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On a side note, does anyone know of a PDF viewer program that ignores the "No Print / No Copy" restrictions?

Yes indeed, there're several!

The short answer is that a Murder tries to present a unified system image, which is important if you use a lot of things like shared folders.

See e.g. article about a university system. Also Cyrus supports load balancing and failover via murder, although backends (the actual file stores) still remain single points of failure.

It's not for the faint of heart, but only takes a couple of "a-ha!" moments to go from lost to competent. Good luck!

It's not for the faint of heart, but only takes a couple of "a-ha!" moments to go from lost to competent. Good luck!

Here is a direct link to the video of Crusher in action http://www.rec.ri.cmu.edu/projects/ugcv/videos/ind ex.htm

Here's a movie

Sounds slightly reminiscent of the CODA filesystem, though more simplified. In terms of many copies and one server to replicate to.

"The potential is there, but the willingness of humans to spend time explaining semantic structures to machines, when they're obvious enough to other humans, is lacking."

That's why you want to make it into a game

My astrophysics professor actually does work simulating black hole collisions. There are some cool images and movies of galaxies containing black holes colliding at http://web.phys.cmu.edu/~tiziana/BHGrow/

YEAH, that bastard never helps anyone except himself.

CyLab at Carnegie Mellon has an education component. They are also aligned with CERT.

Do a google search on Sabastian Thrun, he was the team lead for Stanford, and formally at CMU (what a non-coincidence). Most of the software they used on Stanly (Stanford's bot) was either written by Sebastian in his former research or taken from experience gained on CMU's team the previous year. The ladar mapping he used, I know I saw on some former page of his that had all the gory algorithm details. It might just take a little bit of searching. He also has a c library out there somewhere that does a lot of this stuff, but I can't seem to find it now.

One paper that's of interest might be here: http://www.cs.cmu.edu/afs/cs.cmu.edu/user/thrun/pu blic_html/papers/thrun.ces-tr.html (sorry, no linky, writing in a hurry)

And that paper is mentioned in the readme of the BFL (Bayesian Filtering Library) found here:
http://people.mech.kuleuven.be/~kgadeyne/software/ bfl-trunk/

Lastly, at one point all of us competitors were required to give our design documents to DARPA, and they put them up on their webpage here:
http://www.darpa.mil/grandchallenge05/techpapers.h tml

BTW, I wasn't on Stanford's team, but I was on another finalist team.

Researchers at Carnegie-Mellon disagree. The research was funded in part by airlines, which have a financial interest in banning cell phone calls, but will be (was?) published in IEEE Spectrum, which is well respected and I think peer reviewed. Draw your own conclusions.

Anything you gleaned from the NOVA documentary is bullshit compared to watching the guy explain it himself

That's nice. I've been researching repurposed game engines and there are some very interesting things out there. From architecture and geovisualization to interface with libraries. Even the blind are being helped

That's one. Closer to home, for those who are in the US, would be Dave Touretzky's
http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~dst/raisethefist/

It's downright foolish to believe that a tool will solve your problems. But you sound like a smart guy, so I'm sure you've figured that out. However when in doubt, it's always a safe bet to peruse the SEI site (here's the section on SCM). As far as tools go, I'm always partial to the free ones, but here's my take:

• CVS: Free and easy, but very basic. Difficult to manage in a large environment with lots of parallel development threads.
• Subversion: Improves on some of CVS's shortcomings.
• Arch: Haven't gotten a chance to try it out, but I hear good things. It's distributed, so there's no central repository.
• ClearCase: IMHO, CC is not necessary unless you've got a project with a very large team and an extremely large code base (I'm thinking 1 million SLOC and up...)
• Harvest: Avoid this tool like the plague.

HTH.

I actually put together this earlier this month to show someone that even in a simulation environment, with every node starting at the same voltage (which should be a "stable" state, as long as it's not disturbed by outside influences), the floating point inaccuracies in the simulator are sufficient for oscillation to start spontaneously.

Hasn't Carnegie Mellon produced at least a couple of similar robots that give tours?

Yes. There is SAGE at the Carnegie Museum of Natural History which I've seen in person and there may be more of which I am not aware.

Interesting. I thought I recognized the name Libit.
He's one of the authors of a NIPS paper from three years back: Statistical Debugging of Sampled Programs

As the current primary developer of the system I'm a bit biased, but I think its a great system. It has a steep learning curve, and the documentation leaves something to be desired (like a tech writer...), but once you hit a certain scale the benefits outway the cost. On the site linked above you'll find a working demo with some base data you can experiment with, but obviously the full power of the system isn't utilized until you have lots of data and can see the resulting zones & config files.

There is an active mailing list. Feel free to join it and ask questions.

*: Not to be confused with Southwestern University's NetReg, which is a completely different system developed in parallel around the same time.

As the current primary developer of the system I'm a bit biased, but I think its a great system. It has a steep learning curve, and the documentation leaves something to be desired (like a tech writer...), but once you hit a certain scale the benefits outway the cost. On the site linked above you'll find a working demo with some base data you can experiment with, but obviously the full power of the system isn't utilized until you have lots of data and can see the resulting zones & config files.

There is an active mailing list. Feel free to join it and ask questions.

*: Not to be confused with Southwestern University's NetReg, which is a completely different system developed in parallel around the same time.

Interesting, but not quite correct. Dictionary.com provides a whole series of definitions, and the common theme is that theft involves an acquisition of goods or services without the consent of the owner.

For the sake of moral discussion of copyright (whether infringement is right or wrong) you should not clump in the two meanings of the word theft at the same time. Or ofcourse you can, but I can simply reply with "data theft" is not morally wrong while "tangible property theft" is morally wrong, because the two are distinct.
By using the same word, however, you do make the discussion more difficult and imply the wrong ideas to people not in the know about the subject (that there is conceptual moral equivalence between copying against copyright law and taking someone's tangible property against property law - which is wrong even if you believe that such actual moral equivalence exists).

You should note that none of the definitions explicitly provided the concept that the rightful owner is denied access to the goods or services which have been wrongfully acquired. Your definition depends on that concept.

The original definition of the word theft (before being overloaded with the copyright infringement meanings, before the term "intellectual property" was coined) spoke of only physical tangible things which are implicitly unavailable to their owner if taken without permission by someone else. This is the picture people have in their mind when they hear the word "theft". This is what it communicates.

Intellectual property is, by use of the term property, easily categorized as goods. The fact that these goods are ephemeral is a non-starter, since the same can be said of many items which qualify as services.

That is, ofcourse, if you don't reject the whole notion of "intellectual property" like the framers of the US constitution did.

Intellectual property has a clearly identified owner.
When copyright law is applied, yes. But whether it should or should not be applied is what the discussion is about.

Acquiring intellectual property without the consent of the owner would, therefore, be theft.

According to one of the definitions of theft, yes. But to use this definition in a discussion of this nature is confusing, so please don't.

Trying to justify to yourself that you are not a thief does not mean you are correct.

If copyright infringement makes someone a "thief" or not is a matter of interest to language philosophers. Ask a random person you know what he would think if he was told person X was a thief - and you will see that he gets the wrong idea. He would not say: "Person X is probably a Kazaa downloader" but would more likely say "I better watch out for my purse".

By calling infringement theft and infringers thieves, you are being academically correct while communicating everyone the wrong ideas. I believe language is more about communicating ideas than about being correct academically, but maybe that's just me.

As a MD volunteer election judge....
I prefer that we don't introduce paper ballots, as discussed in the legislation, because they don't solve any problems. There's a good discussion at http://euro.ecom.cmu.edu/people/faculty/mshamos/pa per.htm.
I've got a master's degree in Computer Science, and I've been an election judge for several years, working with the Diebold machines. In my opinion, the procedures established by the election board are sufficient to prevent the general public from accessing and/or hacking the unofficial vote counts.

I've been looking at a Carnegie Mellon peer-2-peer software to do just this. Check it out at http://esm.cs.cmu.edu./ I like it because it uses peer-2-peer to keep things FREE. Has anyone used anything similar to do free broadcasts?
Paul

I've wondered for some time now what would happen if someone would create a short clip of someone reading those various versions of DeCSS, possibly with a title scroll, encrypt the whole thing with CSS. Encrypt a copy of a CSS encryption program and a brute-force CSS key break, using a different key. Include a copy of DeCSS source code, and the key to the second file, and a notice that the contents are copyrighted, and that anyone who wants to decrypt the files is free to do so for any purpose other than suing someone for copyright infringement.

If the MPAA tries to sue you, sue them for violating your license, invoking the DMCA against them.

I've wondered for some time now what would happen if someone would create a short clip of someone reading those various versions of DeCSS, possibly with a title scroll, encrypt the whole thing with CSS. Encrypt a copy of a CSS encryption program and a brute-force CSS key break, using a different key. Include a copy of DeCSS source code, and the key to the second file, and a notice that the contents are copyrighted, and that anyone who wants to decrypt the files is free to do so for any purpose other than suing someone for copyright infringement.

If the MPAA tries to sue you, sue them for violating your license, invoking the DMCA against them.

I've wondered for some time now what would happen if someone would create a short clip of someone reading those various versions of DeCSS, possibly with a title scroll, encrypt the whole thing with CSS. Encrypt a copy of a CSS encryption program and a brute-force CSS key break, using a different key. Include a copy of DeCSS source code, and the key to the second file, and a notice that the contents are copyrighted, and that anyone who wants to decrypt the files is free to do so for any purpose other than suing someone for copyright infringement.

If the MPAA tries to sue you, sue them for violating your license, invoking the DMCA against them.

Here is some more info about the study. http://www.cmu.edu/PR/releases06/060228_cellphone. html Excerpt: "Strauss is an expert in aircraft electromagnetic compatibility at the Naval Air Warfare Center in Patuxent River, Md. With support from the Federal Aviation Administration, three major airlines and the Transportation Security Agency, EPP researchers crisscrossed the northeast United States on commercial flights, monitoring radio emissions from passenger use of cell phones and other electronic devices. They tracked these radio emissions via a broadband antenna attached to a compact portable spectrum analyzer that fit into an innocuous carry-on bag." And for those saying "Carnegie what?" look here: http://www.cmu.edu/clips/rankings.html We are a top university in pretty much everything, especially tech and EPP. A Phd from here means something.

Here is some more info about the study. http://www.cmu.edu/PR/releases06/060228_cellphone. html Excerpt: "Strauss is an expert in aircraft electromagnetic compatibility at the Naval Air Warfare Center in Patuxent River, Md. With support from the Federal Aviation Administration, three major airlines and the Transportation Security Agency, EPP researchers crisscrossed the northeast United States on commercial flights, monitoring radio emissions from passenger use of cell phones and other electronic devices. They tracked these radio emissions via a broadband antenna attached to a compact portable spectrum analyzer that fit into an innocuous carry-on bag." And for those saying "Carnegie what?" look here: http://www.cmu.edu/clips/rankings.html We are a top university in pretty much everything, especially tech and EPP. A Phd from here means something.

According to Carnegie Mellon's alumni page (http://www.epp.cmu.edu/httpdocs/people/alumni.htm l), G. William Strauss's graduate thesis was "Portable electronic devices onboard commercial aircraft: Assessing the risks." Published 2005.

Any CMU students willing to use their library access and a photocopier for the expansion of human knowledge before the IEEE article is published in March?

He "recently completed" his PhD...

http://www.cmu.edu/PR/releases06/060228_cellphone. html/

...and mod the chicken little post down. Even with the near instantaneousness of the web, India is still 12.5 time zones away, both temporally and culturally. It is much better to send very detailed and non-ambiguous specifications off shore due to the long feedback loop. That delay has serious opportunity costs that offset any savings in wages.

That is why all of the Indian companies are CMM level 5 certified or better. They already understand their value proposition.

...robotic paper folding overlords!

> It is immoral to say "I don't like the conditions they're selling it under, so I'm going to violate them."

No it's not. Sometimes the rules must be violated for progress to happen. Everyone from Martin Luther to George Washington to Gandhi to MLK violated the rules at some time or the other. (of course the real question is, do you believe in your cause enough to risk your liberty (as all these other guys did) for what you believe in? Geeks do not have a good history of civil disobedience -- but I digress.)

In this particular case, running a copy of OSX _you own_ on your own PC is not immoral in any way. It indicates a DIY spirit that ought to be encouraged (cue all the political blather about how We Are Falling Behind In Technical Education, etc).

Distributing this cracked copy of OSX is (IMHO) wrong however-- unless you take the (again IMHO) extreme position that copying commercial software is a 'victimless crime', which frankly makes little sense.

Now, in an ideal world, you would be able to tell others how to run _their_ copies of OSX on their PCs. The DMCA can be an impediment to this (which is why I believe the DMCA is bad law) but it is not an insurmountable impediment, see Ed Felten's DeCSS gallery.

by Kotadama: The Power of Words

I'm not sure what happened there. Lets try it again: http://www-2.cs.cmu.edu/~enron/

You're url got mangled somehow. Here's a working version =)

There is a large collection of email from Enron vailable online. It has been usefull for research in natural language processing, text classification, and data mining. Check it out here: http://www-2.cs.cmu.edu/~enron/.http://www-2.cs.cm u.edu/~enron/

With any luck, we shall soon be on our way to dog-riding robots! (scroll down to the essay)

We just need to miniaturize this, make the robot look like Commander Data wearing a sombrero, and all will be well.

Wow. An entire thread devoted to this question, and so far this is the only answer that actually addresses the problem. Every other suggestions seems to be "changes languages", or "here's how to avoid bugs".

Anyway, let's talk specifics here. For the theoretical end of software fault tolerance, you can get a quick overview here or here.

In terms of practicalities, I know of an older fault tolerance library for Unix that includes watchdog, checkpointing, and replication utilities, and was created by AT&T (details and downloads here). A newer version appears to be available for Windows under the name SwiFT. Disclaimer: I haven't actually used either of these, and they both seem a little old. But I don't know of anything newer that isn't a proprietary in-house solution.

Finally, in terms of general design patterns for fault-tolerant distributed systems, you can't go past Joe Armstrong's PhD thesis, "Making reliable systems in the presence of software errors". While it's mostly about Erlang, many of the ideas he presents are readily applicable to other languages too.

Contact the folks at Carnegie Mellon University's "End System Multicast" gang. Its a P2P video streaming sysytem!

It's at http://esm.cs.cmu.edu/

At the time of posting I count at least 5 posts that took you seriously, and at least another couple that could be interpreted either way. That is pretty fucking scary. I could really go a Dispell Fear right about now.

But seriously though, did the Charm Person (http://ddo.ogaming.com/db/spells/CharmPerson.php) work on the chicks?

Cause it took me ages to realise my mistake when trying this. Firstly, regardless of how scary I find them, girls aren't monsters, so Charm Monster (http://ddo.ogaming.com/db/spells/CharmMonster.php ) was never going to work like I thought, and also, before trying to make girls get close to me, I forgot to dispell Protection from Evil on myself (http://ddo.ogaming.com/db/spells/ProtectionFromEv il.php). I was thinking that they were walking towards me in a trance and then screaming hideously and rearing away just because I was too ugly even for Charm spells to work.

I mean, everyone KNOWS girls are evil, it's a simple fact (http://www.andrew.cmu.edu/user/adityaag/girls.jpg ), and yet I forgot to take it into my calculations. I've failed as a Wizard, I might as well take a long un-Feather-Fall (http://ddo.ogaming.com/db/spells/FeatherFall.php) assisted walk off a short pier. Although I never said I couldn't cast http://ddo.ogaming.com/db/spells/WaterBreathing.ph p on myself.

I can't believe I made such a lame D&D post joke. Magic Missle me now.

Oh god, I did it again. WAND.

Okay this is getting beyond a joke. Actually, no, it's just before a joke. So a guy walks up to me and says "I'm a teepee, I'm a wigwam" ...

Moodle and other open-source Learning Management Systems (LMSs) are your best bet. They are based on a set of open standards known as the Sharable Content Object Object Reference Model, or SCORM. SCORM is the product of years of research and development by the Advanced Distributed Learning Initiative and is sponsored by the U.S. Department of Defense. There are lots of resources available on the ADL site to help you get started and to test your content for conformance. The nice thing about going with SCORM as the basis for your work is that you can move up to a supported, enterprise-level LMS if you need it. A lot of schools already have a SCORM-conformant LMS (like BlackBoard) in place.

SCORM is composed of several component specifications like IMS Content Packaging and IMS Simple Sequencing. You can also include (optional) metadata about the parts of your course, known as Sharable Content Objects (SCOs) and assets. Other standards like the Question and Test Interoperability Specification (QTI) are not officially a part of SCORM but can be incorporated using a number of established techniques.

As far as tools go, there are open-source tools available that expose the SCORM specs in a form that is usable by computer-savvy users, like Reload. There are other tools available that are intended for use by users who are less technical, like InSite Studio by Mississippi State University. Other tools are also available from commercial vendors. Some LMSs even have web-based tools built-in, and are known as Learning Content Management Systems (LCMSs).

SCORM is a mature set of specs that are designed to meet the needs of organizations that are in your exact position, and are widely accepted -- some Asian countries have adopted it as a national standard. The SCORM community is growing quickly and new complimentary specs are being leveraged within SCORM-conformant courses all the time. Tool support should also expand quickly now that the SCORM 2004 spec has been in circulation for a while and vendors are getting thier products certified by the ADL.

speech recognition
http://www.speech.cs.cmu.edu/sphinx/

image+speech recognition
http://sourceforge.net/projects/opencvlibrary/

Desktop voice commands
http://perlbox.sourceforge.net/

Others
http://www.tldp.org/HOWTO/Speech-Recognition-HOWTO /software.html
http://www.cavs.msstate.edu/hse/ies/projects/speec h/software/

Do you know about other usable open source speech solutions?

As I said, Nuance (Scansoft) bought them all up; not just SpeechWorks and Nuance, but Draggon, Lernout & Haupsie, etc. They still sell a bunch of (Windoze) retail SOHO packages for a hundred bucks or two.

Microsoft has some crappy .NET-based stuff, but I'd give it a pass, if I were you. It's neither SOHO nor enterprise. Not sure what it is...

It's not really soup yet, but there is also a free solution. See http://www.speech.cs.cmu.edu/. At least one commercial vendor has taken the source, hacked it up and is using it in a commercial product. At least it runs on Linux and (I think) *BSDs

- The AC OP

what you're paying for in the monthly fee includes the following: maintenance costs for the online servers, bandwidth costs for their datacenter, and additional content updates and bug fixes

Start with the game costs $60 for initial purchase. Ok now given that WoW has over 1Mil subcribers, at $15 a month. Then Blizzard has an income of 15 mil to pay those maintenance cost? You really think that it costs anywhere near that much to maintain that game? A month? Plus the 60 mil for the sale of those games to begin with?

The average cost of development on a console is 7 mil.
Ref: http://www.etc.cmu.edu/about/press_articles/15.htm l
While I believe that can range up to twice that for development on some games, there is no way that maintaining that game can cost that much. They should be able to maintain that game for years on the initial sale of that game. They are only enhancing a game already made, and tweaking it as it goes. So lets say that it costs the same to maintain as it did to make that console game, and it cost 3x as much to develop. 60 - 21 = 39 / 7 =~ 5 years at break even. So lets say they introduce content that they charge for (expansions) once a year (1mil * $10) - 7mil (develop new content and sell at 10 bucks each)-they can even not offer to sell, just charge a yearly subscription of $10- is another profit at 3 mil a year. Let me clarify all number of maintenance are high, and expansions (subscriptions) are equal content and energy as the main game, therefore costs are same as a new game development. Over that 5 years there is a profit of 15 million +. Doesn't seem so far fetched now does it? But of course they companies are greedy aren't they? http://hardcodedgames.com/mmpgamedev/2005/03/can-b lizzard-survive-world-of-warcraft.html
predicts that Blizzard will have 840 Mil after the first 4 years. Lots, but do you really need to pay for that? Is that 15 bucks a month paying for maintaining or lining someones pocket? Is there room to compete, oh hell yes, and companies are greedy and we are feeding them because they say so.

Any MMPOGer will come up with this argument that its for maintaining the game, but really the only way I see it is that the publisher is taxing you for nothing and is laughing at you all the way to the bank, because you keep deluding yourself into thinking that it has to be that way! I don't have a problem with companies making lots of money, or even me paying for top quality products. But this 'We have to maintain the game' crap is not true.

(Upon looking up the subscription base there are 1.5 million WoW subscribers making my calculations more, but using the 1 million still proves my point)

Actually, there were many QRIOs produced. Each member in Sony's internal lab that worked on QRIO had their own QRIO to run tests on. There was also a set of QRIOs that they took on tours. On Novemeber 4 2005, Sony released 2 QRIOs to Carnegie Mellon University's CORAL Lab under Manuela Veloso. They may or may not have released others to other educational institutions as well. I'm glad that Sony at least released a few QRIOs to the public before they decided to discontinue them. Their balance is incredible and I think continued research on QRIO will greatly benefit the robotics community.

Emoticons are over 25 years old. If they had been patented in the first place, the patent would have expired by now, anyway.