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Ok. I'm tired of hearing about Media Lab and Xybernaut.

Check out Carnege Mellon's Institute for Complex engineering Systems. They've been doing the wearables for as long as anyone else.

I did a lot of undergrad work for this group, and their projects are as good/better than the stuff coming out of Media Lab, you just don't hear about it. Their wearable for speech translation currently translates between english, croatian, french and I believe one of the oriental languages (?). Pretty interesting stuff.

Ever since then, D has been quirky. Talks, but awkwardly, and always and only just about things that interest her -- tiedye and wiccanism and such. She's pretty clearly brilliant, but always fixated on this or that to the point that it gets frustrating.

You have to understand that Asperger's doesn't mean Rain Man; the "high functioning" modifier is important. In D's case, she has held down jobs, lived on her own, done well in school, had boyfriends, etc. She's 25 or so now and we've only realized there could be a clinical explanation for her oddities for a few months now. Alot of the people that have this condition, if they are anything like D, would for most purposes blend right in with "normal", functioning society.

And this has nothing to do with "labelling the geek phenomenon." Rather, it is a recognition of the fact that there are people -- some but not all of them programmers -- that have a condition and can seek help for it. No one is trying to "weed out the geeks" here, sorry, but you're paranoid.

And in response to Bruce Parens' points -- again, it does not mean non-functional behavior. Aspberger's patients function more or less just like "normal" people -- in the case of D, it took 25 years or so for anyone to realize that there was anything unusual here. Don't associate this with previous conceptions of autism, because on a functional level it seems to be quite different. People with Asperger's are likely to talk just as much as anyone else -- the difference is more in what they will talk about, that mainly being themselves and the things they are interested in and not much else.

For more information, you can look at a study from CMU that deals with Aspberger's patients & computer usage, or a more general explanatory link on the condition at Yale University.

http://english-www.hss. cmu.edu/cyber/sterling/computer.txt
Nothing a bit of Google can't find.
Kandinski is just too lazy to log in.

Just so you know, the limitations of the ICE have little to do with possible limitations of computers. The ICE is mechanical, as were computers at one point. Being mechanical, the computers did max out their capabilities. Look at the precursors to the ENIAC, EDVAC, Z-series, etc. If my memory serves me correctly, the fastest ones took more than 5 seconds (I think it was actually a lot bigger than that) per multiplication. The move from mechanical to electrical gave the possibility of higher speeds. So, now we have electrical computers that can process much faster than their stone-aged mechanical ancestors. How are we speeding them up now? We're making the processors smaller and smaller and stacking on more layers. The Pentium II and III processors are manufactured with a .25 micron process. We have the capabilities for a .1 micron process now. If I remember correctly, the 386 was a .38 micron process (someone check that...). So we can continue to manufacture things smaller and smaller. What happens if we get down to an atomic level? Can we reach an atomic level? Think of how fast a computer would run with a manufacturing process that small. Maybe we will move over to genetic processors by that point. We already have the ability to graft (sp?) neurons onto computer chips. My point is, there are still so many possible twists to computer manufacturing that we can use to increase speed that by the time we reach the limit, if there is one, it will have far surpassed the computing power of our brain. Our brain is a set size, the computers aren't. Email me to discuss it further.

In particular, he notes that

When we write programs that "learn," it turns out that we do and they don't.

This goes along nicely with Douglas Hofstadter in his book ``Creative Analogies and Fluid Concepts'' where he outlines areas that are critical to language translation that happen to be real tough to even think about algorithms to process.

Hofstadter asks the question: ``What is the Chicago of Russia?'' which does not admit unambiguous results. I have parallelled this somewhat with the question What is the Moscow of New York? which has too many potentially valid answers for comfort.

I think "Star Trek Computing" is about as near as "Star Trek Economics," which is to say, no way soon.

There are certainly things to be learned; it's mostly humans that are doing the learning, not the computers...

Robotics. The NavLab at the Carnegie Mellon University Robotics Institute has used neural-net-based computer vision for hands-free driving. The system is capable of driving on interstate highways at traffic speeds, and has even driven cross country! Many other robotics tasks are also done with nnets.

For a good general jumping-off point (and a plug!), check out the neural-networks lab at the University of Texas at Austin CS dept. The page has lots of interesting links, and the lab itself is doing work applying NNets to natural language processing, modelling of the visual cortex, game playing, and many kinds of reinforcement learning problems. Some especially cool stuff is their work in combining nnets with genetic algorithms to evolve networks for game-playing, robot applications, and other tasks.

J.

Robotics. The NavLab at the Carnegie Mellon University Robotics Institute has used neural-net-based computer vision for hands-free driving. The system is capable of driving on interstate highways at traffic speeds, and has even driven cross country! Many other robotics tasks are also done with nnets.

For a good general jumping-off point (and a plug!), check out the neural-networks lab at the University of Texas at Austin CS dept. The page has lots of interesting links, and the lab itself is doing work applying NNets to natural language processing, modelling of the visual cortex, game playing, and many kinds of reinforcement learning problems. Some especially cool stuff is their work in combining nnets with genetic algorithms to evolve networks for game-playing, robot applications, and other tasks.

J.

Actually most Pagans don't use numerology...in fact, I would say that more Christians and Jews do so.

The Law of Fives

The Law of Fives is one of the oldest Erisian Mysterees. It was first revealed to Good Lord Omar and is one of the great contributions to come from The Hidden Temple of The Happy Jesus.

POEE subscribes to the Law of Fives of Omar's sect. And POEE also recognizes the holy 23 (2+3=5) that is incorporated by Episkopos Dr. Mordecai Malignatus, KNS, into his Discordian sect, The Ancient Illuminated Seers of Bavaria.

The Law of Fives states simply that: ALL THINGS HAPPEN IN FIVES, OR ARE DIVISIBLE BY OR ARE MULTIPLES OF FIVE, OR ARE SOMEHOW DIRECTLY OR INDIRECTLY APPROPRIATE TO 5.

The Law of Fives is never wrong.

In the Erisian Archives is an old memo from Omar to Mal-2: "I find the Law of Fives to be more and more manifest the harder I look."

Fnord.

Future GUI designers should read "Usability of Security: A Case Study" by Alma Whitten and J.D. Tygar.

It shows that A LOT of improvement is needed to make PGP-like security usable for the avarage user.

Klaus

For where former Mach people are, see Former Mach Project Members.

Microsoft themselves publicize Rashid's arrival

Umm... someone has already done this and called it Alice; take a look at the Alice tutorial. This is one of the inspirations for the CP4E effort, because it's been really successful at letting non-programmers do interesting things.

That was at CMU, not MIT. More here.

I suggest Omar Khayyam Ravenhurst. (Search forward from the link for "Ravenhurst".)

As for being a US citizen and coding outside the US it appears to have been done relating to at least one ssh product. TTSSH is a free SSH client for Windows. It is implemented as an extension DLL for Teraterm Pro by Robert O'Callahan roc+tt@cs.cmu.edu

Although the last update was Dec 98 so it is possible that he is now in jail.

excerpt:
"November 3, 1998: A lot of people have been asking me when TTSSH will support SSH 2.x. Unfortunately SSH 2.x is a very big, complex protocol and looks a lot of work to implement from scratch. Also, it looks like it will be hard to integrate all its features into Teraterm without significantly modifying the design of the main Teraterm application. There's no way I'll have enough time overseas in the foreseeable future to undertake this project, sorry. I hope there are other people with more time and freedom... "

That seems to indicate that the work was done outside the US.

As for other forms of export, I would guess that you could always do what was done by theEFF or with PGP.
Remember it is only the electronic export of crypto that is the problem.

I too was given a big jumpstart into the world of computing when I first read Stephen Levy's artificial life, Dawkins' Selfish Gene, and Moravec's Mind Children.

Those books showed me that we're actually not just playing games and getting political about OS's for no reason. The rise in the importance of technology has been exponantial ever since people started letting down the old rusty barriers against progress.

If already so much synergy results from commerce and society, then the dream of there being such an incredible future spurred me on to do computer studies, and now internet communities.

Of course, not all of the effects of a new sum-of-the-parts are positive, but the way I see it, I have to be here in this profession to make sure it goes the way I'd like it to because it's going to happen anyway.

Also, the actual theory behind alife, genetic algorithms, or even moravec's mad ramblings,
is really complicated and full of boring math and biology (too much for me: that's what I was studying when I read those books), but pop science books on all those matters can't f
ail to show those things to people who wouldn't otherwise have had the patience nor maybe
even the time or disposition to sit figuring out journals & stuff.

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Slashdot Load Testing (Continues) Posted by CmdrTaco on Mon August 30, 02:13 PM EDT
from the ain't-this-fun? dept.
Fixed so far:

• Dropped http MaxClients down to 75
• increased mysql max_connections to to 250

( Read More... | 190 of 190 comments )

Help Test Our New Server! Posted by CmdrTaco on Mon August 30, 12:51 PM EDT
from the load-testing-is-cool dept.
So here it is: A mirror of Slashdot (as of a week or so ago). It exists now for testing: So feel free to post comments and help test the new load balancer. For the curious, the new system has 3 http machines (P2s) and one mysql box (a dual P2) with a load balancer trying to keep everyone all equally busy. And its about time: the old setup has been really stressed out trying to keep up with everyone. Anyway, don't get to attached to any of your comments here, when we're satisfied that the new setup is stable, I'm gonna mirror over Slashdot and make the final switcheroo.

( Read More... | 335 of 335 comments )

Interview: Mandrake Answers Posted by Roblimo on Fri August 20, 12:00 PM EDT
from the x-leads-to-enlightenment dept.
Monday a whole bunch of people had questions for Mandrake, one of the heavies behind Enlightenment. Slashdot Moderators picked the best ones. We forwarded them, unedited, to Mandrake on Tuesday. His (excellent) answers appear below.

( Read More... | 11562 bytes in body | 9 of 9 comments )

Geeks in the Space: The Attack of 5 Posted by Hemos on Thu August 19, 04:10 AM EDT
from the more-stuff-to-listen-to dept.
Well, we've done it again. Yes, Geeks in Space, Episode 5 has been released. In it, we lament the lack of good news, talk about anti-matter, and the hiring of hacks by companies. You can also become...educated in my long-term plan for the hostile takeover of a certain Redmond-based company.

( Read More... | 14 of 17 comments )

Apple announces Darwin 0.3 Posted by Hemos on Thu August 19, 12:24 AM EDT
from the more-to-download dept.
J. FoxGlov writes "Macintouch reports that v0.3 of Darwin, the open-source foundation for Mac OS X Server is available on Apple's Public Source site. Apple Developer Connection members can get it on CD for $29. Check Public Source for more about the Darwin SDK and the new Darwin. "

( Read More... | 67 of 68 comments )

Microsoft's New Audio Format Cracked Posted by Hemos on Wed August 18, 05:23 PM EDT
from the secure-this-buddy dept.
Barcode (JPB) was one of the first to send us the word from Wired that the new audio format Microsoft introduced (Two days ago), supposed to be a secure format (resricting playback) has already been cracked. Dimension Music first carried the news-and what a name the crack has *grin*.

( Read More... | 238 of 240 comments )

Find your Star Wars Twin Posted by Hemos on Wed August 18, 05:16 PM EDT
from the what-freud-really-wanted-to-do dept.
The_Monk writes "Ever wanted to know your Star Wars twin? Now this incredibly important information can be verified. It placed me the likes of Astro Mech Droids, 'Tarkin, and R2-D2. " Ahem-as the lost twin of Lando (extraversion), I have a Cloud City I'd like to sell someone. But I'm about as agreeable as Boba, always a bonus.

( Read More... | 94 of 94 comments )

Now Police Can 'See' Through Walls Posted by Roblimo on Wed August 18, 12:40 PM EDT
from the move-along-there's-nothing-to-see-here dept.
Bram writes "Just found an article about another way to invade privacy." He's talking about hand-held radar systems police can use to detect breathing, beating hearts or other motion through walls and other obstacles. Sounds like a declassified version of the Ground Support Radar [GSR] units we used years ago in the Army. I can see why police would want them, and I can also see why Bram considers them a privacy threat. Depends on how they're used, I suppose.

( Read More... | 205 of 205 comments )

FreeType posts patent warning Posted by Hemos on Wed August 18, 11:53 AM EDT
from the i-want-my-verdonna dept.
Anonymous Coward writes "According to the the FreeType web page, there have been some new concerns raised about Apple's patents on TrueType. I hope this doesn't affect the planned TrueType support in XF86 4. " It appears that they are still checking into the issue, but I'd really like TrueType support. A lot. Let's hope Apple responds nicely.

( Read More... | 202 of 206 comments )

Microsoft to "publish code" to Instant Messenger Posted by Hemos on Wed August 18, 09:49 AM EDT
from the want-more-market-share dept.
VFVTHUNTER writes "According to this article at cnet, MS, in an attempt to gain a share of AOL's Instant Messenger Service Market, announced today it is going to publish the protocol to its own messenger service. " It's important to note it's NOT the source code, just the protocol.

( Read More... | 192 of 192 comments )

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Features The latest installment of Geeks in Space is up at The Sync. We talk about the Red Hat IPO, crazy naming schemes, and much more.

Perhaps you are seeking Jon Katz's series of articles related to recent events in Colorado. These articles include Voices from the Hellmouth, More Stories from the Hellmouth or The Price of Being Different,

With all the hype about the recent MindCraft Linux/NT benchmarks, you might be interested in reading ESR's Response to the Mindcraft Fiasco

For something different, try reading my little essay Thoughts from the Furnace about the internet, and flame.

Update: 05/03 01:48 by CT : Past Features

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PerLDAP v1.4 Released

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The thing is it's called Electrical And Computer Engineering. The program here at CMU (I am a junior in ECE, doing the computer engineering side of things) is extremely flexible. The way the program works is this:

You have one intro course (18-100), and two core courses (Fundamentals of EE, and Fundamentals of CE). After that, you pretty much get to choose what area you want to do (electrical, computer, or both). If you want to learn more about the program, check out these two links:

The CMU ECE Home Page

Overview of the B.S. in Electrical and Computer Engineering at CMU


My experience here in the ECE program has been great. The program is nop-notch, and very flexible. Anyway, check the links if you want the details of how the program works.

The thing is it's called Electrical And Computer Engineering. The program here at CMU (I am a junior in ECE, doing the computer engineering side of things) is extremely flexible. The way the program works is this:

You have one intro course (18-100), and two core courses (Fundamentals of EE, and Fundamentals of CE). After that, you pretty much get to choose what area you want to do (electrical, computer, or both). If you want to learn more about the program, check out these two links:

The CMU ECE Home Page

Overview of the B.S. in Electrical and Computer Engineering at CMU


My experience here in the ECE program has been great. The program is nop-notch, and very flexible. Anyway, check the links if you want the details of how the program works.

For some people this is the right option. If you are in it for the money, or if you're sure you want to work as a programmer for a while, then of course you don't need an advanced degree. However, I just started grad school at CMU, and here's why I think a Ph.D. is worth it:

1. In industry, they pay you to work on whatever they want. At grad school, they pay you to work on whatever you want.

2. If you're considering staying in academia, you need a Ph.D.

3. I disagree that you can go into industry and then come back to grad school later. It will be harder to get in (your GRE scores will probably drop), you won't be used to studying, and you won't be able to tolerate the decrease in salary. Do it now while you're still young.

4. Some of the best jobs in industry go to people with Ph.D.s.

One last note: apply for the NSF fellowship. You can download the forms off the web. There are about a thousand winners every year, many in CS, so your chances are not bad assuming you're a good student. If you win any fellowship this will basically guarantee admission into a second-tier grad school and the first-tier schools will like you more. (Basically, almost any school is happy to take a student when somebody else is paying.)

dmazzoni+@cs.cmu.edu

In undergrad, you're expected to just learn to do something, but in grad school, you're likely to do some research, and you're expected to contribute something new to the sum total of human knowledge. I say go somewhere that the research interests you.

That, and CMU rules. Actually, the CS school. if top notch. Sorry for the shameless plug. You should really also consider the city, ie whether or not you're going to hate living there.


Andrew Gardner

In undergrad, you're expected to just learn to do something, but in grad school, you're likely to do some research, and you're expected to contribute something new to the sum total of human knowledge. I say go somewhere that the research interests you.

That, and CMU rules. Actually, the CS school. if top notch. Sorry for the shameless plug. You should really also consider the city, ie whether or not you're going to hate living there.


Andrew Gardner

did anyone notice the note near the end (not sure how anyone could stand to read this far into it), right before the list of references:

Note: If you enjoy the exercise, feel free, find and correct the Mathematical problems.

you would think someone writing a paper that so heavily depended on mathematics would actually take the time to check it over several times before submitting it...

--Siva (too lazy to login)

bc(1) says:
2^32 == 4294967296

either this guys on crack or his scheme (which is nearly impossible to understand because of his writting) ends up somehow using some addresses more than once. i vote for the former, based on his poor grammar and odd facination with binary representation...

--Siva(too lazy to log in)

But enough about me. A more appropriate link than CMU's front page might be CMU's Computer Science Department.

And, about time we got more females... Maybe now they're joining the CS school in force, we won't have the common problem of them transferring out after a year or two. With low percentages of them, I can certainly understand why.

not that serious. It's IM for chrissakes

As it exists now, there is no authentication. Therefore, impersonation is trivial. If for no other reasons than social engineering potential, that's a serious security problem in my book. Yes, you mention adding authentication to ICQ, but the fact remains that that hasn't happened, and based on past experience that's not likely to happen.

I still think, however that the base ICQ protocol is far better than anything brought forward by anyone else.

Are you familiar with Caliban?

Caliban is both GPLed and uses strong cryptographic for authentication and encryption (unlike any of the competition).

http://www.andrew.cmu.edu/~bucy/IM/

Check out Caliban:

http://www.andrew.cmu.edu/~bucy/IM/

which uses a new yet to be named protocol that actually has real encryption and authentication, unlike Microsoft's new protocol, AIM, ICQ, Jabber, etc. Coming soon will be support for ACLs and group chat.

The Caliban instant messaging system actually provides real authentication and encryption, along with numerous other features (though some, like ACLs, are still in development).

http://www.andrew.cmu.edu/~bucy/IM/

For a REAL instant message protocol check out Caliban, which actually provides real authentication and encryption:

http://www.andrew.cmu.edu/~bucy/IM/

Our closest relative is the Bonbon (no not the candy).

This finding commands attention because the bonobo shares more than 98 percent of our genetic profile, making it as close to a human as, say, a fox is to a dog. The split between the human line of ancestry and the line of the chimpanzee and the bonobo is believed to have occurred a mere eight million years ago. The subsequent divergence of the chimpanzee and the bonobo lines came much later, perhaps prompted by the chimpanzee's need to adapt to relatively open, dry habitats [see "East Side Story: The Origin of Humankind," by Yves Coppens; SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN, May 1994].

...

If this evolutionary scenario of ecological continuity is true, the bonobo may have undergone less transformation than either humans or chimpanzees.

What you describe doesn't sound like a development process at all. It sounds like a documentation burr... A development process is a pretty ethereal animal (those that may or may not exist, depending on whom you ask).

I've personally not worked on open source projects (yet) but I imagine that they are vastly different than any commercial effort. Seems to me that managing gratis developers is like herding cats - if you try to control them, they'll simply leave.

But, I would strongly recommend Steve McConnell's book on Rapid Development, and Code Complete while you're at it.

The RD book - well, eat it. Read it cover to cover twice, and with that knowledge in your head, use what fits your project and developers.

Your people may like to do thorough design up front, and follow the traditional 'waterfall' process, but that doesn't stand up well to changing specs.

Incremental development seems to work well where I work. We have a small team, and in-house users, so feedback and even design changes can happen pretty quickly..

You'll need to look at the risks your project is facing as well as a number of other factors - i.e. do you subcontract, buy COTS stuff, use strict CM and are you subject to stringent V&V?? Who are your users, how skilled are your people? Look where you fall on the Capability Maturity Model (1.1 release) hierarchy and how you rank per ISO 9000-3. If nothing else, you'll get some ideas.

As you can guess, there's a huge number of variables that go into defining a successful process. The Software Engineering Institute at Carnegie-Mellon University may prove helpful, but I would recommend the aforementioned book (RD) first.

I've never set up PGP because it's pointless. Until we get really good IP-level encryption and logically-impenetrable software (yeah, this *does* require that your assumptions are accurate) at a consumer level, PGP is a strong point...but surrounded by thousands of holes.

This is true, but misses the point.

PGP software should be seamless. I may be greedy, but I want zero effort on my part to use it.

You are being greedy. Public key encryption, like door locks, require a bit of effort to use. That said, I found PGP5's plugin for Eudora on Windows to be pretty close to seamless--point, click, enter passphrase.

Speaking of, why are we pushing pgp? gpg is a free, GLP'd implementation that doesn't involve patented algoritms. A much better option on Linux, anyway.

ssh without authentication...I shouldn't have to establish and propogate private keys then when
installing ssh. That would be nice.

The default setup just asks you if you want to trust this host when it seens a key it doesn't recognize. You can always say 'yes' if you want that level of security.

I have to use a remote college box via unencrypted telnet.

That's too bad. You could always ask them to install something safer...my remote college box turned out to have it installed already. :)

BTW, there is a version of telnet hacked up to use SSL (if it's available) which makes a nice drop-in replacement. I've only used the version that comes with Debian, and don't see the original off hand. However, you can get the source here, or read about it here. It requires support at both ends, though, so it's only helpful if the server admin is friendly.

Using the Mac SSH *is* a PAIN. Especially since BetterTelnet is the best Mac telnet, and I don't know whether it supports the same plug-ins that NCSA Telnet and NiftyTelnet does.

Hmm, what do you like so much about BetterTelnet? I gave up waiting for ssh support and switched to NiftyTelnet some time ago. I haven't had any trouble with it. (here's the encrypting version) BTW, the BetterTelnet faq seems to indicate that there is a working plugin, but doesn't say were to get it. That's an improvement over the last time I checked.

Just trying to help you feel less down on yourself. :)

• Map of Lunar private property.
• Map of Apollo landing sites.
• Moon Handbook, a travel guide.
• Robotic Exploration: LunaCorp, CMU Lunar Rover
• How to get there: The Artemis Project, GSC, Spacetopia
• What to do on the way there: Enjoy Low Earth Orbit
• What to do there:
  • Fun: Lunar golf and javelin throwing
  • Work: Mine oxygen

Note: this is not for the faint of heart, and probably involves overhauling your mail setup.

I've also looked into setting up something like that. It came down to using something like LDAP which is scaleable, standard, and OS-nonspecific for mail users. Then I had Qmail and Cyrus on the backend. I applied the Qmail LDAP patch, allowing Qmail to use LDAP for its user list. For Cyrus, there is another pwcheck file here. It adds the ability for it to authenticate against an LDAP server. Finally (yay!) we need the Qmail/Cyrus glue (as Qmail uses a slow mail format compared to Cyrus, and has no IMAP support [yick!]).

Incoming mail goes to Qmail, which uses scripts to deliver to Cyrus (users LDAP listed). User logins go through Cyrus server programs (which use LDAP auth), and can get their messages that way. This should also support virtual domains.

All in all, it sounds good ;-) I have yet to implement it (I'm going slowly and testing every step. Right now I'm converting my user base to LDAP, then I'll update Cyrus, etc).

Have fun.

As for the MTA, well I've seen plenty of votes for Qmail and Exim. I'm still pretty partial to Sendmail though. I think they'll all work (though I've been told Sendmail on a single server probably would have a tough time keeping up with the load on something like this).

With all of these solutions, if the users are getting much mail, you'll probably have to do something kind of exotic to break up the mail requests across multiple servers. The more transparent you can make this, the better. Either the users will have to know WHICH server thier mail goes on, or you will have to make the multiple servers ALL have access to ALL the mail.

One possible solution would be to use something like CODA (also from CMU http://www.coda.cs.cmu.edu/). This is a cacheing network file system that you could set up on a backend server (running over something like a multi-ported 100Mbps Ethernet Switch with the multiple client servers on the front-end exposed to the network). When client server "x" gets a request from "joe", "x" accesses the file system and gets all the files in joe's mail box (a series of directories) (the ones requested first, then pre-caching all the others). When joe stops using his files, they are allowed to expire on "x" (releasing the cache for use by mary, or adam). Once downloaded, the files can be manipulated on the client and changes are sent to the server when there is time/bandwidth (I'm not sure how the locking and similar mechanisms work on this ... read the coda docs for details).

This way, you can dedicate one or more MTA servers to stuffing mail into the backend CODA server, then have one or more client servers pulling the data out and handing it to the clients. You spend most of your money getting a BSB (Big Stinking Box) for the backend, and use cheap, easily-replacable-if-it-crashes machines for the front end.

Another nice thing about Cyrus: It allows you to set per-user space limitations and access restrictions, and mail sent to multiple users is put into a special cache directory meaning it doesn't take up space for each copy.

One warning: Cyrus suffers from the same problem as INN's traditional storage system - it eats the hell out of inodes because each message is a file. Most email messages are in the 1-2 K range, so when you create the filesystem for Cyrus, make sure to create the maximum Inodes.

I know from the docs that CMU uses this on a 10000+ user mail network, and they apparently are quite happy withit. I've heard similar things from other large sites.

Basically, Cyrus is what Exchange hoped to be :^).

Don

As for the MTA, well I've seen plenty of votes for Qmail and Exim. I'm still pretty partial to Sendmail though. I think they'll all work (though I've been told Sendmail on a single server probably would have a tough time keeping up with the load on something like this).

With all of these solutions, if the users are getting much mail, you'll probably have to do something kind of exotic to break up the mail requests across multiple servers. The more transparent you can make this, the better. Either the users will have to know WHICH server thier mail goes on, or you will have to make the multiple servers ALL have access to ALL the mail.

One possible solution would be to use something like CODA (also from CMU http://www.coda.cs.cmu.edu/). This is a cacheing network file system that you could set up on a backend server (running over something like a multi-ported 100Mbps Ethernet Switch with the multiple client servers on the front-end exposed to the network). When client server "x" gets a request from "joe", "x" accesses the file system and gets all the files in joe's mail box (a series of directories) (the ones requested first, then pre-caching all the others). When joe stops using his files, they are allowed to expire on "x" (releasing the cache for use by mary, or adam). Once downloaded, the files can be manipulated on the client and changes are sent to the server when there is time/bandwidth (I'm not sure how the locking and similar mechanisms work on this ... read the coda docs for details).

This way, you can dedicate one or more MTA servers to stuffing mail into the backend CODA server, then have one or more client servers pulling the data out and handing it to the clients. You spend most of your money getting a BSB (Big Stinking Box) for the backend, and use cheap, easily-replacable-if-it-crashes machines for the front end.

Another nice thing about Cyrus: It allows you to set per-user space limitations and access restrictions, and mail sent to multiple users is put into a special cache directory meaning it doesn't take up space for each copy.

One warning: Cyrus suffers from the same problem as INN's traditional storage system - it eats the hell out of inodes because each message is a file. Most email messages are in the 1-2 K range, so when you create the filesystem for Cyrus, make sure to create the maximum Inodes.

I know from the docs that CMU uses this on a 10000+ user mail network, and they apparently are quite happy withit. I've heard similar things from other large sites.

Basically, Cyrus is what Exchange hoped to be :^).

Don

The Cyrus server at CMU is probably your best bet. You'll find it at at this link.

It's worth noting that this project is currently supporting all of CMU's e-mail needs. It's also my understanding that it forms the basis for Netscape's Message Server and Post.Office. This should satisfy any concerns about it's scalability. It has lots of handy features like kerberos authentication, a database style message repository, support for ACAP, etc.

Alternatively try QMail. Personally, while I think it provides better SMTP performance than Sendmail, I'd rather use the Cyrus IMAP server than the UW one (the only one supported by QMail). You could go with using a combo of sendmail|postfix + Cyrus for incomming mail (i.e. what your MX records point to) and QMail for outgoing mail. It depends on your performance needs

Exchange Server is NOTORIOUS for being both difficult and expensive when you need it to scale to a large number of users, although I understand it's improved substancially since the 4.x days when it was just impossible.

Anyway, that should be Cyrus, or more specifically, the Cyrus imapd.

Anyway, that should be Cyrus, or more specifically, the Cyrus imapd.

What's really cool is that the Sony AIBOs were actually given their own league in this competition. They really can do more than just get up when they fall down.

Carnegie Mellon University has been winning most of these competitions in the past few years - check out the team's project leader's web page here.

Robot soccer is already old. It's been around for several years (3 or 4 at least). My school always cleans up... we entered 3 out of 4 divisions last year and won all of them.

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

Why do they even bother to do this competition any more? Everyone knows that CMU is just going to beat everyone again!

-NooM

And because they were truly benevolent, they always stepped down after the crisis was over and returned power to a senate or council... Cincinnatus is the Roman version ( Li vy's Early History on project gutenberg), but I can't remember the name of the Greek original. Any other liberal arts students?

Hmmm, very revealing... According to the CMU website, the system (presumably Janus) is limited domain, which certainly makes things much easier. Still pretty cool, though.

OK just as a background check I've worked on some haptic stuff. Haptic being a magic word that means force feedback for lack of a better definition. I worked specifically on two projects, which had much better hardware than this thing. With those it was possible, to feel things but not perfectly. Generally (although this was 1-2 years ago) minute details were lost. Things like textures were difficult to feel. Best example I can relate was you hand running quickly over a keyboard type texture. Friction and drag were possible but not very accurate or reliable. That stuff was all done on the PHANTOM. Stuff for this device has gotten better but still if you want realistic feeling you need a lot of computer power behind it. Typically it can be used for medical imaging with SGIs. The other device I worked with was based on magnetics. Its here. It had better precision in the feelings, but less of a range (err at least the prototype did its been about 1-2years since I was there). Basically you could feel things very precisely but only over about 1". The PHANTOM allowed you to feel things kinda sloppily over a much larger range (walls were a little spongy).

The point of all that blathering - I doubt that could get an acurate feeling in these mouse type devices. The input an computation you would need is pretty large. More likely it is what was stated in the article here - a rumble pack in a mouse. So I doubt you could tell the difference between a tennis raquet, a can of soda, or an adult site.

As for any benefits to the blind, I believe there are beter products that do braille type output to a wrist rest type thing that sits below your keyboard. This probably can't do braille due to lack of exactness.
-cpd

A zip drive (parallel port even) and 100 meg SCSI drive worked... Not sure why I ever tried that! You may have noticed the "Network block device support" option in the kernel config. You can export a block device accross the network to another system and raid that! Maybe... It's obviously not possible to mount it read/write on multiple systems but read-only should be ok. That would be funny to have the other 1/2 to your array sitting on the other side of the world! The CODA project has a much more sane way to do this.

We don't know of any Linux RAIDframe ports; we've occasionally toyed with the idea of doing one, but we really don't have time to do it now (our efforts are focused on the NASD project these days). If you're interested in porting it to Linux, though, please let us know.

If you're interested in doing research on raid, you might want to have a look at RAIDframe, which is a system for prototyping disk arrays. It was added to NetBSD last November. It includes a simulator as well as a device driver for doing RAID on real disks, and supports levels 0, 1, 4, 5, hot spares, and more. The base code for level 6 and parity logging is also in there, though I don't know how well it's working.

There's a web page with current notes on RAIDframe on NetBSD here.

cjs

Once the computers that reside on most people's desktops are fast enough, and have enough/fast enough storage, the speach recognition that you will be able to do will be amazing. Products like NaturallySpeaking aren't using all of the technology/techniques that they could be just because the computers that would be required, wouldn't be practical. Here at CMU they've been doing speech recognition since the 70's, and there are currently projects in the works that blow away everything currently on the market... But they probably won't run on your computer.

Once the computers that reside on most people's desktops are fast enough, and have enough/fast enough storage, the speach recognition that you will be able to do will be amazing. Products like NaturallySpeaking aren't using all of the technology/techniques that they could be just because the computers that would be required, wouldn't be practical. Here at CMU they've been doing speech recognition since the 70's, and there are currently projects in the works that blow away everything currently on the market... But they probably won't run on your computer.