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It's ironic that Doug Engelbart is most widely known as 'the inventor of the mouse', but specifically created it to be used in combination with a chord keyset so that you could (with practice) point, click with one hand, and type content or CLI commands very rapidly with the other.

On this subject, Alan Kay said:

Looking back I think that one of the paradoxes is that we made a complete mistake when we were doing the interface at PARC because we assumed that the kids would need an easy interface because we were going to try and teach them to program and stuff like that, but in fact they are the ones who are willing to put hours into getting really expert at things - shooting baskets, learning to hit baseballs, learning to ride bikes, and now on video games.

I have a four-year old nephew who is really incredible and he could use NLS fantastically if it were available, he would be flying through that stuff because his whole thing is to become part of the system he's interacting with and so if I had had that perspective I would have designed a completely different interface for the kids, one in which how you became expert was much more apparent than what I did. So I'm sorry for what I did. The Brown/MIT Vannevar Bush Symposium, Oct 1995

See

• Mouse Site's Augment demo page
• The chordset + mouse video clip
• A key Augment paper on its CLI
• Doug's work in context Much more than a 'mouse'

I've borrowed this CD-ROM from a friend and, to my annoyance, I find there doesn't seem to be any decent way to read the annotated Fire on Linux...and even on Windows it kind of sucks. Does anyone have any solutions?

You might try hacking something together using rtftohtml. I haven't tried it, but it claims to handle footnotes by turning them into hyperlinks, and the RTF version of the annotations are implemented as footnotes. There also seems to be a newer shareware RTFtoHTML, which I did just try (Mac version)--the footnotes get implemented as links to HTML anchors at the end of each chapter, which is a little painful to jump back and forth with.

The Windows version of the annotations didn't impress me that much when I tried it, either, but I was running it under Virtual PC. My method for reading the annotations was to load them into MS Word (given the date, I think it was v4.0) on a Mac, which worked fairly well; it would scroll the footnote pane to keep it in sync with the main text pane. (For that matter, you could use MS Word as a really expensive RTF to HTML translator :-). Word 98 now turns the footnotes into pop-up tooltips (which is a good way to do annotations), but in the pop-ups it messes up the line breaks. You can't win 'em all.

Of course, the other other option is just to read the raw RTF; it's not that ugly once you reflow it.

"One of my teachers is working on protein folding, and has about 45% accuracy using nueral networks and genetic algorithms."

By whose standards? His own I would guess. That's the problem with protein folders as a group: no objectivity. Every year for the past 35 or so one or more of them claims to have a solution. That's why competitions like CASP 4 arose to address this dilemma. No one at that meeting ever makes claims like 45% accuracy at protein folding, but some do issue the occasional nutso press release wherein they claim their method is better than the competition or others improperly exploit their position to force a wacky article into print about a technique of questionable value for solving protein folding which failed to pan out.

"is there any ever protein folding news?"

Well, protein folding is tough, really tough. You may think cracking 512-bit encryption is tough but that's just peanuts compared to protein folding, the inverse attack on the problem first proposed by K. Eric Drexler has turned out to be much more effective, and entire careers have been wasted chasing this dream (which is not to say it isn't WORTH chasing, but just to put things into perspective).

Who is neil stephenson and why should I be excited? I'm going to assume this a joke, but on the off chance it's not..."have you heard the good word, my brother?" Neil Stephenson is one of the two (IMHO) best cyberpunk authors existant. (The other being, obviously, Wm. Gibson) Cyberpunk is a fairly new (emergant in the early 80s) genre of hard science fiction. It deals (mainly) with the socio-cultural impact of emergent technologies, particularly machine-learning and the internet. (try here for a bio by his publisher or here for a bio apparently aelf-authored.) Stephenson's main works are: _Snow Crash_ (his first big hit) which is eerily on-target in predicitons of balkanization and marginalization ten minutes in the future. After that comes _The Diamond Age, or a Young Lady's Illustrated Primer_. This is my favorite story-wise, but the ending kind of sucks. (Hats off to Stephenson as an author, but his endings have a tendancy to be sort of weird and unsatisfyingly anti-climactic) _The Diamond Age_ focuses on the further balkanization of society, set far enough in the future that nano-tech has become cheap and ubiquitous. His newer two offerings are _Cryptonomicon_ (This book is incredible. Admittedly, I'm a number theorist, so I might be biased, but still...) This one is set dually in the present day (or 30 seconds in the future) and during WWII. It focuses on the role of cryptography and data-security in the world. Again, the ending could be better. He has also recently published, both in both tree-medi and available online here an essay about the history of personal computing called _In the Beginning Was the Command Line_. I've gotten mixed reviews on it, but havn't read it yet, so can't really comment. I'd highly recommend you read some of his stuff...I mean, really, what kind of self-resoecting geek doesn't read Stephenson... abszero (sorry I'm AC, I just now noticed)

the OS you write is called Weenix, and is quite decent for the term.

If for nothing else, go for the highly legible course lecture slides.

Dwyt ti'n cofion "websites" o ddysgwrau?

Their website doesn't seem to be very extensive, but it does have some information:

http://www.cs.brown.edu/re search/graphics/research/cave/

For those versed in computer science, all you need to do really is go back to Codd's assumptions about relational databases, change his normalizations to allow duplicate rows and then allow negative rows in cases where a row is deleted before it is present. The theorems of such a relational calculus turn out to encompass the essential "weirdness" of quantum physics.

But they encompass much more:

They describe an entire range of relational objects which are neither quantum nor classical. That we might end up with strange things like synchronicities is no more surprising than that the ripples from a stone thrown in the middle of a pond strike all sides simultaneously -- except that we have to admit the "inverse Markovians" in which "effect" seems to precede "cause".

There have been many studies of identical twins separated at birth exhibiting synchronicities that, when confronted, make "skeptics" of the universal weirdness of things start sounding more like fundamentalist adherents to a new form of religion than intellectually honest scientists. The fact that these studies are on such macroscopic entities as human beings, involving complex behaviors over extended time and space separations is a clue as to just how far we are from appreciating the relationship between DNA and universal weirdness deriving, not from "nature" but from from the fundamental laws of relationships.

What do you think of Roger Penrose and Stuart Hameroff's assertion that consciousness arises as a result of a switch between classical and quantum physics in brain microtubules?

(Bit of info for anyone not up on the idea here.)

ucgapam (just registered)

I was just about to ASK SLASHDOT about XML. XML will solve the search problem (or at least help make it better) Working drafts of XML have been drawn up by the W3 Consorium and XLINK, XSL, etc... are coming. There are almost no XML applications available yet though!!!!! most of what is available is in java. This is a field where Linux could be leading the pack, but is instead an example where I think we are lagging behind. (I hope someone can point me to a group that is bringing XML deep into the linux os)

I want to know if Linux is on top of this. Microsoft has an XML notepad available and I hear that it's going to be all over Win2000 (in the registry even). XML will be the foundation of the new internet and we don't want microsoft to have a technology edge there do we? Perl has XML modules, as I am sure other languages do too (python). Lets get some apps written!

What about Gnome and KDE? this could help make their projects easier. Especially KDE with all of the object similatrities between Corba and XML and Object RDB's. All Config files could be theoretically stored in XML. We need to push this one people!

-pos


The truth is more important than the facts.

I'm not sure why this is. Maybe they just didn't get around to implementing it yet. It seems like it would be a simple (and useful) thing to add a check box in the preferences, but I didn't see one.

There is an online validator at:
http://www.stg.brown.edu/se rvice/xmlvalid/xmlvalid.shtml

Don't forget to check out the book's website for all their "errata" -- we used it in a course (a Data Structures & Algorithms course, oddly, though the assignments didn't have to be done in Java) and the prof would almost always start off the class with a little section "These are the errors in the textbook we're going to encounter today". Some of them were kinda nasty too, if you weren't aware of them; stuff like coding errors in their pseudocode for algorithms wasn't uncommon. Other than that, it's not bad...I'd get into a more detailed discussion about it, but this is the wrong book review :)

It's relatively easy just to build your own, i did this to an old AT keyboard. I just took a screwdriver and followed the keymap on: http://www.cs.brown.edu/~scs/dv.html from there (in win95) i just set it to dvorak, and i was on my way. I only used it like this for a week, because i was painfully slow on it (because i had never used it before), and i switched back because the rest of the world is QWERTY. I have to go to school and use their keyboards, my dad, my sister, my grandparents, my friends, they're all qwerty. There's no sense in having to learn/know 2 different keyboard layouts. It's much easier to use 1.

Swift argues that babies could be a delicacy for the upper classes, and a source of revenue, instead of a resource drain, on the working classes. Sounds morbid, but it's quite amusingly done too.

And it is relevant to this debate. Swift too was trying to argue against contemporary attitudes which counted certain people as worthless, although in his case it was the poor rather than the disabled.

You can read a short introduction to the proposal here.

Software engineering is a ugrad thing. Look for programs that are very hands on, try and talk to the TAs/graders to see how much the emphasize things like doing your own QA, commenting well, following `good design principles'. Working in the industry over summers helps too, you'll learn very quickly what's good and bad by looking at other people's code.

Brown is pretty good for that, but then again I'm biased.

Software engineering is a ugrad thing. Look for programs that are very hands on, try and talk to the TAs/graders to see how much the emphasize things like doing your own QA, commenting well, following `good design principles'. Working in the industry over summers helps too, you'll learn very quickly what's good and bad by looking at other people's code.

Brown is pretty good for that, but then again I'm biased.

> Anyone who has used IRIX knows how horrible it
> is at multi-tasking (I recall compiling on an O2
> or an Octane and witnessing other proesses grind
> to a halt) and other functionality that we take
> for granted under other operating systems.

Wow, that really hasn't been my experience with IRIX, although I am unable to speak for versions earlier than 6.5. Were you running 6.3 or something? Compiles making my machine sluggish has always been my beef with Linux...

As for "functionality we take for granted in other operating systems," from a purely functional perspective, I can't think of a single advantage Linux has on IRIX. It's not easy to make a uniprocessor, virtual memory OS, but it's not terribly hard, either. People do it in undergrauate classes every year. So far, all of the problems that Linux has successfully addressed were addressed a decade ago by some commercial OS. Anything newer, Linux struggles with. Linux's filesystem, real-time, and SMP are crude caricatures of the state of the art, and these are areas which are hugely important to large segments of SGI's customer base.

I love SGI's products. Hell, I'm typing this wearing my "Silicon Graphics: World's Greatest Computer Company" T-shirt, and I think there was a time when it was. It saddens me to see IRIX go, not just because I worked on it, but also because I think it's bad for SGI. From SGI's point of view, Linux has all the problems NT has (it requires ISV's to port, it isn't as technically mature as SGI needs it to be, it doesn't currently run well on SGI hardware). As gratifying as Linux folks might find the pats on the head from SGI, this Linux hoo-haa is a panicky, desperate move. Not a good sign.

When I took his intro to CS programming course, he appeared in the same sweater you
see in the picture, with Birkenstocks and red socks. Eek. Ah well. I now make more money
than his professors salary. Without his damn class.

Clearly I am bitter. : ).

Here are some links for more information.

• Telomerase and Immortality
• Telomere Club

--Karl

i made a ps version for printing with 4 pages/page and everything... if you want it ready for printing

The short answer is: "mmap + SIGILL + SIGSEGV". If you're curious about the details, you might want to check out the Brown Simulator, which provides a full MMU at user-level on top of Solaris.

I have kernel-package installed and I really am into having as much stuff as possible on my system registered with dpkg (I even make WindowMaker themes into .debs), but I don't know why I would want to use kernel-package? What are the benefits over make install, given that kernels only install a couple of files in /boot and a directory in /lib/modules?

Daniel