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The HAVI inter-operability protocol includes what you're talking about regarding state. It's supported by multiple manufacturers, but still questionable whether it will take off...in fact, it looks to be stagnating at the very least.

I'm a professional A/V control systems programmer, and one-way IR-controlled devices are the bane of our existence. If you investigate pro gear intended for permanent installation, even if it's just a VCR, you'll often find a serial port because the manufacturers know it'll be hanging off a control system like Crestron or AMX. But serial protocols are all different, even within the same manufacturer's line. Some are a bitch, some are very, very simple. It's hard to forsee any sort of standardization though, if only because of the wide variety of device functions and the entrenched-ness of manufacturers with their own often long-standing protocols.

So don't look for a common serial protocol. The future of A/V is getting on the network, and efforts are being made on interoperability on this "new" frontier in both corporate and academic worlds.

Try Albert Hofmann's own book, LSD - My Problem Child [flashback.se], which has been available on the Web -- for free -- for about a decade already. It's also available here [cmu.edu] as a single text file.

Much more interesting, exciting and enlightening.

Much more interesting, exciting and enlightening.

Check out ESM or YOID.

Actually, some folks in the iPodLinux project have done some work to get flite (a run-time speech syntheziser engine for ARM) working: See this forum thread. It should therefore be possible to have your iPod read you any text file you wish in a cool, monotone computer voice :)

As you can read in the forum, text-2-speech (ebooks, notes, etc.) as well as a usability for blind people (menus as speech, etc.) are the main motivations (and that it's a cool hack, of course).

Unsure whether anyone's got it working adequately yet. Check with the devs/users in the iPodLinux forums.

I recall hearing something (or perhaps I read it) about Carnegie Mellon Unv a number of years back (2000 or 2001 perhaps?) about CMY declaring that all the airwaves above their campus are their sole property and can not be legally interfered with by anyone on or off campus. Basically they wanted to ensure that their wireless network had no competition. I'm thinking it was CMU. I haven't been able to find anything about it though in a few minutes of Googling. The FCC's ruling would mean that CMU could no longer declare unlicensed spectrum to be their own for their own exclusive use (or licensing depending on how you look at it). I see this ruling possibly applying to students in a dorm that want to have an AP in their room. The school says no because they are offering their own wireless access. The FCC ruling would say that's a no no. Interesting ruling no matter how you look at it.

www.eenadu.net uses dynamic fonts. mozilla does not support dynamic fonts. Possible solution - find appropriate font and install it on your computer. See page with eenadu font.

page with info about dynamic fonts

You will find links to bugzilla there. Last chapter in the page.

I don't know how utf-8 is supported in your country. See Telugu fonts. Firefox (os=winnt) displays test page, if code2000 font is installed. If you are using winxp, you might have Arial Unicode MS font installed. Sites can use unicode to write texts in Telugu.

maybe this will have to understand problems with that page.

AFS is for distributed computing, GFS is for fault-tolerant cluster computing

ah. if you're right about that, then this is probably still not quite what i want.

i've been wanting a distributed, fault-tolerant filesystem to play with for a while now; NFS is getting old and clunky. i want something i can share between several machines, that would keep a local copy on each machine involved, and that could seamlessly tolerate disconnects/reconnects of machines in the cluster. ideally, i'd also like it to do security, authentication and encryption decently.

i haven't found anything. Intermezzo and Coda seem to come closest, but they're both more research project than solid product. OpenAFS seems stuck in the same niche, and all three of them are almost-but-not-quite POSIX compliant. (i'm not really sure if non-POSIX semantics would be a problem or not, but i'm a pessimist; i'd like to take on as few problems at a time as i can.)

GFS seems to hold a lot of promise, and its Sistina heritage is a good sign, but if it can't (easily) replicate files across a network for me, then it's not quite what i'm looking for. ah well, maybe that Unison thingy i heard about can be a poor man's substitute...

How does this compare to other SAN hacks like Inter Mezzo, coda or the Open Mosix File System (find text: mfs)?

I worked on this project a few years back and we had a fairly good working system when I left. The first two obstacle detection algorithms used two cameras and worked well enough that you almost didn't need a laser scanner. It used encoders and a nice GPS system for navigation. When I left they had cm level accuracy on fairways.

automated golf course mowing

The following is a site that may help you build this robot. Using a palm pilot as the processing unit may be very helpful and inexpensive. http://www-2.cs.cmu.edu/~reshko/PILOT/ You could also create a computer model/map of your yard and simulate the AI in the model using bruit force to find the best possible path. That way the computer can figure much of the desired path out for you. Keep in mind the heights of various parts of the terrain... wouldn't want it to flip over and create a potential health hazard. Another option would be to place small inexpensive magnets in the ground to help the guidance system. You could detect these magnetic waves to see where to or not to mow (Sort of like the new "autopilot" cars they are working on in Calif.) I do not fully agree with the slow moving idea because the point is to get the job done quickly so you don't have to worry about what could go wrong (Peace of mind). Also, would you mulch or bag... If you bag, you will have to dispose of the clippings.

http://www.rec.ri.cmu.edu/projects/toro/toro.shtml

On this same note I'd reccomend you check out this project. Video of it in action towrards the bottom. I've seen it working in the park nearby CMU, neato stuff. A little out of your league I'd think, but still worth a look.

I guess engineering, design and programming can't possibly be art.

Another point worth to be noted is that, under Un*x, the DLL Hell is a non-issue, as we've had libraries versioning since day 1. So, I might as well install multiple versions of a library, and yet do not have the need to recompile an application.

Unix versioning is based on sym links. Given that it doesn't look like sym links came into play until somewhere around SVR 3.2 which seems to have come from 4.2BSD (I base the "come from" on a diagram on page 5 of The Design & Implementation of the 4.3BSD Unix OS), and Linux didn't get them until .95.

Now, I don't know what your definition of "since day 1" is but if it's 14 years (First Edition released in 1969, 4.2BSD released in 1983) then you're absolutely correct.

I'd also point you to the fact that Unix didn't have passwords on day one. They were added later. So much for security can't be added on, it's gotta be designed in. Not that you claimed that they did but it's an example of where Unix came from.

You see when Unix was designed it was a stripped down Multics. Multics was too big, too bulky, too much operating system with too many features. But if you look at the features of Multics we all have them on our desktops (and Unix systems). So Unix barely had anything from day 1. You wouldn't want to use day 1 unix today. Oh, maybe you'd find some level of nostalgia in it - it'd be like whipping out a Pong console - but you wouldn't ever make it your desktop, let alone attempt to install multiple versions of software on it.

Check out the Toy Robots Initiative at Carnegie Mellon's Robotics Institute. In particular, the CMUcam and Palm Pilot Robot Kit are worth checking out.

Check out the Toy Robots Initiative at Carnegie Mellon's Robotics Institute. In particular, the CMUcam and Palm Pilot Robot Kit are worth checking out.

Check out the Toy Robots Initiative at Carnegie Mellon's Robotics Institute. In particular, the CMUcam and Palm Pilot Robot Kit are worth checking out.

you sound a lot like me. i didnt like high school as far as academics went. it bored me. there was too much bs work. so i skimped on things like homework which dragged my grades down but i proved in tests that i knew the information as good as our valedictorian.

i was pretty lost just as you seem to be so i just took the traditional route and headed off to college [carnegie mellon]. at first i thought i made a big mistake as college turned out to be a lot like high school as far as pure academics went. however, ive just finished my first year at cmu and i cant be happier. the key is research. because i came to cmu ive had so many opportunities to do research in fields i want to learn more about. im doing working at the intel robotics research lab here in pittsburgh and im working with red team. classes are still pretty boring but its a small price to pay to get to all this exciting work.

so moral of the story? if you can get yourself in a good university for your interests you'll definately be happy. just dont live off campus you first year ; )

I think the story raises a good point. The best analogy I could pint out would be a dam where new leaks keep popping up and you quickly rush to patch them. You spend so much time patching over the leaks that the fundamental design problems in the dam are never fixed.
There are multiple strategies that will actually improve security far more than just trying to ferret out a new vulnerability. I personally recommend using Java or another type-safe language for programming if at all possible since the most common memory management errors are eliminated. Hoevwer, the best way to stop major security breaches is to have a security layer that will assume software programs will be compromised somehow. Then, the security layer is more interested in enforcing access to the system that program ought to have instead of just trusting the effective user ID of the program to hopefully do the right thing.
A bit of karma-whoring here for my thesis project which is based on earlier work in Mandatory Access Controls in Linux, as well as the much more well-known SELinux
kernel modules.
I personally did my thesis in Domain & Type Enforcment which simply puts running processes into various different domains that have certain access rights to Types. A type is just a name tag assigned to files, and in my case you can also type system calls, network sockets, and eventually even Linux capabilities. It is similar to part of SELinux but also designed to be much simpler to understand & implement as well.
Anyway, these systems all are designed with the assumption that vital processes will be compromised and the onus is on the policy writers to enforce least-privilege on the processes. This may sound difficult to do, but it is actually trivial compared to the approach we are using now which is to try and figure out every possible attack and write perfect software (the point of the article). It is much easier to define what a program is supposed to do than every nasty malicious thing someone on the Internet can dream up that it should not do.
I've ranted long enough, but I think that there are good solutions to stopping about 90% of the crap that we see going on today, and that the other 10% will be fun to keep us security professionals employed :p

The first part of your post is right on. If your job is head's down coding without any need for "face time" interaction with co-workers, then you're done for. If you don't lose your job to outsourcing, you'll lose it to generative programming.

Instead of going hopeless and just learning to live with less, reposition yourself so that "face time" is a critical part of what you do. Then your position won't be able to be outsourced. Chances are you won't be working for any CCM level 3 and above companies so I hope that you are comfortable with anarchy.

A group of grad students at the Entertainment Technology Center at Carnegie Mellon University did a somewhat similar project last semester called AugCog (Augmented Cognition). The main purpose was for military applications, as it was funded by DARPA, but they also did a bunch of mini-projects on the side that had Entertainment Applications. An interesting note about this project also is that the faculty advisor for this project was Jesse Schell, the new head of the International Game Developers Association.

A group of grad students at the Entertainment Technology Center at Carnegie Mellon University did a somewhat similar project last semester called AugCog (Augmented Cognition). The main purpose was for military applications, as it was funded by DARPA, but they also did a bunch of mini-projects on the side that had Entertainment Applications. An interesting note about this project also is that the faculty advisor for this project was Jesse Schell, the new head of the International Game Developers Association.

Andrej Bauer's implementation of random art better, personally.

Here is the best photo you'll see of this morning's transit. Taken by Jerry Zhu a member of the Amateur Astronomers Association of Pittsburgh.

LINK

Look down the page to see the "ring of light" images which prove Venus has an atmosphere (as if we didn't already know).

-berek halfhand

Check out project Cyrus. I haven't used it for large projects, but I notice it does support distributing mailboxes across multiple backend servers (The Murder stuff).

Unfortunately, Festival's relatively poor quality cannot be simply fixed by using better voices. Systems like AT&T's have some pretty sophisticated signal processing and text analysis algorithms to splice the speech together in such a way that it sounds decent. Festival is just outdated, but for a freely available system with source code, it isn't that bad. It has been ported to all sorts of platforms including the iPAQ. I wouldn't expect AT&T to just give away something that they worked on for 40 years to perfect, nor would I expect many people in the open source community to be able to duplicate it.

holy crap that was fast. Site's basically dead after 10 comments. I'm trying to get a mirror up at:
http://www.contrib.andrew.cmu.edu/~pnelson/www.mat hsci.appstate.edu/%257Esjg/simpsonsmath/futuramama th/
So far I have the index page and a few pictures, but they'll go up as I get them.

Andrew Linux, used at Carnegie Mellon, is heavily network-based.

As a middle-aged mechanical engineer, I did something similar. I found David Touretzky's book just the thing. Lisp's syntax immediately made sense to me, and the book is interesting in it's own right.

I had taken the required course in Fortran twenty years before and hated it. I suspect some people find functional languages a pretty good fit. After all, spread sheets seem pretty popular.

The advantage of Pascal is that there are a number of books designed at the introductory level. The language itself is fairly easy to understand up to dealing with the differences between val (call by value) and var (call by reference) parameters. Even then, you can usually ignore var parameters for awhile.

Common Lisp isn't so bad either, and Touretzky's book is as gentle as it claims and free.

Maybe not, but a number can be illegal under the DMCA.

You don't have go there for that. It will soon come to you! :)

Of course, he's just some greedy bastard

I would be a little more hesitant to call anybody who goes to work for MS a greedy bastard. I go to a small university in Pittsburgh that has a rather large anti-MS student body.... but at the same time I have never seen a larger turnout for prospective job seekers than when MS comes to town. Microsoft has the luxury of being able to hire the best people, and in the marketing business they can often come from the competition. After all, who better to detail the flaws in a competitor's products than someone who used to hawk them?
That being said I think the arguments are bunk but if you ever want to succeed you should learn to never hate your enemy since it clouds your judgement.

Errr, shoot. Mirror here.

Here are some more pictures of the robot in action and surviving a 3 floor fall.

Here are some more pictures of the robot in action and surviving a 3 floor fall.

Here are some more pictures of the robot in action and surviving a 3 floor fall.

Hey - that page you linked to has movies embedded incorrectly - heres the links:

Dirt hill

Nightlight

3 floor drop

This thing looks coooooooool - its just a strong version of the RC car I had when I was a kid.

Hey - that page you linked to has movies embedded incorrectly - heres the links:

Dirt hill

Nightlight

3 floor drop

This thing looks coooooooool - its just a strong version of the RC car I had when I was a kid.

Hey - that page you linked to has movies embedded incorrectly - heres the links:

Dirt hill

Nightlight

3 floor drop

This thing looks coooooooool - its just a strong version of the RC car I had when I was a kid.

Some very cool Pics of it from the Project's Homepage.

If anybody wants to try out Xerox's Unistroke alphabet, a simple text editor that's trained to recognize Unistrokes is part of the demos that come with Garnet (source comes under a public domain license). Personally, I'm not too impressed, but then again, I find the whole notion of pen computing more of an annoying throwback to the 60s than anything else.

Actually a filesystem is not that bad of an idea. Using the Coda filesystem to bring the file I/O calls to user space, you would not need much more development time to drive the calls to Gmail, especially if there is a webservice interface.

I'll be attending Carnegie Mellon this upcoming fall as part of the Entertainment Technology Center, the same program that Bob Rost is just graduating from. The other game design class you were talking about is 53-609, Game Design, taught by Jesse Schell, former Creative Director of the Walt Disney Imagineering VR Studio. I've heard a lot of good things about this class, and it actually focuses on game design as whole (sports, board, card, etc), not just video games. And like 0x0d0a was saying, this learning isn't just limited to CMU. There are plenty of other schools in the country/world that offer classes in video game design, development, graphics, etc.

I went to CMU. I also had the opportunity to work with one of the people in the class a bit early on (I remember one nasty late night session with that guy finding an inverted branch bug in the compiler that Bob Rost had written).

CMU has a couple of game dev classes. James Kuffer teaches an *excellent* game dev class that started on the PC (Windows/Linux, whatever you're interested in) but apparently this year has moved to including the XBox for some folks interested in brewing up XBox games. The party he threw at the end of the class, with game systems and games as prizes, tons of projectors playing games on a huge screen, and people chatting about algorithms and the like was cool. There were guest speakers from a ton of dev houses, and the class was co-taught with someone fromm the UT2004 team. There's another class aimed at game design that I'm not familiar with, and Randy Pausch's Building Virtual Worlds. CMU has recently had a bad streak of luck with graphics classes (every time they start beefing up their graphics department, ATI or NVidia or someone comes in and hires them away -- I never had the opportunity to take Graphics II for this reason), but it's still fun to muck around with this stuff.

While this sort of thing is cool, it's not something that cannot be done anywhere. These classes are more something that people do because they're fun or for the hell of it. NES Dev in particular only gave a three credits (and CMU's metric is roughly a credit for each hour a week you should spend on a class, including homework, which is wildly unrealistic for NES Dev). It's run entirely by a student that thought that getting together a bunch of people who wanted to do up some NES games for the heck of it would be fun. You can do the same thing with folks online. These classes aren't really part of the core curriculum (especially this one).

I do have to say one thing -- while it's neat to have new NES games, the limitations of the system are...stunning. It's very frusterating to do a lot of things, and difficult to indulge in the cleaner designs of today. In many ways, it's nice to develop on newer systems.

I think that CMU is a blast, and I'll recommend it to folks interested in CS (particularly if they want to go into research). However, you really can get a good education anywhere -- if you take classes and do the bare minimum anywhere, you can get by only doing a minimal amount. There are few resources at CMU that you can't get at elsewhere with a bit more effort. Do stuff you're interested in! If you want to learn about networks, run out and add some cool features to one of the P2P clients out there. Like graphics? Hook up with the Crystal Space team or one of the raytracer folks out there, and try implementing somem of your ideas. Hanging out with people that are enthusiastic about the same things you are and like trying out new stuff is, IMHO, the biggest benefit of being somewhere like CMU, and while you may not be able to be physically where you are, they're all over FreeNode and on tons of computer science forums and the like. Even for grad school -- all the stuff you can learn from is out there on research papers, and I've found that professors are marvelously helpful if you simply fire off a randomm, nice email with a question -- I've sent emails to people at all kinds of academic instutions that I wasn't at with short questions that aren't answered on the 'Net, and if they get intrigued (and good professors are generally pretty easy to intrigue) it's often not hard to get a friendly answer or two.

The single best (and IMHO, the toughest) undergrad CS course at CMU is Steven Rudich's 15-251 class. All the course notes assignments, and content are freely available online, and you are free to go through the course yourself. Prof. Rudich is a great lecturer (an example: his first lecture each year involves him ru

I went to CMU. I also had the opportunity to work with one of the people in the class a bit early on (I remember one nasty late night session with that guy finding an inverted branch bug in the compiler that Bob Rost had written).

CMU has a couple of game dev classes. James Kuffer teaches an *excellent* game dev class that started on the PC (Windows/Linux, whatever you're interested in) but apparently this year has moved to including the XBox for some folks interested in brewing up XBox games. The party he threw at the end of the class, with game systems and games as prizes, tons of projectors playing games on a huge screen, and people chatting about algorithms and the like was cool. There were guest speakers from a ton of dev houses, and the class was co-taught with someone fromm the UT2004 team. There's another class aimed at game design that I'm not familiar with, and Randy Pausch's Building Virtual Worlds. CMU has recently had a bad streak of luck with graphics classes (every time they start beefing up their graphics department, ATI or NVidia or someone comes in and hires them away -- I never had the opportunity to take Graphics II for this reason), but it's still fun to muck around with this stuff.

While this sort of thing is cool, it's not something that cannot be done anywhere. These classes are more something that people do because they're fun or for the hell of it. NES Dev in particular only gave a three credits (and CMU's metric is roughly a credit for each hour a week you should spend on a class, including homework, which is wildly unrealistic for NES Dev). It's run entirely by a student that thought that getting together a bunch of people who wanted to do up some NES games for the heck of it would be fun. You can do the same thing with folks online. These classes aren't really part of the core curriculum (especially this one).

I do have to say one thing -- while it's neat to have new NES games, the limitations of the system are...stunning. It's very frusterating to do a lot of things, and difficult to indulge in the cleaner designs of today. In many ways, it's nice to develop on newer systems.

I think that CMU is a blast, and I'll recommend it to folks interested in CS (particularly if they want to go into research). However, you really can get a good education anywhere -- if you take classes and do the bare minimum anywhere, you can get by only doing a minimal amount. There are few resources at CMU that you can't get at elsewhere with a bit more effort. Do stuff you're interested in! If you want to learn about networks, run out and add some cool features to one of the P2P clients out there. Like graphics? Hook up with the Crystal Space team or one of the raytracer folks out there, and try implementing somem of your ideas. Hanging out with people that are enthusiastic about the same things you are and like trying out new stuff is, IMHO, the biggest benefit of being somewhere like CMU, and while you may not be able to be physically where you are, they're all over FreeNode and on tons of computer science forums and the like. Even for grad school -- all the stuff you can learn from is out there on research papers, and I've found that professors are marvelously helpful if you simply fire off a randomm, nice email with a question -- I've sent emails to people at all kinds of academic instutions that I wasn't at with short questions that aren't answered on the 'Net, and if they get intrigued (and good professors are generally pretty easy to intrigue) it's often not hard to get a friendly answer or two.

The single best (and IMHO, the toughest) undergrad CS course at CMU is Steven Rudich's 15-251 class. All the course notes assignments, and content are freely available online, and you are free to go through the course yourself. Prof. Rudich is a great lecturer (an example: his first lecture each year involves him ru

There has already been research on partially "anonymizing" eigenface data to the point where it is useful but does not provide 24/7-everywhere-people-go tracking.

OK. Now I know this from not taking notes in grade school and tearing off the sheets from all my composition books to make severely intricate designs of paper airplanes. What I do know is that this so-called "ro-bot" did not properly make an airplane! If you see the airplane video it shows that it folds the A3 (or is it legal? letter4? DIN 2A? Imperial VII?) sheet of paper only three times. This gives you a paper airplane where the "nose" is folded at a 45 degree angle, NOT the preferred (and traditional) 22.5 degree angle (achieved by a fourth fold). See the video, I'm not too good at explaining it. All I know is that THAT airplane will not fly.

The hat video is at this link, not the bad one on the site. http://www-2.cs.cmu.edu/~devin/hat.mov