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That sounds like a trivial subset of a certain thesis project I did In a nutshell... if you are running Windows I have bad news: malware downloaded via Firefox is still malware. And if you want real security for shit you download, the OS has to have some form of MAC system (Yes, most mean this as SELinux, but it usually means nastier policies than come with most distros)

Actually an announcement of the system breech was given on Wednesday on the official cmu-news board.
This was also posted on the website on Thursday: http://www.cmu.edu/PR/weekly05/050421_prweeklynews .html

(I sure hope somebody mods this up)

F.R.I.E.N.D: (First Responder Interactive Emergency Navigational Database)

I had the opportunity to work on this during my undergrad years at CMU. What Microsoft has patented is just a part of this project. The only difference is that Microsoft wants to deploy this to average consumers, while FRIEND was targetted for emergency personnel. Oh, and this was all back in 1994, and yes, we did have a (mostly) working prototype.

NavLab does an alright job...

Lego Mindstorm kits are a good way to go, since they require very little to set up, and the graphical programming language is easy to use; there are plenty more advances programming interfaces(nqc, pbforth, legos, and lejos) for the next level student.

Another good option is to enter some of the various robotic competitions (http://www.rec.ri.cmu.edu/education/Robotics%20Co mpetitions.shtml/).

Imagine a compiler that doesn't just compile code but tapes out the coprocessor need to run it.

Or at least the verilog to reconfigure the coprocessor or build the ASIC? Yeah, I work for one of those research groups.

http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~phoenix/

Here is an article about the issue that was published in yesterday's edition of The Tartan, the student newspaper of Carnegie Mellon, one of the universities targeted by the RIAA. There was also an editorial written about the issue. (Note: The Tartan's website cannot be rendered in Internet Explorer. Please use a standards-compliant web browser.)

Also, below is the full text of an email that was sent to all students on April 4 from Carnegie Mellon's Chief Information Officer Joel Smith.

-------- Original Message -------- To: The Carnegie Mellon Community
From: Joel Smith, Chief Information Officer
Subject: Illegal use of copyrighted materials on Carnegie Mellon's network - your *personal* liability
Date: Mon, 04 Apr 2005 22:33:47 -0000

We are writing to remind the entire campus community of the University's commitment to the protection of intellectual property and copyrighted material. When it comes to illegal copying of digital materials - whether music, video, text, or pictures - the University imposes its own penalties (disciplinary action, loss of network connectivity) on anyone who is found to be using Carnegie Mellon's network for such purposes.

Moreover, the trade organizations that are charged with protecting copyrighted materials, e.g. the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) and the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA), are aggressively searching for copyright violators on the Internet and *will take independent legal action against such violators.* Peer to peer file sharing activity using the Carnegie Mellon network is accessible to their monitoring. Past actions by these industry associations have resulted in substantial monetary penalties imposed on the individuals involved. See:

http://www.dailyprincetonian.com/archives/2003/05/ 02/news/8154.shtml

In fact, according to the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, penalties can range from $750 to $150,000 per song if songs are the items being distributed illegally.

Please be aware that the target of these actions is not the University, but rather the individuals engaged in the violations. As an Internet service provider, following the results of court rulings last year, the University is obliged to respond to subpoenas from organizations like the RIAA and the MPAA requesting the names of individuals who operate computers illegally sharing copyrighted materials. Do not be misled by the fact that Verizon, as an Internet service provider, won its case for not providing user names in response to certain kinds of "John Doe" subpoenas. The ruling allows the RIAA and the MPAA to discover the identities of copyright violators from Internet service providers (including universities) as long as they follow certain legal procedures.

Simply put, if you are engaged in illegal use of copyrighted materials (usually done by peer-to-peer file sharing using programs like Kazza, LimeWire, BitTorrent, and others) and the University receives a proper subpoena asking for the name of the person who registered the computer being used for such purposes on the Carnegie Mellon network, we are legally obligated to supply that name. The result may well be that the RIAA or MPAA will take legal action against *you*. There is nothing the University can do to shield you from such action.

Since your identity on the network is based on the match between your name an the IP address and *MAC* or *hardware* address of your computer, it is a very good idea to be sure that all and only the computers you physically control are registered to you. You can check the list of computers you have registered to your name using Computing Services' NetReg system. Go to http://netreg.net.cmu.edu, click on the Enter button at

If you want a top technical school that isn't turning out just money-driven pricks or socially inept nerds, then you want a school that has strong liberal arts, business and humanities colleges.

Yup. However, there is research into things sort of like what Stephenson described. One example:

TeleNano Project: Augmented Reality User Interface for Atomic Force Microscopes (afm)

With this 3D computer simulation coupled with realtime force feedback, an AFM can become a nanomanipulation tool where a user can interact with nano-size particles as easily as if they were lagre objects on the desk in front of them. This expands the utility of the AFM from simply a scanning device to a manufactuing tool with which we can assemble structures which are virtually impossible to build presently. Furthermore this system will allow novice users with little training to utilize the advanced capabilities of the system.

http://haystack.lcs.mit.edu/screenshots/full-scree nshot.png

http://helium.knownspace.org/manifesto.html

http://www.daml.ri.cmu.edu/Cal/

Why can't they use ESM ? That should save them bandwidth.

After I heard the Verizon Wireless testing audio track linked in TFA I had to google the surrealist sentences they chose. I stumbled upon the weird-ass Harvard Psychoacoustic Sentence List, and I don't know which is stranger; the official test sentences or the unofficial ones they added themselves.

Here are the first 20 sentences of the test, noting the gender of the reader and the stanza:

F[H21/08]: (unintelligible) taught the new maid to serve.
M[H06/03]: Adding fast leads to wrong sums.
M[H06/04]: The show was a flop from the very start.
F[ ???? ]: There was water in the cellar after the heavy rain
F[ ???? ]: They're not listed in the new phone book.
M[H01/10]: A large size in stockings is hard to sell.
M[H01/06]: The juice of lemons makes fine punch.
F[H39/07]: Smoke poured out of every crack.
F[H39/08]: Serve the hot rum to the tired heroes.
M[H07/10]: Those words were the cue for the actor to leave.
M[H08/01]: A yacht slid around the point into the bay.
F[H10/05]: The play seems dull and quite stupid.
F[H11/06]: Thieves who rob friends deserve jail.
M[H06/01]: The frosty air passed through the coat.
M[H06/02]: The crooked maze failed to fool the mouse.
F[H21/09]: He wrote his last novel there at the inn.
F[H21/10]: Even the worst will beat his low score.
M[H06/05]: A saw is a tool used for making boards.
M[H06/06]: The wagon moved on well oiled wheels.
F[H24/01]: Try to have the court decide the case.

You might also want to take a look at Twelf.

CSS was however broken by Frank Andrew Stevenson: http://www-2.cs.cmu.edu/~dst/DeCSS/FrankStevenson/ index.html. Many DVD decryption tools today exploit the weaknesses in CSS that he revealed.

Thanks for pointing that out in a public interview, mirrored by Slashdot, and read by all the attorneys.
Asshole.

-Frank Andrew Stevenson

Slyck.com Interviews Jon Lech Johansen
April 4, 2005
Thomas Mennecke


Depending on your point of view, Jon Lech Johansen is either your hero or adversary. To the copyright industry, Jon Lech Johansen has been a detriment to their policy of control since the advent of DeCSS (Decrypt Content Scrambling System.) To those who cherish freedom, he has been a pillar of hope in an age when DRM (Digital Rights Management) threatens to overtake mainstream media.
Jon Lech Johansen became well known for his role in the development of DeCSS. Jon spent 3 long years in the Norwegian courts proving his innocence. The American movie industry pressured the Norwegian Economic Crime Unit to press charges against Jon Lech Johansen in 2000 for allegedly bypassing the CSS copy protection on DVDs.

After two trials, the courts finally ruled in Jon's favor. However, there is much more to Jon Lech Johansen than DeCSS. In this interview, Slyck hopes to bring to light the many facets of Mr. Johansen, and the numerous projects he is involved with.

Describe your role in the development of DeCSS. Was is a group effort or were you the mastermind behind it?

DeCSS was written by 3 people: a German developer, a Dutch developer and myself. The reverse engineering was done by the German.

From time to time I see people repeat the claim that DeCSS was only made possible because a DVD player manufacturer forgot to "protect" their DVD player. This is a myth that is perpetuated by people who don't understand how computers work. Code obfuscation only slows down reverse engineering, it doesn't block it.

What was the motivation behind creating DeCSS?

The motivation was being able to play DVDs the way we want to. I don't like being forced to use a specific operating system or a specific player to watch movies (or listen to music.) Nor do I like being forced to watch commercials. When your DVD player tells you "This operation is not allowed" when you try to skip commercials, it becomes pretty clear that DRM really stands for Digital Restrictions Management.

Did you ever expect the level of legal entanglements; and for it to become as popular as it is today?

No and no.

How difficult was it do break the CSS encryption? What did it take to break the encryption?

Technically DeCSS didn't break CSS. Breaking a crypto algorithm requires revealing and/or exploiting a method that's faster than brute force. DeCSS simply implemented CSS the same way as a normal DVD player.

CSS was however broken by Frank Andrew Stevenson: http://www-2.cs.cmu.edu/~dst/DeCSS/FrankStevenson/ index.html. Many DVD decryption tools today exploit the weaknesses in CSS that he revealed.

Another myth is that DeCSS is illegal because it uses a "stolen" key. A CSS key is 5 bytes. How anyone can think that it's possible to "steal" 5 bytes is beyond me. 5 bytes do not have any protection under copyright law because it's not an original work. It's probably possible for 5 bytes to be protected under trade secret law, but CSS hasn't been a trade secret since DeCSS was released and mirrored all over the net. Is someone who names their child "Frank" (5 bytes) stealing Frank's name? It's absurd.

Was there at any point during the DeCSS trials when you felt you were in serious trouble, or were you confident throughout that you would emerge victorious?

I was confident throughout.

What was the expression(s) on the face of the movie industry when you were finally acquitted?

The MPAA's (or rather, the MPA, which is the international arm of the MPAA) Norwegian lawyer was present for most of the first trial. I don't remember if he was present when the judgment was handed down, but if he was, he was probably wearing his standard grumpy look.

For the acquitt

Cycorp is making progress, though.

I recommend reading Witbrock, Michael, D. Baxter, J. Curtis, et al. An Interactive Dialogue System for Knowledge Acquisition in Cyc. In Proceedings of the Eighteenth International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence, Acapulco, Mexico, 2003.

Also, if you are a lucky college student, go see the author talk about Cyc teaching itself at USC or Carnegie Mellon..

Oh, and for once, I actually am an expert on the topic, not that that matters on slashdot.

*What* fundamental advances? Name them!

Firm semantical foundations, the Pi-Calculus, Game Semantics, Full Abstraction results for various languages, Zero Knowledge Proofs, Breakthroughs in Program Logics (Separation Logic, Honda-Logics), Proof-Carrying Code, Model-Checking.

Take heart---the problem you're contemplating has been fairly well studied.

I remember a professor here at CMU saying that you could do localization for forklifts by pointing a camera at the floor. Most warehouse floors have enough scratches and marks on them that as you wander around, you can get a pretty good idea of where you are by comparing them to a map (using techniques like Monte Carlo localization---google it!). Combined with encoders on the forklift wheels, you may be able to get the resolution you need.

Here is a paper describing technology like this. In the results they say they get accuracy down to a millimeter.

So, those talking about painting a grid on the floor have the right idea---but perhaps you don't even have to do that!

I totally agree. Ars video looks like a poo.
Chungs third video http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~johnny/steadycam/girl3.mov looks simply amazing.

http://www-2.cs.cmu.edu/~johnny/steadycam/

It's just a little Physics, not magic: from Johnny Chung Lee's website (and also in the magazine):

How you use it is 80% of the smoothness. This even is true for the professional stuff with all the fancy shocks and hydraulics. Don't expect this thing to perform miracles, you have to practice using your arms and body to create a smooth motion. Watch your hands while you walk, and see how level you can keep them relative to the ground. Watching the shadow of your hands on a sunny say is an easy way to isolate thier movement. Keep your legs bent and learn how to "glide". I talked with someone who has used professional steady-cams and they said this was, "really, just as good." Getting good results is not so much about the equipment, but how you use it. That's really true about everything.

Just because they built the tool doesn't mean they're pros at using it. I've read that even after you build the steadycam, it'll take awhile to get used to and become good at. For a better idea of the usefulness of building the steadycam, check out the movies near the bottom of the page by the original creator (especially where he follows the walking subject):

http://www-2.cs.cmu.edu/~johnny/steadycam/

Not to review a review of an instruction, but I think Ars Technica is being a little hard on the Chung. Operating a steadycam is a bit of an artform unto itself.

A steadycam will not turn Shakes the Clown into the next Scorsese, but once you learn the limitations of the axes you'll get results like Mr. Lee posts as samples on his site (see the bottom of the page, under "Using Your Steadycam").

First off, skyhooks (as opposed to space elevators) rotate

Two major types of earth orbital cable (sometimes called skyhook) have been investigated in the literature. The simplest, but also largest, has a filament dropped to the surface from synchronous orbit, counterbalanced by one extending outwards.

... and could never be compensated by electromagnetic propulsion

That wouldn't be what we call a genetic algorithm.

My entire computer is transparent

East coast theora mirror

It's like a manual BitTorrent :)

And from the looks of the CMU site linked to above, their project is heavily based on this PARC work.

Snakebots are very fragile. Many times a section would break after a few hours demostration. Jer was working on making each section more modular and easier to build. Apparently the main goal of snakebots for many research labs are for providing demostrations (read: grantbots) and giving new grad students something to do. ;-)

At least they called him by his name, not just "The iTunes back door guy."

I'm pretty sure his nickname is "dvd jon".
Remember that whole DeCSS thing?
--
Fairfax Underground: Where Fairfax County comes out to play

A Piece of Blue Sky While it was possible to defend against prosecution in the United States for claims of miracle cures by invoking the First Amendment's freedom of belief, it was stupid of Hubbard to sell his vitamin mixture as a specific for radiation sickness. In 1958, the Food and Drug Administration (F.D.A.) seized a consignment of 21,000 "Dianazene" tablets, which were marketed by a Scientology company, the Distribution Center. The tablets were destroyed by the F.D.A. because their labeling claimed they were a preventative and treatment for radiation sickness. 13

This was not the last time Hubbard tangled with the F.D.A. Nor was it the last time he claimed a cure for the effects of radiation. The Scientologists still advertise All About Radiation with a flier which claims that "L. Ron Hubbard has discovered a formula which can proof a person against radiation." Scientologists believe that enormous doses of Niacin, a form of vitamin B3, will protect them from the devastating effects of exposure to radiation in the event of nuclear war.

Zoë is 1x2x2 meters (h, w, l) and was developed by Carnegie Mellon's Robotics Institute with 3 or 4 million in NASA grants more info here

Sorry. Chainmail was the set of miniatures rules extracted from 2nd edition AD&D. D&D evolved from an older british game called "Tunnels and Trolls," arguably hybridized with a little known Conan-themed RPG called "Royal Armies of the Hyborean Age," and was the first thing gygax/TSR made.

Why do you thin that AD&D (1E) had all ranges and movements in inches whcih were later converted to feet (which differed if you were indoors or out)?

Because 1st edition AD&D was the first D&D to directly integrate the miniatures rules partially developed by the Dungeons and Dragons Master System and Immortal System crusade rules. Please remember that AD&D was almost 15 years into TSR's gaming line; it should not be used as evidence of how things started. If you look, original D&D was in fact in meters, not inches, not feet.

Miniatures were for sell at just about every place that sold D&D stuff.

When 1st edition AD&D was new, there wasn't a single store in New York City which carried TSR products. Back then they were still a wholly mail-order supplied operation. Where are you getting this stuff? Miniatures broke into the market through miniature train and toy stores; there was no such thing as a fantasy gaming store. You're claiming that a product which created that kind of store showed up in those stores before they existed.

TSR put out lots of minis although I prefered Ral Partha.

Uh, no, you didn't. The miniatures made under the TSR name from 1988 on were made by Ral Partha. You might as well say a 1997 Toyota Celica is better than a 1997 Geo Prizm - they're the same damned car, and they're the same damned miniatures.

Besides, Ral Partha didn't start until 1984; 1st edition AD&D is from 1973. Your timeline is a decade in disjoint.

Warhammer started out as a game to use the minis that GW made for D&D.

Games Workshop started making miniatures for TSR in 1989. Hogshead has been publishing warhammer since 1977. Where are you getting your information?

Okay... but here's my point: Every single example that shows how elegant Haskell and OCaml are uses lists. The 4-line Quicksort example for Haskell uses lists. All of the code that demonstrates easy reuse of functions and functions taken as arguments uses lists (like how easy it is to implement quite complicated algorithms using only map and filter, for example).

Or perhaps more correctly, "every single example that you've seen". For a real quick one, look at Jason Hickey's Intro to OCaml (pdf) and have a quick peek at his Red/Black tree implementation. Or even cooler (if you're into that sort of thing) is the ever famous One Day Compilers talk.

But what you're saying in #1 above is that in "production," speed-sensitive code, no one is using lists... this would mean that no one is using map, filter, or any other pieces of reusable primitive code. So, they are instead all using mutable data structures... I.e., they are programming with side-effects and loops (random access instead of recursion, even when ever element of an array/list needs to be accessed/processed).

No. What he's saying in that you should use the best data structure for the job. Your best bet would have been to use the Hashtbl module from the standard library, or if you wanted to stay in the purely applicative, the Map module (also in the standard library) would have been loads faster...

You are aware that there are more purely functional data structures (pdf) (OCaml implementations) than the list, don't you?

So... maybe you can re-write higher-order memoization code using more efficient data structures? I would love to see that code, and I'm sure the OCaml community would benefit from having that in their toolbox.

Here's a pretty neat example that uses arrays in a naive way, but you could certainly use, say, a map instead... And I'm pretty sure the OCaml community (by which I mean the people who would have helped you improve your code had you asked them) know about things like this.

I don't think I spread any falsehoods. I mean, my experiment was real, and the results are real, and the code is there for people to inspect and try on their own. I also talked in my /. post about OCaml code that is isomorphic to C being fast, but functional code perhaps not being fast.

Yes. And we inspected it, found it to be poorly written, and told you so. The "falsehood" here is that you claim that code written in a functional style is slow, when you really should have said "my code written in a naively functional style is slow". If I fill my gas tank with water, my car sure is slower than walking, therefore all cars are slower than walking... right?

Trust me... I am *dying* to use OCaml or Haskell for real-world programming. I have spent the past month or so exploring these languages and trying to apply them to real programming problems. Especially when shootout results showed that OCaml was sometimes faster than C, and when I discovered that OCaml was much faster than Hasell, I was really starting to think that OCaml was a possibility.

I put a link to tho OCaml mailing lists above. Use it. Ask questions of the list (you may want to start with the beginner's list). They can help you learn the language faster and better than google will.

However, the ONLY reason why I would want to use OCaml is to take advantage of the expressiveness of pure functional programmin

Here is a mirror to the video.

So .. let me get this right. I'm supposed to pay you for the chance to do YOUR job FOR you?

"Does a boy get a chance to whitewash a fence every day?"

I do data mining research, most recently on the Enron email dataset, and I've actually been having to roll my own multi-mailbox storage, access, and retrieval systems. It's taking way more time than I'd like, at this point I've gotten a database and web-based viewers made up (beware, they're quite slow).

If anyone has an idea of an open-source application similar to what the submitter is looking for, it would help my research quite a bit. There's practical research applications in this stuff, if someone's interested in making it.

You mean like ESM or TMesh?

I'm currently doing my master's at Carnegie Mellon University in Software Engineering . I am tremendously happy with the program. The problem with basic CS degrees is that they teach you the fundamentals of computer science, and how to code but they don't teach you ANYTHING about what it means to write software. There is a lot more that goes into software than hacking at code, and this is usually lost on the B.S. CS students (and all the local know-it-all sysadmins). The program is a mixture of software project management, and things like software architecting, program analysis, and there are other cool courses like Fault Tolerant Distributed Systems (the one i spent 45 minutes talking about during my recent Google interview). The program has definitely changed my outlook on software, and I would HIGHLY recommend it to anyone. Within the next ten years we're (America) going to have to start teaching at least rudimentary software engineering skills to our students or else ALL of the jobs are going to be going to India and China where they care about something other than making sure that students understand about automata and graph theory. We've got an almost 100% job placement rate (right through the dot-com burst too) and my friends from the program have jobs working at places like Amazon and Google. Good Luck whatever you decide.

I'm currently doing my master's at Carnegie Mellon University in Software Engineering . I am tremendously happy with the program. The problem with basic CS degrees is that they teach you the fundamentals of computer science, and how to code but they don't teach you ANYTHING about what it means to write software. There is a lot more that goes into software than hacking at code, and this is usually lost on the B.S. CS students (and all the local know-it-all sysadmins). The program is a mixture of software project management, and things like software architecting, program analysis, and there are other cool courses like Fault Tolerant Distributed Systems (the one i spent 45 minutes talking about during my recent Google interview). The program has definitely changed my outlook on software, and I would HIGHLY recommend it to anyone. Within the next ten years we're (America) going to have to start teaching at least rudimentary software engineering skills to our students or else ALL of the jobs are going to be going to India and China where they care about something other than making sure that students understand about automata and graph theory. We've got an almost 100% job placement rate (right through the dot-com burst too) and my friends from the program have jobs working at places like Amazon and Google. Good Luck whatever you decide.

Software Engineering...

You learned how to code, now learn how to actually write a piece of software.

http://mse.cs.cmu.edu/ -- Might as well aim high ;-)

At least they have been shown to slightly disturb experiments at the CERN accelator ring.

I use MobileMeter. It works perfectly for the three laptops I've owned and every one of my friends's laptops.

I wonder where they got these ideas?

In contrast, if we do not have patents, we will likely stifle creativity since no one can claim ownership to their idea and profit accordingly.

I have to disagree with you here. I don't think anyone should be allowed to "own" an idea. And apparently I'm in good company.

I suspect both general purpose and scientific computing can benefit from nested data parallelism.
The Nepal Project at the University of New South Wales concentrates on Multiple Program Multiple Data (MPMD). In a nutshell, any problem that can be specified as array operations can be flattened, unrolled, and automatically parallelized. This is not the holy grail of general purpose transparent parallelization of purely functional programs, but instead nested data parallelism. This extends research done in data parallel languages such as Nesl, Sisal, and really nifty algorithm shape research done in FISh.
This is the best approach to transparent parallelism that I've seen yet. Anyone know anything better?

An excellent example of how anecdotal evidence can lead you to incorrect conclusions.

The SEI was approached by the military a couple decades ago. The military had a problem; when it contracted out software development work, it would sometimes get back what it was looking for, it would sometimes get it on time. Sometimes it was late, sometimes it didn't work, sometimes it did the wrong thing, and sometimes they got nothing at all.

The SEI went about polling a large number of contractors, trying to see what was common amongst the ones who delivered. They found there was actually a very strong correllation between a number of processes and practices and high-quality under-budget software. The result is the Capability Maturity Model or CMM for short, which divides companies up into 5 "levels".

The kind of organization you describe is quite definately a "level 1" company, the kind with the highest risk, and the lowest quality. Most companies, even small ones, should strive to follow the practices of at least level 3, as the benefits are quite tangible; no more late projects, and vastly fewer defects.

I mentioned it in another post, but my dad has a good web site that deals with quality issues (IE only, unfortunately). And, if you're looking to improve the quality of your software, his current contract is going to expire soon.

An excellent example of how anecdotal evidence can lead you to incorrect conclusions.

The SEI was approached by the military a couple decades ago. The military had a problem; when it contracted out software development work, it would sometimes get back what it was looking for, it would sometimes get it on time. Sometimes it was late, sometimes it didn't work, sometimes it did the wrong thing, and sometimes they got nothing at all.

The SEI went about polling a large number of contractors, trying to see what was common amongst the ones who delivered. They found there was actually a very strong correllation between a number of processes and practices and high-quality under-budget software. The result is the Capability Maturity Model or CMM for short, which divides companies up into 5 "levels".

The kind of organization you describe is quite definately a "level 1" company, the kind with the highest risk, and the lowest quality. Most companies, even small ones, should strive to follow the practices of at least level 3, as the benefits are quite tangible; no more late projects, and vastly fewer defects.

I mentioned it in another post, but my dad has a good web site that deals with quality issues (IE only, unfortunately). And, if you're looking to improve the quality of your software, his current contract is going to expire soon.

It's worth noting that the second time around Steve put Avie Tevanian in charge of software, the lifeblood of Apple.

From the Carnegie Mellon CMMI web site;

1. Benefits of CMMI

   The CMMI models improve upon the best practices of previous models in many important ways. CMMI best practices enable organizations to do the following:

more explicitly link management and engineering activities to business objectives

expand the scope of and visibility into the product life cycle and engineering activities to ensure that the product or service meets customer expectations

incorporate lessons learned from additional areas of best practice (e.g., measurement, risk management, and supplier management)

implement more robust high-maturity practices

address additional organizational functions critical to its products and services

more fully comply with relevant ISO standards

1. SCAMPI incorporates the best ideas of several process-improvement appraisal methods. The SCAMPI A method is being used successfully by many organizations. The emerging SCAMPI B and C methods will extend the suite of SCAMPI methods. The method implementation guide for government supplier selection and contract monitoring also builds on SCAMPI in the acquisition arena.