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I don't think many people feel flash memory is the future due to its numerous limitations.

I was impressed by this Carnegie Mellon project though: http://www.ece.cmu.edu/~mems/

Which aims to place drives on a grid, overcoming all the problems of a revolving drive and dramatically improving seek time.

That's peanuts, here's DeCSS in Brainfuck.

but what it does mean is that we must find another way to make it happen.

One of the sins that we get into is saying that something can't happen because it can't happen in the only way we can imagine it happening.

From a lecture by Stephen Rudich

So yeah, maybe it can't happen the way they are talking about, but there's bound to be another way.

Don't say impossible too early...

Calculators are why students can't do math by themselves anymore. Whoever had the idea that in my sophomore year of high school, I should be required to purchase a TI-89 calculator should be shot.

In my senior year of high school, I took calc 1 and 2 from a decent state school. This course also integrated the TI-89.

Once I got to college, I entered the land of multi-variable calculus. Since the school I'm going to is a high-end private institution, of course they don't allow us to use calculators at all in Calc 3. Silly me. I haven't taken an integral since we first learned about each method of integration. Why? "here's how you can take an integral on your TI-89" were the first words out of the teacher's mouth as soon as we'd learned the basic concepts.

So I spent the first two weeks of school here cramming calculus 1 and 2 into my head *again*. 2-3 hours a night just to get caught up with the rest of the students (often sophomores), who had learned it right.

Now I shun the calculator for all purposes except straight calculations (in a physics course, for example). For mathematics either you can do it with your head/on paper, or it's a big enough task that you need a full fledged CAS. There's really no place for a calculator in math.

Brian

Major detail... Venus's day is 225 earth days long. It is spinning far too slowly to support a space elevator that relies on a geosynchronous orbit at the top.

Very good point! How about a spinning space elevator . It consists of an orbiting spinning tether. Both ends of the tether dip into the atmosphere and nearly touch the ground at one or more landing points along the equator. While the center of mass of the tether is orbiting at what ever required velocity, the tether is counterrotating with a tip velocity that compensates for the orbital velocity. Thus, the tip of the tether becomes nearly stationary as it touches down at the landing point(s). As a side benefit, the tip of the tether furthest from the ground is moving at nearly twice the velocity of the orbiting tether mass and can sling payloads into interplanetary orbits.

NetMeeting was useful in that it brought decent IM to a consumer grade OS (Windows 98), but I can recollect CUSeeMe around 1993.

http://www-2.cs.cmu.edu/~gitars/16-721/final/final .html

CMM Company Appraisals
Take a look, there are definately more CMM level 4 and 5's in India than most of the rest of the world. This is why the IT industry looks to India for a quality product, and why companies outsource software production.

Yeah, but your browser would have to support CSS encryption.

here

and here

Hope this helps

V.P.

here

and here

Hope this helps

V.P.

You know, there are some other cults that rely on electronic gizmos and want to take all your money!

anyone else thinking death ray & world domination??

Secret plans

What other favorites from the past could be contributed to a UserLinux distribution, making it irresistable? How about Clipper, isn't that dead yet? Couldn't its corpse (implementation) be examined for clues in how to improve ReKall? I like the idea of integrating Coda into UserLinux, a product from 1987. I wonder, has IBM bothered contributed portions of OS/2's object-oriented GUI to either GNOME or KDE? Also, let's not forget the hundreds (thousands?) of games cast aside by their developers. I for one, would love to see an Open Sourced version of a game like Elite.

= 9J =

Quite possibly the most impressive paper from SIGGRAPH 87. The abstract reveals the importance of this paper: "New technology is presented for imaging a restricted class of dessert foods."

Here's the author's page on the topic, and a usenet post containing most of the text, including the important Schrodinger wave equation for the Jell-O field J.

Quite possibly the most impressive paper from SIGGRAPH 87. The abstract reveals the importance of this paper: "New technology is presented for imaging a restricted class of dessert foods."

Here's the author's page on the topic, and a usenet post containing most of the text, including the important Schrodinger wave equation for the Jell-O field J.

Just wanted to add to the parent post. While cramming hard for theory courses don't forget to take "soft" courses in your English, Drama, Design, Art, and Psychology departments. It all depends on what these departments have to offer, but it doesn't hurt to understand a bit about humans work as well. It's good to get some grounding in different mechanisms of human communication, and to develop a good aesthetic sense, particularly if you want to have any involvement in the design side of things, or help you work with game designers who may seem a little insane.

At the very least taking these other courses is a good way to meet women (which arguably may draw you away from the game industry, but that's a different manner) that you might not otherwise meet in hardcore theory and engineering courses.

One interesting degree (Masters level) is in Carnegie Mellon's Entertainment Technology department. Check out their Curriculum. It doesn't teach specific technologies that apply to the video game industry, and in fact the focus is much broader, but it's not a bad foundation for starting a career in the videogame/tech-entertainment industry. They've got a good track record for placing graduates in top-notch organizations.

Sorry--when I say technological measure, I mean it to abbreviate "technological measure that effectively controls access to a work," since that is the only context in which technological measures are relevant in the DMCA.

Software is technological, and if part of it prevents you from using another part of it, then it 'effectively controls access'. I don't see how you can claim otherwise.

Here's how I claim otherwise. Let's look at the definition again:

(DMCA)
a technological measure ''effectively controls access to a work'' if the measure, in the ordinary course of its operation, requires the application of information, or a process or a treatment, with the authority of the copyright owner, to gain access to the work.


Forget the words "controls access to a work," because the condition is defined immediately afterwards. You can't use those words as a basis for arguing that software is a technological measure (... TECATAW). Instead, the software must require, in the ordinary course of its operation, the application of information, a process or a treatment in order to gain access to the work.

First, as I've said before, the copyrighted work is the bits of the program. Those bits do not require anything to happen in order for them to be accessed. It's true that in order to execute certain bits on the computer in a useful way, you need to change the branch instruction or trick the program in some other way. But executing is different from accessing, and the DMCA only talks about access.

Second, there is no application of information, process or treatment. I can't even fathom how you think this fits. The DMCA was designed with scrambled television signals in mind, in which case the process is the descrambling or decoding, and the information is the encryption key. The copyrighted work is obfuscated and inaccessible without the descrambling. But the computer program in our example is entirely accessible, and needs no process, treatment, or application information to be accessed.

Of course, this doesn't even consider the fact that a network-drive-as-physical driver would have substantial non-infringing use, certainly exempting it (if not acts of circumvention) as a circumvention device.

Again, in case anybody is jumping in on this discussion late: I am entirely opposed to the DMCA; I think it's a bad law that should be repealed. I have even had my own run-in. But believing that the law somehow applies to every instance of using a computer in a way that somebody else doesn't like is just foolish, and worse, it may lead to a culture where we instantly fold as soon as the DMCA card is drawn. I don't want to live in that culture, so let's not encourage this!

This paper describes a filesystem (called S4) that keeps versions of every write(), up to some specified time window. You can mount a read-only version of the filesystem as it existed at any arbitrary time in the past (up to the size of the window). For a lot of people, they think several weeks would be a reasonable window.

They aren't lawsuits, they're cease and desist letters, which are hardly even "legal threats," because if they threaten to sue you and don't, then that is illegal.

For my part, I fought the C&D letters and they eventually backed down.

It's important to know what the DMCA actually outlaws!

What you are after is iSCSI. iSCSI standards for Internet SCSI and is a "method of encapsulating SCSI over TCP/IP". iSCSI allows a network share to appear as a local scsi drive to the operating system. So you need a server that supports the iSCSI protocol and a client that support it also.

This site seems to be quite informative on the status of the various Linux projects. Check this out for a server implementation

If you have a very reliable connection you may want to go for AFS

In case the connection is not realiable (or not fast enough), you may want to try CODA which is a distributed filesystem which supports disconnected operations. Beware: AFS is a mature project, while CODA may still be a work-in-progress.

If you have a very reliable connection you may want to go for AFS

In case the connection is not realiable (or not fast enough), you may want to try CODA which is a distributed filesystem which supports disconnected operations. Beware: AFS is a mature project, while CODA may still be a work-in-progress.

Asimo is worthless, even more so that C3P0 or R2D2. I balk at seeing science fiction robots in the Hall of Fame, but the concept of one of the more worthless PR robots floating around today being inducted makes me want to gag myself. Asimo is an impressive bit of engineering, but I feel that all those man hours could have been better used. Much the same with Kizmet. MIT has been wasting the time of some pretty good researchers on relatively worthless projects. Or atleast that's my $.02.

Oh, and my nomination? NavLab and R. Daneel. Yes, R. Daneel is science fiction, but Asimov is the man.

But even if it is found illegal, so what? It will be a very long time before there are no countries in the world willing to distribute something like this. And if it becomes a standard part of common Linux distributions (for example), it will be damn hard to shut down.

But even if it is found illegal, so what? It will be a very long time before there are no countries in the world willing to distribute something like this. And if it becomes a standard part of common Linux distributions (for example), it will be damn hard to shut down.

Ahh, good ol' Shakey. I don't know if he'll get in--the younger folk at CMU don't seem too familiar with Nilsson's work.

At IJCAI this year, I was on the WUSTL team competing in the Robot Challenge. In homage to Shakey, we had our robot, Lewis, play "Take Five" for background music, as this is the background music in the Shakey video*. CMU also sent a large contingent to participate in the Robot Challenge. Not a one of their students got the joke. Even after being told it was a reference to Shakey, I don't think anybody from CMU gave us anything other than blank looks. Some of the other people on the Grace team got it, but none of the CMU'ers. Well, at least not anybody getting their hands dirty--I believe Dani Goldberg got it.

But yes, Shakey is certainly deserving to be in the hall of fame. A lot of great achievements in robotics were realized in Shakey--he was fully autonomous, capable of rather complicated planning, and did navigation by visual landmarks. Of course, he had to think for 15 to 20 minutes between actions, hence "Take Five", but this was the late 60's. No fancy on-board computers, laser rangefinders, or probabilistic methods, but duplicating Shakey's performance from scratch is a signifigent piece of work even today.

* I believe this is the same video. My internet connection is too slow to verify, but I've never heard of another Shakey video

Ahh, good ol' Shakey. I don't know if he'll get in--the younger folk at CMU don't seem too familiar with Nilsson's work.

At IJCAI this year, I was on the WUSTL team competing in the Robot Challenge. In homage to Shakey, we had our robot, Lewis, play "Take Five" for background music, as this is the background music in the Shakey video*. CMU also sent a large contingent to participate in the Robot Challenge. Not a one of their students got the joke. Even after being told it was a reference to Shakey, I don't think anybody from CMU gave us anything other than blank looks. Some of the other people on the Grace team got it, but none of the CMU'ers. Well, at least not anybody getting their hands dirty--I believe Dani Goldberg got it.

But yes, Shakey is certainly deserving to be in the hall of fame. A lot of great achievements in robotics were realized in Shakey--he was fully autonomous, capable of rather complicated planning, and did navigation by visual landmarks. Of course, he had to think for 15 to 20 minutes between actions, hence "Take Five", but this was the late 60's. No fancy on-board computers, laser rangefinders, or probabilistic methods, but duplicating Shakey's performance from scratch is a signifigent piece of work even today.

* I believe this is the same video. My internet connection is too slow to verify, but I've never heard of another Shakey video

Agreed, that's the first thing that came to mind. Why not put something in space that could be in the sunlight all the time and not even have to deal with shadows.

And what's this about robots building the god-damn assembly out of freaking dust!?! I guess, MAYBE in 50 years. But certainly not now. Hans Moravec's site shows a lot of cool progress he's making towards generalized robot vision... the type of vision that will be necessary for any sort of autonomous assembling operation.

A significant amount of early Internet history is there as well: Stuff you don't/won't see in AOL or MSN and stuff you certainly won't see in newspapers or books anymore because it doesn't validate today's corporate dogma.

The Usenet archives need to find some independent mirrors before Google gets torn to shreds and its remains sold of to appease shareholder pressure. It's not hard to imaging the new group of MBA overlords deciding that maintenance of the archive is not profitable enough to warrant the active effort it takes to keep it from entropy.

RedZone Robotics and Carnegie Mellon had this years ago on their Pioneer robot which did structural analysis at Chernobyl. It was deployed in the summer of 1999, though I think the build was complete by the start of 1999.

I was told the 3D Mapper was from SGI, but I have a feeling they provided the computers, not the mapping technology. Also, the resulting 3D environment could be explored via a VR helmet and gloves. Pretty slick stuff, I have video of it somewhere.

RedZone Robotics and Carnegie Mellon had this years ago on their Pioneer robot which did structural analysis at Chernobyl. It was deployed in the summer of 1999, though I think the build was complete by the start of 1999.

I was told the 3D Mapper was from SGI, but I have a feeling they provided the computers, not the mapping technology. Also, the resulting 3D environment could be explored via a VR helmet and gloves. Pretty slick stuff, I have video of it somewhere.

So CMU is supposed to pay 25$*client for every ACAP client? Oh, that's not the same thing... how 'bout putting a shameless cache to app config in the acap client and get in the lawyers' crosshairs?

You didn't hear what the nut-cult did to the government? sued 'em:

None of the following is disputed by Scientology officials and, indeed, some of it was boasted about by David Miscavige [Head of the nut cult] in his October 1993 speech:

* The IRS and its individual officers were sued for $128m.
* 2,500 lawsuits were launched against the IRS.
* Private detectives were employed to find out what "crimes" IRS officials were guilty of in their private lives.
* Freedom magazine printed lurid allegations about "IRS crimes".

They only dropped the lawsuits after the IRS agreed to grant them tax exempt status.

"We stepped up our efforts to get government documents about us, through the Freedom of Information Act. This would escalate to literally thousands of requests, and when the IRS wouldn't comply we never failed to take them to court. Slowly we were able to start piecing together the picture. And we were also beginning to impinge on government resources. In fact, the attorneys working for the government defending these law suits were to become so inundated that their entire budget would be wiped out handling our cases - so much so that they didn't even have money to attend the annual American Bar Association conference of lawyers - which they were supposed to speak at! [David Miscavige, speech to IAS, 8 October 1993]

"The purpose of a lawsuit is not to win, but to harass."

Intermezzo and Coda both do this, but I don't think there's any windows versions available. There are some Microsoft things available too, but obviously those aren't for linux. NBD (which everyone else has mentioned) isn't distributed, so that's not really what you're looking for.

What you might be able to do is put together a microcosm of Freenet or something like it, running on just your home computers. There may be other Peer-to-Peer solutions available that are faster/more stable. Do some searching on peer-to-peer distributed storage networks. I know of two researchy ones: OceanStore and Chord. Good luck!

SunPin wrote:

Without voice dictation, I can't move to Linux so if you planned to tell me just that, try offering a suggestion instead.

Yeah, dictation on Linux is in a pretty sorry state, and I don't see it getting out of that state without still yet more academic development.

However the latest version of ViaVoice is now available for Mac OS X. That's a serious step up from Windows in stability and system quality.

Try 20 years ago. 1982. Or Earlier. See http://www-2.cs.cmu.edu/~coke/. See "Ancient History" at the bottom. This pre-dates http. I remember fingering the coke machine back in 1990 or so.

Really?

Open Source Projects at Apple.

Feel free to download the source code to the OS. They have an x86 version available as well.

Or, you can download a forked project at OpenDarwin.

By the way, OS X is based on FreeBSD and the Mach microkernel from Carnegie Mellon University, not Linux. Unix was open-source long before Torvalds learned how not to crap his diapers. Indeed, IBMs mainframe source code was open to their customers as well.

Closed-source is a Microsoft invention.

It's "50 Ways to Hose Your Code", but still, yeah.

Something like that.

Beyond the obvious CODA = $0.00

Please, that's nothing. Check out this keyboard from an old Symbolics Lisp machine.

Yeah, that's right. Wanna know what happens when you type Hyper-Super-Meta-Control-Symbol-Shift-Square? So do I...

See also space-cadet keyboard.

But please don't call these 'wearable'... We already did this with cellphones, PDAs, and walkmans, and we didn't start calling these 'wearable' just because our coat has a special pocket for them, did we?

I've implemented many mail servers using the Cyrus IMAP Server and have nothing but praises for it. It runs on Solaris, Linux, *BSD operating systems and performs amazingly as a standards compliant IMAP server.

In which case, I would assume that students would attend class and participate because it's a good idea, not because there is a mechanism to force them to be present.

I'm not trying to debate this to death, but the reason I'm going through all this is because while I was in college I was subjected through innumerable schemes to boost attendance and participation, some of which involved technical solutions similar to the one you've described. I found the best solution was when the professor laboriously learned everyone's name and addressed them personally when discussing the topic at hand.

The end result is that the professor knew when students missed class, and blatant non-attendance would result in the student somehow being pointed out. This was usually done by the professor greeting him and welcoming him back, usually with a prominent seat up in front to be properly reacquainted with the classroom.

Good old John

I remembered seeing this a couple of days ago on HardOCP's boards. I mirrored the thread about it (as /.'ing a bboard is not too nice) which has quite a few pictures and some talk:

http://andrew.cmu.edu/~pnelson/big.html

(and yes, I did just download the 4 individual pages and cat them together =P)

Okay, so I read this paper as a part of the SOSP reading group here at school. Just want to make it clear that this is not the file system used by the front end that we all see. It is used by internal dev groups as well as the web spiders that they employ. Their unique usage has definitely led to a number of interesting choices (such as the atomic appends) for the file system design. Read the paper for more details :-)

Okay, so I read this paper as a part of the SOSP reading group here at school. Just want to make it clear that this is not the file system used by the front end that we all see. It is used by internal dev groups as well as the web spiders that they employ. Their unique usage has definitely led to a number of interesting choices (such as the atomic appends) for the file system design. Read the paper for more details :-)

People should know that there has been at least one project called "Y Window System" already (Not to mention W and Z...):

Here, 1998 vintage

There was also the YY window system. but that's long dead - 1992 era.

The guys from the french review site x86-secret decided to not only do the same type of thing, but make a bunch of videos available too! They mostly consist of old hardware (even though there is some new stuff) + fireworks = BOOM!!
http://explosive-reviews.x86-secret.com/
And because I'm nice, and it's not my bandwith, I'm currently mirroring them:
http://www.andrew.cmu.edu/~pnelson/explosive-revie ws.x86-secret.com/

No, no no... That's not Xenu of Scientology fame, that's Xinu of Douglas Comer fame.

Sheez, obviously if it was Xenu, the line would have started way to the left of the whole Unix hierarchy on the chart -- we're talking 95,000,000 years ago, after all.