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The software seems to pick out the most unusual words in a page. Typos can get quite unusual. One of their papers gives an example that uses "peroperties" as an index word. On the target page, it's clearly a typo for "properties". If the authors of that page ever bothered to spell-check it, that word would go away, and the paper would be that much harder to find.

(I've already sent them an email about this.)

Chris

Eric

Richard Fateman has a program called "mockmma" that is a simple knock-off of Mathematica. I don't know how complete it is, but I doubt it is anywhere close to being a complete clone of Mathematica. It's written in Common Lisp and there's a pointer to it on the ALU's Lisp Tools page.

There are other resources:

• The Numerical Analysis & Associated Fields Resource Guide, especially sections "NA Software Libraries on the Net" and "NA Software Packages on the Net".
• Usenet newsgroups sci.math and sci.math.symbolic (but read the FAQ, first, and read the news groups for a few weeks before posting!)

I'm sure if you spend a little time with a search engine (Deja, Google), you will turn up more information. I found the above in less than five minutes, so I'm sure there's much more information out there if you look a little bit.

if Matlab-like functionality is appropriate, then try Octave (look for it on the GNU site)

you said you don't like Emacs. well, if your dislike is strong then I guess Jacal and Mockmma are not your cup of tea. they are written in Scheme and Common Lisp respectively, so presumably they are most convenient to run with the prompt in Emacs.

hth

If an income tax exempts savings and charitable donations, then it has almost the same economic effect as a sales tax -- any income that you didn't save (or give away) was, by definition, spent on something.
--
"But, Mulder, the new millennium doesn't begin until January 2001."

If your application can be fielded entirely in ANSI C and its libraries, you can just use dos-gcc to compile up a DOS executable under Linux (dos-gcc is djgpp built as a cross-compiler). I build each sfront release under Linux for both Linux and DOS/Win32 using dos-gcc, and it works great. It was worth purging gratiutious non-ANSI-libs from the source tree ...

I've checked the original press elease from UC berkeley. It seems to be about putting a cell on a chip and controlling its membrane potential (voltage) with electronic circuits. It probably has nothing to do with cybernetic control or neural implants (yet). The following are quotes from the press release:

"UC Berkeley's bionic chip took three years to build using silicon microfabrication technology. It is transparent, so it can be studied by microscope, and measures about one hundredth of an inch across. The much tinier cell, which measures about 20 microns across, or one thousandth of an inch, is not visible to the naked eye. It sits in a hole in the center of the chip and is kept alive with an infusion of nutrients."

"Cell membranes allow certain materials in and keep others out depending on the needs of the cell. The bionic chip can open and close a cell membrane in milliseconds, allowing for a very precise control never before possible. Once in place in the circuit, the cells themselves are considered bionic since they can be operated in this way by computer control."

What about SETI@home? Has it become too "Popular" to be the in thing to run anymore? It's a moot point for me anyway; Both of SETI@home's linux distributions for my box (i686-pc-linux-gnu-gnulibc2.1 and i686-pc-linux-gnulibc1-static) core dumped on me under RH 6.1. So, I guess I'll keep my piddly 133mhz pentium busy doing distributed.net stuff, even if they do occasionaly have bugs with their code; at least it runs.

1. SETI@home
2. GIMPS: The Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search

I've been thinking about a vacuum sealer, to prevent meat freezer burn more than anything. Are they really worth the money (and counterspace)?

Forget Tupperware and Rubbermaid - the new disposables are the way to go! I don't feel guilty when my leftovers have grown fur and I throw the container out.

Every winter, I make up a few batches of soup. One evening, minimal effort = one meal + 10 bowls of frozen soup. 10 minutes in the microwave and it's as good as new. The key is to find recipes that will use up a large cut of meat. I get a ham dinner, a ham&pea streudel and the 10 bowls of soup from one ham. You can do similar things with a good beef brisket or pot roast.

There's a great recipe archive at http://soar.berkeley.edu/recipes/ which can range from basic food to fancy.

The Willamette will be introduced at 800 mhz initially and climb in 33 mhz increments for a total of 22 separate processors. To prevent VAI from gaining market share Intel will be creating 22 new slot types believed to be labeled SLOT E through SLOT BB, skipping the letters Q and Z.

Interestingly, you will be able to overclock the new Celerons to 1.5 ghz three months prior to Willamette's 1.5 ghz release. Sadly, the price of rambus is expected to climb as long as Intel's processors remain faster than their AMD counterparts. That's ok to potential low end Celeron customers because they only expect to get 16 megs of ram with their sub-$1000 systems.

There is a light at the end of the tunnel however: In 2001 Intel will debut a whole new way to compute! Intel is building a vast server running at 10.94 TeraFLOPs/sec capable of running everybody's desktops from San Jose. You will have instantaneous access at anytime to the worlds fastest computer. The home client will be called Q Box! followed of course by Z Box! completely skipping X Box... This is of course the natural next step in the evolution of home computing. Intel will no longer be putting serial numbers on their processors to keep track of you. They will already have all your data. Rumors of Intel's collaboration with the folks at SETI@home are patently false. Intel did mention not to expect more than one frame every 18 hrs 13 min 45.4 sec on your first person shooter.

Results: I was getting probed at an average of once every 20 minutes from a variety of locations. Urk! (Please note, my ip starts with a 24, which tends to indicate an @home or roadrunner cable modem service)

Side note: If you want to test your machine, go to Steve Gibson's SheildsUP!. It's a bit slow at the moment (and posting this ain't gonna make it faster). Personally I wish I had known about this site before this insanity started.

-----

If you're interested in the actual geography of the net rather than a theoretical one, check out this page for some cool research on the geographical distribution of domain names. It's by a dude named Zook, who is a Ph.D. student at UC Berkeley in the Dept. of City and Regional Planning. Neat maps.

Berkeley doesn't do that anymore. You have to register now (LIPS and then they let you use it, using a DHCP configuration. To go into the library that has the connections, you have to be a student, or have a drivers' license and be over 18.

Unless I'm very much mistaken, MP4 does not compress an audio track like MP3 does. It is not an improved version of MP3. From what I've read on the MP4 Developer Tools Site, MP4 works somewhat like an augmented version of MIDI files (in fact there seems to be legacy support for MIDI).
So you wouldn't be able to convert your CD tracks to MP4.

Quotes:

'MP4-SA is different from standards like the MIDI File Format, because it includes not only the notes to play, but the method for turning notes into sound.'

'If the instrument models use algorithmic synthesis instead of wavetables, an MP4-SA file can describe realistic musical performances without using any audio data -- just score data, mixdown cues, and DSP algorithms. In this case, the MP4-SA file is about the same size as a MIDI File, but is a lossless encoding of the audio heard at mixdown. Just like a WAV file -- but 50 to 1000 times smaller!'


--Luc

Take a look at the MPEG-4 Structured Audio: Developer Tools for info on MP-4.

RootPrompt.org -- Nothing but Unix

This was probably quite difficult to implement, but isn't exactly conceptually brilliant. Modern computers already run at different clock rates internally. Your disk I/O bus runs at one speed, your video processor runs at another speed and the CPU still spends a lot of time waiting for stuff to come down the system bus from memory.

It's even less conceptually brilliant, when you see what people elsewhere have been working on - namely wavepipelined architectures.

Funny... people just keep on reinventing the wheel... fire... and then they patent it to hell.

IIRC, the guys at Manchester University were working on this back in 1989/1990 (or at least they were when I went on a tour of the place...). Back then, it was just called the "wave pipelined RISC chip" - these days, it's the "Amulet". Check it out. It's based on ye olde ARM processor architecture - but the implementation is completely asynchronous -- that is, each individual logic element is clocked separately.

Sure, it's still experimental... sure, it's slower than other chips - but it also predates IBM's announcement by about 11 years. Just goes to show - academia ain't entirely useless ;-)

Links
Architectural Overview at Berkeley

The Amulet Asynchronous Logic Group at Manchester University

Who needs clocks? Bah!

Simon

This camera seems to do what researchers at Berkeley have been doing for a while now, but its getting to consumer level. The culmination of this technology is to be able to give the computer a regular 35mm photograph and let it reconstruct perfect models and textures of everything it sees.

The Berkeley researches have this working, only it takes more steps and more time. Alot of these techniques were used in The Matrix for stuff like the bullet time shot and the scene in the beginning where the girl does the levitating crane-kick. See this picture for another example if you have no idea what I'm talking about. And its all done in BSD so, yeah, Linux could probably do it too, even if this Minolta camera doesn't let you (they won't be the only ones with a cool-ass-3d-camera-you've-gotta-have).

These techniques are the future, not just for games, but for anything 3D. Its still polygon meshes too, so all of our other techniques for working with polygons (clipping, colision detection, transformations, etc..) still work fine just little to no modelling time. (but then of course, how do you do the really cool stuff like alien worlds or evil monsters?)

Kinda reminds me of an old Doom map modelled after the bethesda movie theater close to my house. =]

Dave

This camera seems to do what researchers at Berkeley have been doing for a while now, but its getting to consumer level. The culmination of this technology is to be able to give the computer a regular 35mm photograph and let it reconstruct perfect models and textures of everything it sees.

The Berkeley researches have this working, only it takes more steps and more time. Alot of these techniques were used in The Matrix for stuff like the bullet time shot and the scene in the beginning where the girl does the levitating crane-kick. See this picture for another example if you have no idea what I'm talking about. And its all done in BSD so, yeah, Linux could probably do it too, even if this Minolta camera doesn't let you (they won't be the only ones with a cool-ass-3d-camera-you've-gotta-have).

These techniques are the future, not just for games, but for anything 3D. Its still polygon meshes too, so all of our other techniques for working with polygons (clipping, colision detection, transformations, etc..) still work fine just little to no modelling time. (but then of course, how do you do the really cool stuff like alien worlds or evil monsters?)

Kinda reminds me of an old Doom map modelled after the bethesda movie theater close to my house. =]

Dave

I guess this camera and software combo are the comercialization of this research. Go there if you want to know how it all works and how cool it can be.

Dave

--

Idea: A PO box that accepts magnetic media and duplicates it to a network of automatic, unstructured, and uncontrolled mirrored web servers. The disk can get posted and then the mailer and media will be destroyed.

After the effort of getting a PO Box with a fake ID, they can still easily stake the box out and arrest the owner when he gets his mail.

There's a list of anonymous remailers that I hope is still good. It explains how to pgp the message multiple times and chain it through multiple remailers, so you don't have to trust any single remailer. You can make the ultimate destination a mailing list or a mail to news gateway.

Public terminals in universities, cyber cafes, or libraries make anonymous net access very easy. Don't feel like doing whatever you want to do in public? Just install some kind of proxy on the machine - a simple port forwarder if you know where you want to connect to. After you're done, kill the process and delete the binary, on the off chance that someone there is competent enough to track down what happened.

Get a shell account on a heavily used system that does not run identd. Barring any funny tricks (e.g. the netcom*.netcom.com machines have a modified /usr/bin/telnet that logs username/source/destination to syslog), it will be difficult to differentiate you from the rest of the traffic. Just the same, get the account under a fake name, pay with a money order, and telnet to it from somewhere at least slightly safe. If you want to be a little bit more careful, leave some sort of proxy running on the machine and do whatever you want to do while you're not even logged in.

It seems to me that Gates and Case are really very nineteenth-century types - they are the famous "robber barons" like Leland Stanford and Andrew Carnegie.

This is not a new insight. J Bradford DeLong has an excell ent article with some interesting conclusions on the influence of the personal billions.

But the key question is: are there true economies of scale to build the structures that would be abusive. After all, big isn't inherently bad.

Microsoft had such an opportunity - the "network effect" that pulled so many applications onto Windows.

The 19th century robber barons had railroads, and industrial economies of scale - a big steel mill is more efficient that 100 small ones.

But does AOL/Time-Warner have a similar hook? None is obvious to me - there's little advantage to a web application provider in hosting through AOL. A little one, but not a big one. Not like the difference between staking your future on the launch of a Windows app against a MacOS app.

The difference between a rich company and a dangerous monopoly is the "only game in town" factor. Time-Warner has that in some cable utilities - that's the only monopoly I see. And cable has competitors.

Remember when AT&T was "TPC" ("see figure 1"?)(BTW, I can't find a URL for a "see figure 1" joke to include here...)

Henry Troup
hwt@igs.net
These comments are placed in the public domain.

It seems to me that Gates and Case are really very nineteenth-century types - they are the famous "robber barons" like Leland Stanford and Andrew Carnegie.

This is not a new insight. J Bradford DeLong has an excell ent article with some interesting conclusions on the influence of the personal billions.

But the key question is: are there true economies of scale to build the structures that would be abusive. After all, big isn't inherently bad.

Microsoft had such an opportunity - the "network effect" that pulled so many applications onto Windows.

The 19th century robber barons had railroads, and industrial economies of scale - a big steel mill is more efficient that 100 small ones.

But does AOL/Time-Warner have a similar hook? None is obvious to me - there's little advantage to a web application provider in hosting through AOL. A little one, but not a big one. Not like the difference between staking your future on the launch of a Windows app against a MacOS app.

The difference between a rich company and a dangerous monopoly is the "only game in town" factor. Time-Warner has that in some cable utilities - that's the only monopoly I see. And cable has competitors.

Remember when AT&T was "TPC" ("see figure 1"?)(BTW, I can't find a URL for a "see figure 1" joke to include here...)

Henry Troup
hwt@igs.net
These comments are placed in the public domain.

Actually it is very good that the DeCSS people are NOT charging any money! Although this would mean that there would be possible monetary damages, there are many trade secret laws which would more clearly favor the plaintiffs if the defendents were making monetary gains.

For more info on the Trade Secret issue, check out:
This link

Two quotes are pertinent to AOLs latest action. They point out that flat rate pricing "...creates an incentive for the ISP to passively or actively degrade service quality, since per subscriber usage and cost decrease with worse quality but revenue remains the same." A little later, they state,

"The only incentive to limit service degradation is the threat of loss of subscribers to other ISPs. ISPs reduce this threat by increasing the cost of switching to other providers. For example, in order to switch, a subscriber would have to reconfigure her computer which she may find difficult to do, and her e-mail would not be forwarded."

Hmmm.

(Note: for the purposes of this comment, AOL is considered an ISP, although the authors do mention that "...AOL's Internet service provision is now handled by UUNet, so AOL may properly be said not to be an ISP any more.")

Two quotes are pertinent to AOLs latest action. They point out that flat rate pricing "...creates an incentive for the ISP to passively or actively degrade service quality, since per subscriber usage and cost decrease with worse quality but revenue remains the same." A little later, they state,

"The only incentive to limit service degradation is the threat of loss of subscribers to other ISPs. ISPs reduce this threat by increasing the cost of switching to other providers. For example, in order to switch, a subscriber would have to reconfigure her computer which she may find difficult to do, and her e-mail would not be forwarded."

Hmmm.

(Note: for the purposes of this comment, AOL is considered an ISP, although the authors do mention that "...AOL's Internet service provision is now handled by UUNet, so AOL may properly be said not to be an ISP any more.")

Two quotes are pertinent to AOLs latest action. They point out that flat rate pricing "...creates an incentive for the ISP to passively or actively degrade service quality, since per subscriber usage and cost decrease with worse quality but revenue remains the same." A little later, they state,

"The only incentive to limit service degradation is the threat of loss of subscribers to other ISPs. ISPs reduce this threat by increasing the cost of switching to other providers. For example, in order to switch, a subscriber would have to reconfigure her computer which she may find difficult to do, and her e-mail would not be forwarded."

Hmmm.

(Note: for the purposes of this comment, AOL is considered an ISP, although the authors do mention that "...AOL's Internet service provision is now handled by UUNet, so AOL may properly be said not to be an ISP any more.")

Two quotes are pertinent to AOLs latest action. They point out that flat rate pricing "...creates an incentive for the ISP to passively or actively degrade service quality, since per subscriber usage and cost decrease with worse quality but revenue remains the same." A little later, they state,

"The only incentive to limit service degradation is the threat of loss of subscribers to other ISPs. ISPs reduce this threat by increasing the cost of switching to other providers. For example, in order to switch, a subscriber would have to reconfigure her computer which she may find difficult to do, and her e-mail would not be forwarded."

Hmmm.

(Note: for the purposes of this comment, AOL is considered an ISP, although the authors do mention that "...AOL's Internet service provision is now handled by UUNet, so AOL may properly be said not to be an ISP any more.")

Well, considering a lot of Wintel users have it running in Screensaver mode (at least just about all of the people I've seen running it on Windows), and considering that SETI *almost* has too many people crunching data compared to whats available, the GUI option really isn't a big deal for most.

Personally, and this is not trolling for flames, I think the SETI project is a waste of time in its current state.

The data you process may be processed multiple times by others, thus rendering your time spent, worthless. I have heard reports that they in fact lost a portion of the anylized data, and resubmitted it to clients, as well.

Finally, by their own technical paper, they claim:

The sky survey covers a 2.5 MHz bandwidth centered at 1420 MHz ... The survey covers 28% of the sky (declinations ranging from +1 to +35 degrees) with a sensitivity of 3E-25 W/m2.

2.5mhz frequency spread, covering 28% of the sky.

It just seems like a waste of time to me.. others may (and obviously do) see it differently, but to me, if they are only searching 1/4 of the sky, and even then, only scanning a 2.5 mhz frequency range, that leaves a LOT out. I ran a client myself, but when I started reading more data about the project, and what it entailed, I decided that I could put my proc time to better uses.

Then again, SETI obviously has the use of expensive hardware, dedicated scientists, and hundreds of thousands of interested people willing to run clients to analyze the data, so obviously it has support. I dont think the entire SETI program is a waste of money, I just dont see the benefits of scanning such a small portion of the sky/freq range.

Again, not trolling here, this is an objective opinion.

PiHex

Mersenne Primes

Seti@home

Why do this? Well, first my ultimate goal is not stats-oriented. I don't really care where I am in the stats, where my team is in the stats, etc. What I enjoy most is that I contribute to a number of projects, albiet a little in each.

For example. The Seti@home client runs on a Pentium 166 (overclocked to 200) that is sitting in the living room of my apt. It makes my roomates happy to see eye-candy on the monitor out there and it keeps the otherwise idle machine (it's a proxy/firewall for our cable modem connection) doing something. No, it doesn't zip through data blocks (about 1 every 5 days or so), but it is doing _something_.

So, what's my point? (I'm asking myself that same question). Basicly, it's that people participate in distributed computing projects for various reasons. If Seti@home has brought 1.6 million people into the distributed computing fold, then more power to them! (I do contest their figure of 1.6 million people participating, but that's for another discussion). Even if the client is not 100% efficient (and what software package is 100% efficient?) they are still contributing to the overall education of people in matters of distributed computing, in particular internet based projects.

Finally, it should be noted that distributed.net re-did a large number of CSC data blocks (~25%) as a security measure to reduce/eliminate false-positives from making their way into the stats.

Ask and ye shall recieve. It's bundled with the 2.0 download.

Check out http://setiathome.berkeley.edu/README.xsetiathome. txt
---

http://setiathome.ssl.berkeley.edu/uni x.html mentions "The xsetiathome X11 client released with the 2.0 versions of the client has known problems. Please note the README.xsetiathome file in the .tar delivery. Not all platforms necessarily have an xsetiathome client. Please do not email us about bugs in the xsetiathome client."

-beme

There is both a Linux and Slashdot group on Seti@Home. If you want to help out just go to the Seti@Home website and download the client. After installing the client you can just join the Slashdot or Linux group by going to the groups link on the main page. Search for the group you want. Then just join the group.

The Slashdot group currently has 424 members and has computed 47953 packets.

The Linux group currently has 344 members and has computed 146283 packets. (there are a few *really* good systems in the Linux group that process the bulk of those packets)

The DeCSS/DVD case revolves around a little-known and recently (Oct, 1998) enacted bit of copyright law known as 17 U.S.C. 1201, Circumvention of copyright protection systems

There is an excellent review and analysis of this law by Professor Pamela Samuelson of the University of California, Berkeley. Her paper Intellectual Property and the Digital Economy: Why the Anti-Circumvention Regulations Need to Be Revised , published last year, takes a long look at the law, its history, and many, many problems. I recommend it strongly to anyone, legal community or lay, who wants an understanding of the problems of the law. Samuelson also presents some of its weaknesses, which may be helpful in developing a legal defense in the California, New York, and Connecticut cases.

It's a long read (40 pages), give it a shot. From the introduction:

The Digital Millennium Copyright Act of 1998 ("DMCA") prohibits the circumvention of technological protection measures used by copyright owners to control access to their works. It also bans devices whose primary purpose is to enable circumvention of technical protection systems. The Clinton administration proposed these anti-circumvention rules as implementations of U.S. obligations under the World Intellectual Property Organization Copyright Treaty. However, the DMCA?s provisions are significantly broader than the treaty required. They violate the Administration?s stated goal of only imposing "predictable, minimalist, consistent, and simple" regulations on the budding digital economy.

Although Congress heeded some concerns of digital economy firms by crafting certain exceptions to authorize legitimate circumvention, those exceptions are overly narrow and shortsighted. They should be supplemented by a more general "other legitimate purposes" exception. The DMCA's anti-device provisions are, moreover, overbroad and unclear, especially on the question whether it is legal to develop a technology necessary to engage in a privileged act of circumvention (e.g., a fair use). Either Congress or the courts will be forced to constrain the reach of the anti-device rules so as not to undermine Congressional intent to preserve fair uses and so as not to harm competition and innovation in the information technology sector. Finally, though the DMCA provides for a study of one class of potentially harmful impacts of the anti-circumvention rules, this study needs to be broadened to consider the full impact of this unprecedented legislation.

What part of "Gestalt" don't you understand?

The DeCSS/DVD case revolves around a little-known and recently (Oct, 1998) enacted bit of copyright law known as 17 U.S.C. 1201, Circumvention of copyright protection systems

There is an excellent review and analysis of this law by Professor Pamela Samuelson of the University of California, Berkeley. Her paper Intellectual Property and the Digital Economy: Why the Anti-Circumvention Regulations Need to Be Revised , published last year, takes a long look at the law, its history, and many, many problems. I recommend it strongly to anyone, legal community or lay, who wants an understanding of the problems of the law. Samuelson also presents some of its weaknesses, which may be helpful in developing a legal defense in the California, New York, and Connecticut cases.

It's a long read (40 pages), give it a shot. From the introduction:

The Digital Millennium Copyright Act of 1998 ("DMCA") prohibits the circumvention of technological protection measures used by copyright owners to control access to their works. It also bans devices whose primary purpose is to enable circumvention of technical protection systems. The Clinton administration proposed these anti-circumvention rules as implementations of U.S. obligations under the World Intellectual Property Organization Copyright Treaty. However, the DMCA?s provisions are significantly broader than the treaty required. They violate the Administration?s stated goal of only imposing "predictable, minimalist, consistent, and simple" regulations on the budding digital economy.

Although Congress heeded some concerns of digital economy firms by crafting certain exceptions to authorize legitimate circumvention, those exceptions are overly narrow and shortsighted. They should be supplemented by a more general "other legitimate purposes" exception. The DMCA's anti-device provisions are, moreover, overbroad and unclear, especially on the question whether it is legal to develop a technology necessary to engage in a privileged act of circumvention (e.g., a fair use). Either Congress or the courts will be forced to constrain the reach of the anti-device rules so as not to undermine Congressional intent to preserve fair uses and so as not to harm competition and innovation in the information technology sector. Finally, though the DMCA provides for a study of one class of potentially harmful impacts of the anti-circumvention rules, this study needs to be broadened to consider the full impact of this unprecedented legislation.

What part of "Gestalt" don't you understand?

That's good; I can hardly wait. I'm tired of every couple of months having to take off the covers of my computers and vacuum out those extra cycles that were discarded. Running SETI@home has helped reduce the build-up, but this should help even more.

• Sensei - Started LinuxNewbie.org
  
• Matt Welsh - Wrote a couple of books. his homepage is here
  
• Havoc Pennington - Works on GNOME for Red Hat. His page is here
  
• Tom Christiansen - Did a lot of Perl documentation. More info here
  

Recently the NSF agreed to fund the MASH Consortium, which will maintain and develop the MASH toolkit. I think it's going to be modeled after the X Consortium.

For more info, see:

MASH Project home page The toolkit and several apps built with it are available now. (FYI, I am a grad student at Berkeley, but have never worked on the MASH project.)

This could be a really useful device, ground breaking even, the first true internet appliance. If Intel is good at marketing (and they are) they'll aim these squarely at the segment of the population who doesn't really need or want a computer but who may be convinced of the utility of browsing the web.

Consider that a couple years ago I bought my dad (73 years old now) a computer. It was a Macintosh and despite my worries its probably the most used gift he's ever received. He writes email, browses the web and plays a few games. He's even managed to use google to find stuff I've written and other things he finds interesting. I'm actually pretty impressed seeing as this was his first exposure to a computer.

My mom on the other hand has no real desire to use it. I've shown her a few things which interest her but she can't overcome the concept that she'd be "a computer user". I bet I could buy her one of these though and she'd use it a lot. It's got a regular phone so it is fine in the kitchen or whatever it is you call the area where we typically have dinner. If by default (or through a single click) it hooked up to the Searchable Online Archive of Recipes she'd use it a lot. Add in some more links for other interests (quilting or needle point or whatever) and she'd use it even more.

Eventually I'm sure she'd outgrow it and start using my dad's computer. That's fine. In a lot of cases despite this device being sold in a garage sale for 10 bucks within a year its still a win for Intel. They buy a new computer with... an Intel processor.

I don't see this as a big win for Linux. My mom (or my dad) isn't going to run and buy an Intel box to run Linux on. Sorry, Linux just isn't applicable here at this point in time. Linux just enabled Intel to sell these boxes at a really low price point.

Now here are some gadgets that were/are awesome for their time! (and in no particular order)

1) Cyberscope
2) Trebuchet
3) Picavet Suspension
4) Cameras
5) Cordless stuff
6) Standard based home automation
7) Scale combat
8) Webcams
9) Thermos
10) Slashdot

I know one of the people who did the R&D on bullet-time sequences in "The Matrix"; he recently gave a seminar at U.C. Berkeley along with Jon Gaeta where they discussed how the bullet-time sequences were done.

First, the difference between bullet-time sequences and the GAP commercial sequences is a big one:

Freeze-time shots (e.g., the GAP commercial) are easy to do. All shots are taken simultaneously of the scene, and you don't need to worry about the motion of the subjects in the scene.

Bullet-time shots actually have to move in very slow motion. At the seminar, they said that although they had many cameras firing sequentially over the camera path, they were unable to place cameras close enough together to capture sufficient frames during really slow segments of movement (if you watch The Matrix bullet-time sequences, you'll see that initially the motion starts out very slow, and gradually speeds up)

The way that Manex solved this was to use computer vision techniques to interpolate the necessary "in between" frames. This is especially difficult since the motion in some shots (i.e. Keanu Reeves' arm waving in a circle in the air) have motion that isn't linear (meaning that the compute can't simply compute the pixels along a straight line from one frame to another). Manex used a lot of combined interpolation techniques to achieve the results in the movie.

In addition, obtaining consistent camera lighting, film grain, and film speed parameters proved difficult. They used cameras that were all uniform in make and model, but had to image process the frames to achieve consistency.

Second, you may notice that all bullet-time sequences were captured on a green screen! One of the reasons they did this was because the angle of rotation is actually more than 180 degrees. (This is also a difference from the GAP commercial) So how did they insert the background?

Well the answer is, they re-created the backgrounds. Manex used image-based modelling and rendering techniques that were based on work done by Dr. Paul Debevec at U.C. Berkeley. You can read more about the FACADE photogrammetric modelling system and The Campanile Movie (which I helped work on) by following the link.

Manex's techniques greatly improved upon the work at U.C. Berkeley; they showed an OpenGL real-time demo of the sub-way and government building lobby shots from the movie at the seminar; very cool stuff.

Hope that sheds some light on how effects in The Matrix are really done.

-- Charles

I know one of the people who did the R&D on bullet-time sequences in "The Matrix"; he recently gave a seminar at U.C. Berkeley along with Jon Gaeta where they discussed how the bullet-time sequences were done.

First, the difference between bullet-time sequences and the GAP commercial sequences is a big one:

Freeze-time shots (e.g., the GAP commercial) are easy to do. All shots are taken simultaneously of the scene, and you don't need to worry about the motion of the subjects in the scene.

Bullet-time shots actually have to move in very slow motion. At the seminar, they said that although they had many cameras firing sequentially over the camera path, they were unable to place cameras close enough together to capture sufficient frames during really slow segments of movement (if you watch The Matrix bullet-time sequences, you'll see that initially the motion starts out very slow, and gradually speeds up)

The way that Manex solved this was to use computer vision techniques to interpolate the necessary "in between" frames. This is especially difficult since the motion in some shots (i.e. Keanu Reeves' arm waving in a circle in the air) have motion that isn't linear (meaning that the compute can't simply compute the pixels along a straight line from one frame to another). Manex used a lot of combined interpolation techniques to achieve the results in the movie.

In addition, obtaining consistent camera lighting, film grain, and film speed parameters proved difficult. They used cameras that were all uniform in make and model, but had to image process the frames to achieve consistency.

Second, you may notice that all bullet-time sequences were captured on a green screen! One of the reasons they did this was because the angle of rotation is actually more than 180 degrees. (This is also a difference from the GAP commercial) So how did they insert the background?

Well the answer is, they re-created the backgrounds. Manex used image-based modelling and rendering techniques that were based on work done by Dr. Paul Debevec at U.C. Berkeley. You can read more about the FACADE photogrammetric modelling system and The Campanile Movie (which I helped work on) by following the link.

Manex's techniques greatly improved upon the work at U.C. Berkeley; they showed an OpenGL real-time demo of the sub-way and government building lobby shots from the movie at the seminar; very cool stuff.

Hope that sheds some light on how effects in The Matrix are really done.

-- Charles

AvantGo
ProxiNet
TopGun (as well as some other nifty Palm progs)
Palm Telnet 0.41

Hasn't this been discussed a million times in connection with the SETI@home client (see their FAQ)? I don't think a real solution has been found yet, but it's kind of the same problem as with Quake.

It think this might be what he was talking about.

I saw somewhere a few months ago (don't you love it when people really back up their information like that?) that the growth of the web vs. the available indexing technology meant that only about 4% of the web was being indexed. Goodness, that's a surprisingly low number, isn't it? I've heard it mentioned, and have often mulled over the idea myself, that some sort of distributed indexing is probably the next logical step. With the apparent successes of distributed.net and SETI@home, this is at the very least intriguing. So let's just say, for the sake of discussion, that I had some time on my hands and the motivation to see a monster search database project through (these are both very hypothetical points). I could create the central database and write some client code. My dedicated AOV (Army of Volunteers) could come in veritable droves to download the client code and join the team (which they certainly would, right? Right?!?!?) Anyway, their client would initialize and get one of the starting URLs from the root database and go to down indexing and spidering. Shouldn't be too much of a bandwidth hog, since it will be just text, but it would be constant. Maybe not a good idea to do this with an analog modem. When the client has "eaten it's fill", or once a day, or something like that, it would slam it's content my way.... ah, there's a potential problem. That's a lot of content. Well, it's all text, so my client could maybe get some decent compression out of it by gzipping it up. Still, it wouldn't exactly be trivial. Thinking on about this, why will it help me to have my AOV doing these HTTP transactions for me when my server could do them it's own damn self. Surely my server would have a big enough pipe that the bandwidth wouldn't be a problem, and I could start any number of processes. What's the big difference between web indexing sites like distributed.net and SETI@home? Ah, it's processing power. That's what's required for the "traditional" distributed application. That kind of number crunching isn't helped by bandwidth... you need such a honkin' processor to do all that chewing that it's not cost-effective to create the system... it makes a whole lot more sense to distribute the work to any number of "normal" machines, thereby simulating a "super computer". That's right... it's all coming back to me now. So, what would be helped by distributing the web indexing process? And wouldn't the smart fellas at Google or AltaVista or have thought this through by now and come out with some sort of beta? Hmmmmmmmmmmm...... What? You actually read this whole thing? Sheesh. That's impressive. Oh well, might as well moderate me up :) RP

Browse a few relevant papers and find some keywords to search for more of the part of the field in which you are interested:

• Indexing with Neural Networks
• CMU Web->KB Project
• Ontology-Based Web Agents (PostScript)
• Berkeley Info Org course

Java has many many flaws. Thats fine, as one expects an evolving system to improve in time, you have to accept some warts at various stages. The problem is that (ignoring the obvious mis-statement that java is write once, run anywhere) java does not have a working numerical model. That is, java doesn't do math right on all platforms. The designers of the language seem to have forgotten that different numerical hardware behaves differently, and needs a consistent interface to set up correct rounding, precision, and other issues such as trapping floating point exceptions.

One can run a java program on a RISC machine, get one answer, and run the IDENTICAL bytecode on another machine and get a completely different answer. All this courtesy of an incorrect interface to the floating point hardware.

Alrighty, lets get the standards body to fix it, as Sun appears to have no interest in making it work properly. Whoops, cant do that now.

So here we have a language, without the ability to properly do numerical calculations on floating point numbers. I strongly recommend perusing W Kahan's paper on this.

A real standards body would, could, and should fix this. One may do that now, or they may not. Either way, numerical computing, HPC, and other related work on Java is now dead.

Thanks Sun. First a poor design, then no way to fix said poor design.

etoy sent out an "official" toywar graphic with their last press release. It's alittle big, but kinda nice: Lego guy with a machine gun or something. Copy available here.