear across the country, he can always keep her supplied with new pictures. Of course George sees that as the problem too, since he now has to find new pictures to post to the picture frame! He plans to enlist his siblings for help in this area.

PC Hardware in a Nutshell

He's already used information from the book to solve a problem with his CD burner! It sounds like a great book, but I'm glad I'll never have a reason to us it! :-)

When I went to Amazon to read about George's Toni's new book, I was presented with a link to another O'Reilly book: Windows 98 Annoyances. It is no surprise to me that the book is 480 pages long! I then followed links to Windows ME Annoyances, Outlook Annoyances... well, you get the picture.

A DVD Disappointment

George couldn't wait to pop in one of his favorite Sopranos DVDs and try the subtitles to better understand the Jersey accents. Unfortunately, captions are not encoded on the Sopranos DVD! When he tried to turn it on, an error message was displayed. Then miraculously, captions appeared! Alas, it was english subtitles for someone who was speaking Italian... it was actually part of the video. What a cruel joke!

Vanilla Sky

Teri and I saw a movie last week at the new AMC Theatres at Desert Ridge--

The odd thing that I learned while researching Vanilla Sky for the web site is that it is a remake of a 1997 Spanish film entitled "Abre Los Ojos" (Open Your Eyes) starring... Penelope Cruz! The movie takes place in Madrid, but is evidently very similar (and BETTER, if I am to believe the user comments on Amazon).

Jillian's - An Arcade for BIG Kids

Steering Wheel for the Dreamcast

George believes he will be more successful at driving games (such as SegaGT) if he uses a steering wheel. There are at least three wheels for the Dreamcast-- two made by Mad Katz, and the Concept 4 Wheel by Interact Accesories, Inc [I have since discovered at least two more wheels-- I'll try to post more info on the

Quantum LEDs

Even though I read the article a few times, I was unable to identify a clear application... although it seems they could be used as components within other systems such as optical quantum computers.

The complete report will appear in an upcoming issue of Science.

A New MegaPrime Champion

The discoverer is Michael Cameron, a 20-year old from Ontario who is participating in the Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search (GIMPS!). His discovery is one of a very rare kind of prime numbers known as Mersenne Primes. Named after Marin Marsenne, a 17th-century mathematician, Marsenne numbers are expressed as 2^P-1, where P is a prime number. THe resulting Marsenne number is almost never a prime itself-- Cameron's new number is only the 39th known.

The GIMPS project is made up of hundreds of thousands of participants who get assigned numbers to test as primes on their home or office computer using software downloaded from the project. Cameron ran his desktop computer on the problem part-time for 45 days before proving his number was a prime. It took a powerful workstation 3 weeks to independently confirm his results.

The GIMPS project is similar in its implementation to the SETI@Home and Bovine RC5 projects. The SETI (Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence) project, which is still on-going, recruits participants from all over the world to run screensavers on their computers which use otherwise-idle computing power to analyze radio telescope data for potentially artifical signals. The "Bovine" RC5 Encryption Cracking Project is very similar, but instead of analyzing radio signals the participants computers systematically attempt to crack an encryption code. George is still an active participant in the project, and has been attempting to crack codes for over five years!

Do Some Real Science! The new wave of distributed computing research efforts provides all of us who posess a computer and an Internet connection with the chance to participate in a serious scientific endeavor. Take a look at these opportunities: Unlock the Secrets of the Human Genome Your computer can design new protein sequences that the world has never seen before, all during its idle time. Go to Genome@Home for the details. Stabilize the World Economy At SaferMarkets, your spare computing power can help predict trends in the world markets. Their data analysis is attempting to gain a better understanding of market volatility. Find Intelligent Life As we discussed earlier, SETI@Home allows your home computer to analyze radio telescope data in the search for extraterrestrial intelligence. You can also join a team to compete against other teams! There are teams for elementary schools, colleges, workplaces, clubs, and special-interest-group teams such as The MacAddict team, the OS/2 Warp Team, and even one named "The Knights Who Say Ni%quot;! Fight Aids You and your computer can now help in the Fight Against Aids by performing part of the calculations attempting to model the evolution of HIV drug resistance. Go to FightAIDS@Home. Crack Some Codes! RSA Security, Inc. is holding two Cryptographic Challenges which reward cash prizes to the winners. Check it out at http://www.rsasecurity.com/rsalabs/challenges/. Find a New Prime Number As mentioned earlier, you can participage in the Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search (GIMPS!). Their efforts have uncovered five new Mersenne Primes already! Other Projects I couldn't mention all the projects available, but you can find more at the Yahoo! Distributed Computing Projects page.

A Discover Card Update