Who? Richard Friedman is a senior staff information engineer who
documents the Sun Studio compilers and contributes to the Sun Studio portal at
developers.sun.com.
rchrd wrote his first computer program in
FORTRANSIT
on the IBM 650 in 1962. He also is a photographer
and has a life and a
radio program.
Rich Brueckner explains the Sun Heisenberg Compensator, announced this week by Sun at SC07:
Rich explains further:
Here is a spoof video on high-tech jargon to watch while we wait for the hundreds of press releases that will come out of the SC07 conference this coming week.
About the video:
One of my favorite spoof films was something call the Retro Confabulator. In this update, we parody marketing techno-jargon .
Wikipedia definition of a Heisenberg Compensator:
In the fictional Star Trek universe, the Heisenberg compensators are part of the transporter system. A Star Trek matter transporter is presumed to operate by reading the precise quantum state of every particle making up the person to be transported, breaking down that person from their component matter into energy, "beaming" that energy to the desired location, and recombining this energy back into their component matter according to the information gleaned when the precise quantum state was read. However, in quantum physics, the Heisenberg uncertainty principle states (in general terms) that one cannot know the quantum state of a subatomic particle to arbitrary precision. Therefore, matter transportation in this way was believed to be impossible, and this was formalized as the no teleportation theorem.
Thus, the creators of Star Trek created a plot device, the so-called Heisenberg compensators. It is unclear how exactly the Heisenberg compensators work. It is, of course, possible that they do not actually tell you the precise statistics of each particle; they could just compensate for not being able to know them.
Actually, the Compensator a solid-state version of the Turboencabulator, with billions of transistors per picoraster, and a low power integral.
See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turboencabulator
Posted by rchrd on November 16, 2007 at 07:20 PM PST #