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I'm still waiting for my free laptop. :)

The page located at http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~russell/ai.html#search contains wonderful links about coding A.I. into your games, programs, etc.

(basically, arguments to functions are covariantly typed, when they should be contravariantly typed. This means that the arguments of a method in a subclass may be further specialized than the arguments of the method overridden in the superclass. This means that at runtime it can throw error. Instead the arguments a subclass method can take should only be allowed to be generalized.)

Sather is very similar to Eiffel, and gets this right. But there is only one compiler (though a couple of variants), and it hasn't been updated in a while.

http://www.cs.waikato.ac.nz/sather/
http://www.gnu.org/software/sather/
http://www.icsi.berkeley.edu/~sather/

256 registers? I'd rather have a superscalar stack machine, given today's RAM bandwidth constraints.

This would have the advantage that the ISA would be independent of the internal architecture, so later chips could run the same code with a greater degree of internal parrelisation...

I work with folks at UC on the Cheshire Project which also uses this licence. We'd like to be able to use the GPL, but this is sure better than nothing , so I agree with the parent poster

http://cheshire.berkeley.edu/

-- Azaroth

I tried to dig up the paper, but these guys are really publishing a lot of stuff. this may have something to do with it. The author's homepage is here, you can look through a list of some of his papers.

The way they connect their dialogs to the windows that created them looks a little bit familiar, no?

User Interaction Design for Secure Systems

by Ka-Ping Yee
Computer Science Department
University of California, Berkeley

Abstract:
The security of any computer system that is configured and operated by human beings critically depends on the information conveyed by the user interface, the decisions of the computer users, and the interpretation of their actions. We establish some starting points for reasoning about security from a user-centred point of view, by modelling a system in terms of actors and actions and introducing the concept of the subjective actor-ability state. We identify ten key principles for user interaction design in secure systems and give case studies to illustrate and justify each principle, describing real-world problems and possible solutions. We anticipate that this work will help guide the design and evaluation of secure systems.

They're crop circles!

The 'I' in RAID stands for "inexpensive" as defined by the creators (discoverers?) of it. Some of the original RAID papers are available online.

Why this work does apply almost entirely to GUI issues this is because the GUI is the tool through which 99.99% of the world uses a computer. For related work that shows some better examples by the same author I would suggest that you take a look at this paper (sorry for citing it Ping...) which provides some nice examples of how a GUI that explains the security implications of certain preference settings can be used for a mp3 player, etc. This paper is writen from the capability-semantics perspective, so the standard unix security model is already outclassed, but it will give you a better idea of how security and UI are related.

Pompeii and (even better) the Greek ruins at Paestum

I think the Japanese did that or something similar...4 years ago. But the American's have the market when it comes to quantum haiku

I'm using an 802.11b network with 128-bit encryption, meaningless passwords (not "admin" or "router"), and the WAP will recognize only the MAC of the portable (yes, that can be spoofed, but it keeps out random strangers). Finally, the access point is in the basement, so its reception zone is mostly up, not horizontal.

There could be specific weaknesses in my brands of hardware, but that's another problem.

Am I mistaken that this provides reasonably good security?

Short answer: Yes, you are mistaken.

Longer answers: Here, here, or here.

Assuming your neighbors are clueless luddites who have to call you when their printer runs out of paper, WEP will prevent them from borrowing you Internet uplink bandwidth. Against a determined attacker, WEP, MAC filtering, and most of the other features built into modern 802.11a/b APs are ineffective.

On the other hand, you may not care.

Eg, my home machines are all secured and I do regular audits and scans. Any sensitive communication (eg, logging into a machine at work) happens over ssh and so is protected. So the only thing a script kiddie can do is watch my web traffic (which he is welcome to do), borrow my bandwidth (which would probably be noticed, and maybe try DoSing my home network (which is easy to fix).

All of the above was also true when my home network was wired. The move to 802.11b just traded a decrease in security for an increase in convenence (ah, reading /. while sitting on the deck).

As Schneier has said, security just buys you time. In the case of 802.11 (or for that matter, any wireless protocol), it takes significantly less time for the security to be breached than it would if the wired protocol was in use. If that worries you, don't use 802.11 networking, cordless phones, or cell phones, or adjust the sensitivity of your traffic to suit the medium.

One thing Cringley hints at is a coming boom in popularity and capability of truly decentralized peer networks. It is the fully and highly decentralized network architectures that the Microsoft group credits most with resilience against any kind of legal, technological or political attacks.

We are starting to see some of these technologies emerge, awaiting integration into flexible infrastructure that allows fast, easy and efficient distribution of data, content or otherwise, between peers on a local and global scale.

The end result will be a combination of a number of technologies seamlessly interoperating like:

- distributed hash tables

- decentralized search

- swarming distribution

- wireless networks ... and many others.

It is nice to see the word get out: You cannot control the flow of digitial information in decentralized peer networks!

If by "mainstream" he means dominant and common, Uncle Sam gave us the answer, illegal monopoly. Yep, if free software came installed on PCs right out of the box and enjoyed it's obvious price advantage, it would be dominant by now. There's nothing more difficult about maintaining a Linux box than an M$ infected computer that the end of anti-competitive practices would not prevent. New M$ junk won't even run on some of my computers. As someone else pointed out Apple has taken Open software and sold and supported it without any technical problems. We can also point to the fact that there are just as many, if not more happy Linux users as there are happy Mac users.

It's happening anyway. Despite the best efforts of the "entertainment" industry to push DRM, people are turning from M$. They are willing to put up with the possible inability to listen to new music formats (WMA) and watch digital movies for the sake of ownership of their computers and their information. That is mainstream! Joe sixpacks is not going to go for the $1,000 stereo that breaks every two years that is WinXP. If that's all Joe is interested in, he may abandon computers alltogether for set top boxes. The rest of the computer using population will continue to move towards free software for it's superior tool sets. It's so simple even a dumbass like me can see it.

What kind of graduate student would be asking questions like this and holding forth such eleitist attitutdes? Let's look at the page. Hint one, name of course, " New Product Development." Product? Oh Lord! He's a Mechanical Engineer like me. Here's some help, Prabhu,

• Front page does not comply with W3C or IEEE specs, so I can't read the buttons on your page. Try Bluefish.
  
• The differences between Open and Free software are a source of contention, but you can find a good opinion here.
  
• Don't Slashdot your page!
  
• When you need software for your Mechanical Engineering Project, hire someone with a BS in CS, or find a reputable consultant. If they mention M$, keep looking.
  

Good luck with your paper.

If by "mainstream" he means dominant and common, Uncle Sam gave us the answer, illegal monopoly. Yep, if free software came installed on PCs right out of the box and enjoyed it's obvious price advantage, it would be dominant by now. There's nothing more difficult about maintaining a Linux box than an M$ infected computer that the end of anti-competitive practices would not prevent. New M$ junk won't even run on some of my computers. As someone else pointed out Apple has taken Open software and sold and supported it without any technical problems. We can also point to the fact that there are just as many, if not more happy Linux users as there are happy Mac users.

It's happening anyway. Despite the best efforts of the "entertainment" industry to push DRM, people are turning from M$. They are willing to put up with the possible inability to listen to new music formats (WMA) and watch digital movies for the sake of ownership of their computers and their information. That is mainstream! Joe sixpacks is not going to go for the $1,000 stereo that breaks every two years that is WinXP. If that's all Joe is interested in, he may abandon computers alltogether for set top boxes. The rest of the computer using population will continue to move towards free software for it's superior tool sets. It's so simple even a dumbass like me can see it.

What kind of graduate student would be asking questions like this and holding forth such eleitist attitutdes? Let's look at the page. Hint one, name of course, " New Product Development." Product? Oh Lord! He's a Mechanical Engineer like me. Here's some help, Prabhu,

• Front page does not comply with W3C or IEEE specs, so I can't read the buttons on your page. Try Bluefish.
  
• The differences between Open and Free software are a source of contention, but you can find a good opinion here.
  
• Don't Slashdot your page!
  
• When you need software for your Mechanical Engineering Project, hire someone with a BS in CS, or find a reputable consultant. If they mention M$, keep looking.
  

Good luck with your paper.

I hope you like what i left in your guestbook sucker!

Karma whores take note -- Slashdot would probably run stories on anything listed on that page. (You still get points for an accepted submission, right?) Some of them, like the nanotech stress sensor paint and the flying robots sound familiar, but just because they've been linked once doesn't mean they can't be linked twice!

Maybe you mean this outage:

Misplaced break statement in AT&T's long distance software, causing 60,000 (that's sixty-thousand) people to loose long distance service for 9 hours?

...and this is why the Quadra 840/av and its little sibbling the Quadra 660/av were able to do voice recognition before just about any other PC... they had DSPs!

in fact, the Quadra 840/av had 2 ATT DSPs with considerable processing power! there is even some software that will use the DSPs for various calculations!

so the answer is pretty simple -- put some high powered DSPs in one of those PDAs, coupled with some decent software, and you would have the very device that you desire!

the end

How Java Floating Point Hurts Everyone Everywhere

All of those people waiting on SETI@home to find something intresting will finally be able to pick up an intelligent lifeform signal.

the term "AI" encompasses a lot of subject areas. its an incredibly complex and interdisciplinary field.

for instance, it covers everything from playing chess (and game playing generally) to image recognition to genetic algorithms to autonomous agents to logical reasoning/inference to fuzzy logic and beyond.

in other words, you'd be surprised what "AI" covers.

in the last "renaissance" of AI (around the 1970s or thereabouts), the goal of AI was to create intelligent computers. this, as one might guess, was found to be pretty damn hard.

nowadays the goal (very generally of course) is to create computers that _ACT_ intelligently. there IS a difference.

as with many things, tis a matter of degree. some of the most interesting AI that i have seen of late has involved modeling the intelligences of animals like insects. while perhaps not overly "intelligent" in the universe of intelligent beings, insects do manage to perform well in real environments which is far better than most "AIs" can claim.

here's a good beginning (and even intermediate to advanced in some ways) book on AI.

dkm92end

complaining about trains ...
Take a look at these and shut the hell up.
image 1
image2
In case you haven't guessed already , These are from my hometown bombay. So there...

"Black Ops of TCP/IP", Indeed.

According to the SETI@HOME stats page, SETI is running about 45 TFLOPS, which is slightly ahead of the Earth Simulator's 40 TFLOPS or the LANL 10 TFLOPS machines. This isn't real precise - Top500 uses Linpack as their benchmark, which is a lot more realistic and controlled than SETI, so your mileage may vary. And of course that's Today's measurement from SETI, which is fairly variable in its CPU speed.

As for network - do you need throughput or low latency? Depeding on your problem small changes in algorithm can do wonders. E.g. for film rendering you might choose a few NAS and a hoard of dumb/diskless rendering slaves. If you copy the model libraries (for the included figures, textures, etc.) onto a local disk at the beginning of a scene render run, you will decrease net load a big deal (I've done that with Provray rendering myself).

If you don't have the rerssources to buy e.g. Myrinet, try alternative architectures if they might fit your problem, e.g. hypercubes (see other posts) or models like Flat Neighbourhood.

...this is the yet another result of global warming.

People, we've already lost Venus to corporate carelessness and greed, and now Io is being turned into a wasteland! How many more Jovian moons must be covered in molten rock and sulfurous ash and before all the evil American companies wake up? The Face on Mars weeps for us all!!!

Please forgive my emotional tirade; I'm just upset because Stephen King died again.
__________

As a counterweight to the preceding foolishness, I'll add some meaningful data to the discussion by correcting the following line of the press release:

"The Surt eruption appears to cover an area of 1,900 square kilometers, which is larger than the city of Los Angeles and even larger than the entire city of London," Marchis said.

The city of Los Angeles covers 5,959 km^2, and London covers 4,147 km^2, so the eruption wasn't even half as large as either of them. Even Melbourne, at 2,027 km^2, would not have been completely covered by the lava flow, though I'm sure tourism would have been affected.

People have been attaching cameras to kites for quick-and-dirty aerial photographs for almost a hundred years.

Either this story has been in the queue for way too long, or you need to verify your sources.

Kite Aerial Photograhy began at least as early as the late 1880's with the work of Arthur Batut in Labruguiere, France - including this 1889 image of the city. He went so far as to use an altimeter to automatically adjust the focal length of the camera

~~~~~~

KAP seems like a great application for one of those X10 wireless cameras. Outdoors they have a range of maybe 200 feet and that could probably be enhanced with a directional antenna.

People have been attaching cameras to kites for quick-and-dirty aerial photographs for almost a hundred years.

Either this story has been in the queue for way too long, or you need to verify your sources.

Kite Aerial Photograhy began at least as early as the late 1880's with the work of Arthur Batut in Labruguiere, France - including this 1889 image of the city. He went so far as to use an altimeter to automatically adjust the focal length of the camera

~~~~~~

KAP seems like a great application for one of those X10 wireless cameras. Outdoors they have a range of maybe 200 feet and that could probably be enhanced with a directional antenna.

Note that Charles Benton (The guy who runs the first site listed) is offering a particular geeky barter: exchanging photos for slide rules)

Note that Charles Benton (The guy who runs the first site listed) is offering a particular geeky barter: exchanging photos for slide rules)

Look at the penguin kites: http://arch.ced.berkeley.edu/kap/images/pengarch.j pg

Those along waterfronts know that daily patterns of onshore and offshore breezes can aid in getting good wind.

Brooks Leffler pioneered the art with a magazine (!!!) that he still has back issues of. He even sells stabilizing tails. The most stunning pictures in my opinion have been by the vastly-experienced Chris Benton... he inspired my finally getting into this. $100 for the kite, $80 for the camera, $100 radio+misc, and you're up and going.

Yes

Actually, this is one of the few cases wherein if you don't trust the gub'mint (setter of standards for rad-leakage) or the corporates (laptop manufacturer), you can just as easily verify for yourself.

Alpha: If you're not convinced from the laws of physics that alphas will be stopped by the casing of your laptop, build a cloud chamber with some dry ice and alcohol, and sit your laptop on top of it. Observe the lack of straight fat traces emanating from your laptop.

Beta: Ditto. You can also build a detector for charged particles out of gold leaf and leave it next to your laptop for a few hours, or you can just eyeball your cloud chamber for longer traces with occasional kinks as electrons are deflected in the medium.

Gamma: OK, your cloud chamber won't work as well here, so drop $300 for a pocket geiger counter from a place like Edmund Scientific. (It slices, it dices, it's something no kid who grew up during the Cold War should be without! :-)

Cloud chambers are easy to build, and fun to watch. Get an old radium-dial watch or clock, place a blue LED next to it, and you've got yourself a "nuclear lava lamp".

Case modders alert! You could replace the top flat part of a PC with it and the cool air from the base of the chamber would ooze down into your case, providing a little bit of extra cooling. along with one hell of a l33t case mod - permanently mount your rad-source in the middle of the chamber, mask off and paint a "radioactive" symbol in the plexiglass cover, with a small source directly beneath the center of the rad-symbol, and illuminate it with a one of those traffic-light/borg-cube-green LEDs, and bring a few blocks of dry ice to the LAN party! W00T!

OK, back on topic. The bottom line is that measuring the amount of ionizing radiation leacking from a nuke-powered laptop is trivial, and if you compare the (lack of) radiation coming from your laptop from the (big pile of) background radiation coming from the bricks in your house, the glaze on your grandma's dishes, and the potassium in that bundle of bananas, or just from living in the Rockies, you just might learn something about risk assessment - something about which those in the knee-jerk anti-nuclear movement would prefer to keep you in the dark.

a great idea. also please be advised that some of the best rated college stations do webcasts as well.

(i guess my west coast prejudices are showing- i'm sure there's great ones on the east coast and midwest, etc as well)

There is nothing in the current motes that can not be miniaturized. In three years this demo will be done with a 6" aircraft, and millimeter-scale sensor nodes.

This is all leading to "Smart Dust".

These tests were down with MICA sensor motes which can be purchased from Crossbow Technology.

These motes run TinyOS, which was developed at UC Berkeley.

More information about TinyOS:

• TinyOS FAQ
• TinyOS support page
• TinyOS SourceForge page
• nesC Compiler SourceForge page
• MICA sensor mote hardware designs

Yes, my job does involve programming for these motes. I have four of them on my desk acting as an ad-hoc wireless sensor network now.

These tests were down with MICA sensor motes which can be purchased from Crossbow Technology.

These motes run TinyOS, which was developed at UC Berkeley.

More information about TinyOS:

• TinyOS FAQ
• TinyOS support page
• TinyOS SourceForge page
• nesC Compiler SourceForge page
• MICA sensor mote hardware designs

Yes, my job does involve programming for these motes. I have four of them on my desk acting as an ad-hoc wireless sensor network now.

These tests were down with MICA sensor motes which can be purchased from Crossbow Technology.

These motes run TinyOS, which was developed at UC Berkeley.

More information about TinyOS:

• TinyOS FAQ
• TinyOS support page
• TinyOS SourceForge page
• nesC Compiler SourceForge page
• MICA sensor mote hardware designs

Yes, my job does involve programming for these motes. I have four of them on my desk acting as an ad-hoc wireless sensor network now.

These tests were down with MICA sensor motes which can be purchased from Crossbow Technology.

These motes run TinyOS, which was developed at UC Berkeley.

More information about TinyOS:

• TinyOS FAQ
• TinyOS support page
• TinyOS SourceForge page
• nesC Compiler SourceForge page
• MICA sensor mote hardware designs

Yes, my job does involve programming for these motes. I have four of them on my desk acting as an ad-hoc wireless sensor network now.

These tests were down with MICA sensor motes which can be purchased from Crossbow Technology.

These motes run TinyOS, which was developed at UC Berkeley.

More information about TinyOS:

• TinyOS FAQ
• TinyOS support page
• TinyOS SourceForge page
• nesC Compiler SourceForge page
• MICA sensor mote hardware designs

Yes, my job does involve programming for these motes. I have four of them on my desk acting as an ad-hoc wireless sensor network now.

(arg, the super-slow WestCoast slashdot server has apparently eaten some of my post, and mis-formatted the rest.)

I was mainly referring to textual documents. The cases of diagrams, schematics, and maps are obvious examples of some layout control being necessary. However,

When I read something, I better have the optimum learning / content transfer scenario.

In the majority of today's printed communication (going by quantity of paper here), there is an adverserial relationship between author and reader. The publishers of newspapers and junk mail are trying to get me to read and respond to advertising, while overlooking shortcomings in their articles/claims. They cannot be trusted to present information in the most suitable way.

Neither can electronic publishers- PDF writers behave the same way paper-users do, and HTML authors are in a constant battle with client-side reformatting software to stuff more and more advertising windows onto my screen.

Their main motive is advertising- which has expanded far beyond its roots of "informing potential customers of our services", into "subconciously training customers to prefer our product for reasons unrelated to its merits, often to their own detriment"

If, however, these publishers know that the information will be reformatted by my own software, and that they can't do anything about it, then we'll see an increase in communications honesty: they'll no longer be encouraged to trick you into paying attention to ads. And they'll be forced into a more straightforward "pay-to-read" business model, rather than the vague "this article brought to you by the fuzzy chance that you'll like it and form a more positive association with Pepsi than with Coca-Cola".

(I know, you don't have to tell me, the technology for effective nanopayments doesn't yet exist. I told you, I'm being idealist here! Advertising is obviously costing the consumers some money in the form of increased expenses, or else companies wouldn't be able to cover their ad costs, not to mention profit by them. It would be nicer all around if that money could go to be paid from the author to the reader, without an advertiser getting in the way.)

An easy example: Let's say that I draw a circuit diagram. Most of them fit better landscape but it just happens that mine fits better portrait.

You think there's only 2 kinds of paper layout? My printer has 14 inch pages. So I guess I'm stuck at the author's whim for portrait, and can't print it all.

The example of a circuit diagram looking better in landscape or portait doesn't even make sense. (Its just whether or not the numbers on the transistors are rotated 90 degrees, the image has no necessary top or bottom).

A fallacy in your argument that "only the author knows the best format for his data" is that it begs the question that there even IS one best format. In the digital age, there should be multiple valid views of information, dynamically reformatted from moment-to-moment according to the needs of the viewer.

Publishing a diagram or schematic in a display language robs me of the potential benefits of reading it on my computer. If you'd given my a copy of the application-level data from your engineering program, I could print it out on my giant size plotter. I could aggregate complex sections into single block diagrams, I could link it with other related circuits. I could load it into SPICE to see how it actually runs. I could mouseover an IC and see highlights on the 18 other components it's linked to. All these cool possibilities of really exploiting the power of computers, held back because people cling to the old habits of paper-based publishing.

True, today its not likely that the application you used it widely enough distributed for that to be possible. But that can be circumvented- for instance, the application file format could contain a URL for some plugin viewers (including one in java) to convert the data to a printable form if I don't have the original program. This should be transparent to most people who just want to view the document (same way that Microsoft Mediaplayer(tm) downloads new codecs) Or if I do have that program, or a compatible one, then I can use its full power to explore the data from many viewpoints.

As a consequence, you get crap for not relying on the author criterion. No, that's not very smart..

If I got a bad printout because
I blindly apply an overbroad format, that's my fault. As my fault, and I can fix it and view it again (and, preferring to read from the screen, probably without wasting paper). But if the author made a mistake, I have no opportunity to
correct it myself. In my own experience, however, PDF authors often send out unreadable messes because they LIKE distressed handwriting fonts and they LIKE 3 center justified columns of 6 point all-lowercase Arial. People get these elaborate text-formatting tools, and then feel a constant urge to use them, regardless of consequences.

The use of PDF or similar file-formats means that I don't have the freedom to correct the author's mistakes and oversights. (It is somewhat possible to extract the text from a PDF file, but Adobe discourages this,
making the needed tools either expensive or laborious to operate).

Even though he might be a good writer, I'm stuck with his bad page-layout choices, and can't enjoy the work. Most people don't have the skill for good graphical design, lets not force their bad/non choices on everyone else.

Like Free Soft
ware says, more power to the end-user! Separate content from presentation! Viva la libre!

This is particularly true in an environment like the central California valley, where two points of land on either side of a fault line can shift as much as a foot in either direction over the course of a year or so, and that's without an earthquake.

This is particularly true in an environment like the central California valley, where two points of land on either side of a fault line can shift as much as a foot in either direction over the course of a year or so, and that's without an earthquake.

Could some explain to me the meaning of this code name Longhorn? I mean, look at thier logo! Just two red horns. Maybe they have finally realised who Billy really is.

Check out Team Cheaing is Possible.

I don't think you know how SETI@home works. First of all, it's pretty clear you don't even know how the program works. Every work unit is sent out to at least 3 computers so that results can be verified. However, since we send out so many workunits (as in, we can clog a 100 Mbit pipe, and these workunits aren't exactly huge), the system may send a workunit out more than the minumum amount of times. So a workunit may be sent out more times than necessary, but won't be sent out less times than necessary. If we aren't splitting tapes fast enough to keep up with demand, workunits will be sent to more people. We do this, because otherwise we wouldn't be able to satisfy the demands of the users, and redundancy is good. It's simply not worth our time to be going after every suspected case of cheating (as in, we have better things to do, especially since there's only a few of us). Now, on to all of the flamebait about open source. The infrastructure for the next generation of SETI@home, BOINC is open source. In fact, we would like your help on it looking for bugs and security holes. So if you want to help, visit http://boinc.ssl.berkeley.edu and help find bugs in our code. Thanks, Mike Gary Berkeley SETI project