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A Projection System with Radiometric Compensation for Screen Imperfections

I agree that the media has a corporate bias. But I disagree that the media and entertainment industry are fundamentally "left of center"; on social issues, the American people tend to be fairly progressive.

If anything, the result of corporate-driven media is a bland, mainstream, offend-as-few-people-as-possible product.

Access to abortion (in at least some circumstances) and environmental protection laws are thoroughly mainstream "values", the results of the recent U.S. presidential election notwithstanding.

Indeed, the disconnect between the current administration's avowed legistlative agenda and the "values" of the average American is what makes this last election so... "interesting," to my mind.

When I said "had more to do with the holocaust" I ment they were more involved in a strict sence. I didn't mean to imply culpability. I guess I should have elaborated more, but very long post don't get read :). However, from a great article

In his 1967 book Three Popes and the Jews, the diplomat Pinchas Lapide (who served as Israeli consul in Milan and interviewed Italian Holocaust survivors) declared Pius XII "was instrumental in saving at least 700,000, but probably as many as 860,000 Jews from certain death at Nazi hands."

This is not to say that Eugenio Pacelli--the powerful churchman who served as nuncio in Bavaria and Germany from 1917 to 1929, then as Vatican secretary of state from 1930 to 1939, before becoming Pope Pius XII six months before World War II began--was as much a friend to the Jews as John Paul II has been. Nor is it to say that Pius was ultimately successful as a defender of Jews. Despite his desperate efforts to maintain peace, the war came, and, despite his protests against German atrocities, the slaughter of the Holocaust occurred. Even without benefit of hindsight, a careful study reveals that the Catholic Church missed opportunities to influence events, failed to credit fully the Nazis' intentions, and was infected in some of its members with a casual anti-Semitism that would countenance--and, in a few horrifying instances, affirm--the Nazi ideology.

I used to work for a company that produced a High Resolution Display that used mirrors to steer a red or blue laser beam onto a sheet of photochromic film - the blue laser would permanently write on the film - the red laser could be used for drawing small amounts of vector graphics - a cursor, or a few characters of text. Doing complex graphics in vector mode when the persistence of the human eye is less than 40ms will require the mirror to be scanned at very high frequencies

Do you think the royalties earned by artists on musical works are too high? Are the artists being too -- there's that word again -- greedy?

No. Actually, the groupthink is that most recording artists are underpaid rather than overpaid, largely because the label deducts expenses before paying royalties to the recording artist. Read "The Problem with Music" by Steve Albini for the gory details. On the other hand, the label pays mechanical royalties to the songwriter's publisher before deducting expenses; a singer-songwriter who somehow manages to avoid a Bright Tunes fight may get a check from the music publisher (for the CDs) and from BMI (for radio play) before the album recoups.

Yeah. Take a look at my alma mater, Columbia. The stats are just plain wrong: there's a campuswide wireless network, many classes are offered online and some in streaming video, the school provides webspace (though admittedly it's still up to you to design your site), and both WKCR and WBAR are streamed online. So why are these all red X's in Forbes' table?

How to avoid keyloggers

Fascinating.

I was at Columbia University last week for a meeting sponsored by the local ACM chapter and LXNY, the speaker was Stephen Bourne (he who is sh).

At some point during his excellent talk on the history of Unix and his place in it, someone asked what he thought was the reason for the success of the operating system, and without hesitating, he talked about the room where all the terminals were located (he never specifically referred to it as the "Unix room" though) and how when you released software it was used immediately by those in the room and if something broke, you were called "idiot" (and probably worse) by your peers -- it was in your best interest to make sure you didn't put out junk as you really didn't have that dilution of responsibility that engineers have in a large corporation where the design team is in one wing of the building, the coders are in another, and the testers in yet another location, etc.

It was a great speech, anyone who hasn't seen Dr. Bourne speak should do so, he is an excellent source of insight into the early years of Unix and software engineering in general. He is now working for a venture capital firm and roughly a third of his talk was spent talking about that, it's a testament to his great speaking skills that most of the people in the room didn't lose interest when he switched topics like that (I'm convinced that most hackers suffer from ADD).

Thomas

Then there's the Alternative section. Folks who label themselves like that tend to be doing all their own work.

That's what they think. How can an independent singer-songwriter know for sure that he's not subconsciously copying an existing copyrighted song? George Harrison got in trouble for this.

Here is a JDBC-driven database access program that is free as in freedom and free as in beer.

Here's the Wal-Mart Cheer:
http://www-1.gsb.columbia.edu/faculty/kyee/walmart /walmartcheer.html

A chip optimized to do QCD calculations (QCDOC QCD on Chip) has been developed and parallel computers using that chip are being built. More details can be found here. Machines are being built by the U.S., U.K. and Japan. The U.S. and Japaneese machines will be located at Brookhaven National Lab Computing Facilty which is close to Columbia University where the QCDOC was developed.

Many of you talk a good game of prior art, providing oodles of weblinks that supposedly prove your searching brilliance and the Patent Office's ineptitude. However, after looking over the "prior art" references cited in this thread, I fail to see any that would actually fully read on Xybernaut's claimed subject matter.

For instance, both the Nomadic Radio and Smart Cow Collar lack a display controller, and from all appearances also lack any computer components enclosed in the collar that can movably extend outside the collar adjacent to the user's face.

Simply mentioning that the Gumstix computer is small enough to fit under a collar doesn't remotely cover the myriad of claimed limitations in Xybernaut's patent.

This Hewlett-Packard paper merely states, "A collar mounted near-field transceiver allows connection to head-mounted peripherals." Again, nothing about a display controller (or any other computer components) movably extending from inside to outside the collar.

The Invisible Computer talks optimistically about a future when, "Computers will be in your collar, so you can whisper when you talk with them and hear without bothering others." The specific operational structure of Xybernaut's claimed invention is not here either.

Levi's Industrial Clothing apparently comes, "Armed with a remote, [so] you can switch between [an MP3] player and [a mobile] phone, while earphones and microphones are concealed in the jacket collar." No mention of display control. No mention of collar component extension.

This 'Enter the Cyborg' article further describes Levi's Industrial Clothing as having, "a microphone hidden in the collar, and retractable earphones [that] extend out from the shoulders for listening to both music and phone calls." So we have computer component extension -- but from the shoulders, not from the collar. And still, mind you, no display controller enclosed in the collar.

This Carnegie Mellon University paper reveals, "The general areas we have found to be the most unobtrusive for wearable objects are: (a) collar area..." Okay, great. But yet again, no display controller and no collar extension.

The closest prior art comes from Accenture's Personal Awareness Assistant. However, the earliest mention of the Personal Awareness Assistant on Accenture's website appears to be January 2002. And Xybernaut's invention was filed on January 2, 2001. Besides that, saying Accenture's mini digital camera constitutes a "display controller" would be a bit of a stretch. Regardless, Accenture also fails to say anything about "input/output connectors" or "peripheral ports" -- as claimed by Xybernaut. So another dead end here.

Now you may well make the argument that Xybernaut's invention is an obvious variant (where "obviousness" is completely subjective and easily disputable) of the above prior art. But that position is dramatically different from declaring Xybernaut's invention not to be novel. For Xybernaut's invention not to be novel, you would have to find a piece of prior art dated before 2001 that contains each and every limitation recited in claims 1, 11, 20, or 22 (a

Your point could very well be the case. Maybe a "blood-sucking-lawyer" could help us out here? :)
There is some reason whey the FSF does not consider this license a Free Software license or GPL compatible, and I am sure it is not just because "it is a license that MS uses". The FSF has a pretty darn good lawyer/Professor of Law & Legal History named Eben Moglen, so I don't think the "it is a license that MS uses so we won't" argument will stick.

...more dangerous isotopes, iodine-131 and iodine-133, which have half-lifes of 8.02 days and 21 hours respectively, making them very active and dangerous substances.

I'm not disagreeing with the statement, but just wanted to point out that iodine-131 saved my wife's life:

http://cpmcnet.columbia.edu/dept/thyroid/RAI.html

Quantitative phase microscopy is a relatively new technique that can generate phase images and phase-amplitude images. In practice, to obtain a quantitative phase image one collects an in-focus image and very slightly positively and negatively defocused images, and uses these data to estimate the differential with respect to the defocus of the image. These images (a through-focal series) can be easily obtained in our system with our z-motion nano-positioner. The resulting data can be solved to yield the phase distribution by Fourier-transform methods. Results are obtained by essentially solving an optical transport equation. Significantly, the phase that is obtained does not have to be unwrapped, as is required for interferometry.

Whippersnappers!

You have an IBM 704? Wow. That's amazing. Are you doing anything special to celebrate the anniversary?

Hell, I'm 25 and I've owned one of these

So say we abolish copyright. What then?

At least songwriters wouldn't have to worry about subconscious plagiarism lawsuits.

The number of creative works, good or bad, would trickle to a crawl. How many people contribute to GPL software because of the assurance provided by the license that their work won't be taken and sold back to them?

On the other hand, how many people contribute to permissively licensed software such as the BSD operating systems and various data compression libraries such as libpng and libvorbis?

We'd be like Hong Kong, where bootleggers make it almost impossible for acts to make any money whatsoever by selling copies of cds for $1.

Well at least some musicians would be able to make a living from the over-21 crowd, who will pay for live performance of a musical work.

Rosen disagrees with FSF on many points -- specifically, whether dynamically linking creates a derivative work. And since FSF's lawyer is a law professor and Rosen is a two-bit hack, you should think twice about listening to Rosen. Incidentally, MySQL's lawyers also disagree with Rosen -- and have gone to court to defend the GPL.

Especially in connection with music, please read this and this before dismissing parent as entirely sarcastic.

"Programs coded with the COMND JSYS had many virtues. They were friendly, helpful, and consistent. All programs written using COMND worked the same way: type "?" to find out what the commands or options are, type ESC to complete the current field (if possible) and receive a prompt for the next field. People could use the "?" and ESC features liberally to learn their way through a new program, and later, could type terse, abbreviated commands for speed. This approach, called "menu on demand," does not favor the novice over the expert (as menu-oriented systems do), nor the expert over the novice (as do the cryptic, terse command sets of APL or UNIX)."

Indian seems to be an exception of this rule. I am not saying that those fine gentlemen mentioned in this article or chaired in various powerful positions in the country are Indian spies or doing something insidious. But, it is just too difficult for them to remain impartial. Read the biography of Professor Bhagwati. He is an advisor at the government level for both US and India. Professor Bhagwait and quite a few popular economist in his camp, e.g. T.N. Srinivasan of Columbia, Arvind Panagariya of Yale, share the same background. The conflict of interest is obvious. National policy in most cases are more important than one or two odd pieces of high tech weapons. This unquestioned practice of relying on foreign social scientists can be a real disaster.

Both Democrats and Republicans are conservative. The term "liberal" has turned into a contentless profanity flung about from one side to the other simply to provide a convenient derogatory label.

The US leans so far to the right that Democrats seem liberal. There is really hardly anything to distinguish either US political party other than paying lip service to some ineffable ideology like "family values."

Most of the calls for social reform come from true liberals such as Eben Moglen and Noam Chomsky, people so far outside the conservative mainstream that they are labelled "radicals," and therefore automatically wrong.

The Democrats and Republicans just have different masters. There is very little real difference.

But I'm still voting Democrat.

This Sybase move now means that I can download and play with a serious database. It's a smart move because it means that I will be gaining skills in programming for that database engine, skills which are seriously marketable.

Eben Moglen co-wrote the GPL and is probono counsel to the Free Software Foundation.

What makes free software free is how its creators choose to share it with the rest of the world. That's a social agreement. The GPL codifies that contract and it's held up admirably all this time.

When people say the GPL hasn't been challenged it's a good thing. It means the GPL was written well.

The earlier HP-120, which ran CP/M, on a Z-80, also had 3.5" diskettes. But as one of the last CP/M machines, it was a dead end.

Apple didn't ship the original Macintosh with 3.5" drives until 1984. The Lisa had 5.25" drives (made by Apple, and crappy), and a hard drive (made by Apple, and crappy). Apple never made disk drives again after the Lisa.

The original Mac had no hard drive and only one floppy, remember. Everybody else was shipping machines with two floppies and a hard drive by 1984. Not until the Mac got a hard drive was it useful, or did it make money for Apple.

Indeed, my school runs its IT infrastructure (email, web, &c.) primarily on Solaris, and is in the process of migrating to Linux for these purposes. Our computer labs, meanwhile, are a good mix of Windows and Mac OS X workstations. The help desk is reassuringly platform-agnostic both online and in person. So I'd say there's one or two schools yet that haven't sold out to Microsoft.
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Sick of pompous windbags? Change "Karma Bonus" modifier (Preferences, Comment Options) to -1 penalty.

...ever bothered to pick up a copy of Infinite Energy magazine?

Let us not forget Irving Langmuir's symptoms of pathological science:

The maximum effect that is observed is produced by a causative agent of barely detectable intensity, and the magnitude of the effect is substantially independent of the intensity of the cause.

The effect is of a magnitude that remains close to the limit of detectability, or many measurements are necessary because of the very low statistical significance of the results.

Theories outside the field's paradigm are suggested.

Criticisms are met by ad hoc excuses thought up on the spur of the moment.

The ratio of supporters to critics rises and then falls gradually to oblivion.

Nicholas Turro has added:

The remarkable result is specific for a "special" system.

Some special technique or equipment is involved.

The result requires a stunning departure from the paradigms that fully determine results in all other comparable systems, including those studied by the authors.

Some of the common traits seen by the Infinite Energy crowd are summed up nicely by Martin Gardner:

He considers himself a genius.

He regards his colleagues, without exception, as ignorant blockheads.

He believes himself unjustly persecuted and discriminated against.

He has strong compulsions to focus his attacks on the greatest scientists and best established theories.

He often has a tendency to write in a complex jargon, in many cases making use of terms and phrases he himself has coined.

You don't see the last one, and you get only a taste of the first one, but I'd say your vitriolic comment is covers the rest rather well here.

I was going to add some other good tell-tale signs, but a little Googling has turned up a nice page.

Please note Bubba that it was over four months between when the DoE decided to look again at cold fusion and when Mallove was murdered. This may constitute "shortly after" in a cosmic sense, but your statment is ignorant and misleading. I assume you either spout it in a deliberate attempt to mislead, or you probably heard it secondhand and didn't bother to verify it (both qualities, by the way, the "infinite" and/or "free" energy crowd have in abundance).

By the way, did you know that Art Carney, the great comedian, died on November 9 2003: THREE DAYS AFTER THE DoE COLD FUSION MEETING!

Coincidence? I think not.

there is NO research stating there are ANY animals that practice ONLY homosexuality.

Well, here's one example for you: gay penguins. They're pair-bonded, monogamous, and even adopted an egg together. And since they wear tuxes, they're better dressed than most waterfowl.

Furthermore, there's actually tons of evidence. See, for example, Biological Exuberance by Bruce Bagemihl. He lists well over a hundred animal species in which homosexual behavior has been observed, in the wild and in captivity. From dogs to wolves to dolphins to whales to butterflies.

i've seen male dogs jump on other male dogs (which, BTW, is actually a display of dominance, NOT sexuality)

Not always. In wolves, the dominant dog is sometimes the one getting mounted, sometimes the one doing the mounting.

Possible Solution 1. Artist create music using cheap digital tools - these are already available.

The incumbents would stoop and have stooped to stopping the artist at the songwriting stage. Incumbents have successfully claimed that one who subconsciously copies a song he had heard 10 years ago owes a million dollars to the songwriter. Bright Tunes v. Harrisongs -- read it and weep.

Artist does a gig - lots of people pay to come

Even when the incumbents own virtually all of the all-ages music venues?

Do same thing with movie industry

Aren't the incumbents trying to get Congress to ban the "cheap digital tools" for this?

You're mistaken. Useless features AND Dodge commercials. A company with a logo like a vagina.

Franklin's crystal revealed the ultimate helical nature of DNA. But the double stranded bit was based on the Chargaff rules.

I heard a bunch of stuff about XTP a while ago, but not much recently.

Here's what Google finds:

http://www2.ics.hawaii.edu/~blanca/nets/xtp.html
http://www.cs.columbia.edu/~hgs/internet/xtp.html

At the Wizards of OS conference this year, Eben Moglen told several long stories aside from the official talks. One of them was about when he had a meeting with MS's strategy group that deals with Free Software. He said that after a long fruitless discussion, he simply asked (paraphrased), "why the heck don't you just GPL Windows? Make it clear that you are serious by getting somebody on the board we trust. Give him a big share package, so that it is clear you can't back out easily. And then play by the rules. Nobody would say anything against you, you would be just a normal citizen. With your money and manpower, you could decide in which direction Free Software moves, and nobody would have a problem with it. People would still buy Windows from you - and on top you could still offer proprietary stuff, while getting rid of all the negative press."
To which the MS guys, with a serious voice and without a moment's hesitation, only replied, "this we will never do"

And what happens when a major sheet music publisher such as Warner-Chappell cracks down on Free music, claiming (successfully, unlike SCO) that some of the Free songwriters lifted their melodies from copyrighted works? If you wrote Free songs, and you were accused of stealing melodies, what would you do to defend yourself in light of the evidence and precedents?

Exactly - and in much of Central and South America, kidnapping for ransom is a large and growing problem. I sometimes travel internationally on business, and there's no way I'd head down there these days. Fortunately for me, I usually head to Scandanavia. I'll let the Swedish Bikini Team take me hostage anytime...

Has the FSF ever won a verdict in court?

No, because they have never needed to. In a move sure to please those who think the US is too litigious, the FSF has chosen to work with infringers so they are no longer infringing upon the FSF's copyright license. I would cite a document stating this, but this comes from Brad Kuhn, executive director of the FSF, who came to a college near where I live and spoke about the history of free software including how the FSF reacts to copyright infringement.

One of the GNU GPL's biggest strengths is that people and organizations of all sizes have been using the GPL for the better part of two decades and only recently has anyone been willing to pursue anything close to a GPL infringement case. Lawyers have studied the license and apparently concluded that it is solid. Eben Moglen has spoken on this at his Harvard talk and his two articles on the topic of enforcing the GPL.

Has the FSF ever won a verdict in court?

No, because they have never needed to. In a move sure to please those who think the US is too litigious, the FSF has chosen to work with infringers so they are no longer infringing upon the FSF's copyright license. I would cite a document stating this, but this comes from Brad Kuhn, executive director of the FSF, who came to a college near where I live and spoke about the history of free software including how the FSF reacts to copyright infringement.

One of the GNU GPL's biggest strengths is that people and organizations of all sizes have been using the GPL for the better part of two decades and only recently has anyone been willing to pursue anything close to a GPL infringement case. Lawyers have studied the license and apparently concluded that it is solid. Eben Moglen has spoken on this at his Harvard talk and his two articles on the topic of enforcing the GPL.

Columbia University has a decent amount of material availible to the public through Columbia Interactive. Unfortunately, it isn't free (unless you happen to be a CU student or faculty member) and it isn't for normal credit courses, but is nevertheless interesting. Last I checked, you need RealPlayer to get the audio/video content, but it should work with most browsers (I use Mozilla, and it's never given me a problem).

Two things about your comment:

1. Document summary (text summarization) is nothing like video summary
2. Text summarization is nothing new. Early papers date back to 1958, (more). MS Word has had it (Tools | Autosummarize) since 1997.

I am not a scientist (yet), I do however read the musings of a real scientist at Note Even Wrong. Scroll down to "There They Go Again..." and enjoy what he has to say about the article.

1. BPL will eventually be regulated out of existence in the USA (by the FCC) and in Canada (by Industry Canada) due to the provable interference with the HF bands. This will not be just due to interference with ham operators - militaries still use the HF band.
2. Manufacturers of BPL equipment, and the companies that developed the technologies therein, will be desperate to recoup costs. They won't want to see zero return on investment, or get stuck with an inventory that now is only suitable to be landfilled. They will turn an eye to selling in foreign markets, focussing on countries with less laws and regulation regarding spectrum management.
3. A power utility company in one of these countries will bite, purchase, and roll out BPL.
4. The ensuing interference will affect the HF band world-wide.
5. There will be much bitter complaining from those suffering the HF interference, but in the end, they will either find a way around it, or they will effectively lose the use of the band.
6. Assuming the HF band becomes unusable world-wide due to foreign run BPL installations, there will be great pressure on the FCC to drop any domestic prohibition on the technology, and allow full roll-out here.

There may only be 12 notes, but the individuality of the artist can make a big difference between two songs with similar melodies/chord progressions/lyrics.

By "individuality of the artist", do you mean of the songwriter or of the performer? If the latter, how would one interpret this in the context of Bright Tunes v. Harrisongs, 420 F. Supp. 177 (S.D.N.Y. 1976).

and some cases illegal (the Gone With The Wind 'remix' where entire passages are retold in slave era black speak, massa).

Do you refer to The Wind Done Gone? A higher court lifted the injunction on that work.

Take a single sentence from it, and use it in a completely different context and you are fine.

The late George Harrison took a sentence from a popular song and lost a lawsuit.

Then again, this is being asked on Slaskdot where people don't understand the outrage at a piece of software that emulates an iPod exactly and is named pPod.

That's different. When cloning a program, it's easy to shut out access to the expression by simply refraining from reading the first program's source code or object code. What you copy when you don't read the source code of a program is the uncopyrightable idea of its operation. This is how all those Tetris clones turned out to be legal in the end.

With music, on the other hand, almost anybody inundated with Western culture can reduce a recording to its source code effortlessly, as part of the process of "humming" it. Despite the conclusions of this article, current copyright case law recognizes little "idea" in music but only "expression." There's no way to avoid access to copyrighted works because places of commerce almost universally play copyrighted music in the background over the PA speaker.

Again, if you are not an idiot, its clearly drawn in front of you any you didn't have to rip off someone else fully to make your 'art'.

That's what George Harrison thought. Or are you calling a late Beatle an "idiot"? And what steps can I take to become no longer an "idiot" myself?

If motives of five to eight notes are regarded as "words", then why do judges let composers enforce copyrights on individual "words"? And how can anyone know whether a particular "word" is already taken?

Oh, and sausage :-)

I liked this section best, particularly his argument that Amazon is not as vulnerable to competition (say from Walmart) as previously thought due to the way they have managed to incorporate a kind of network effect into their system via all their user contributions to the site. The lesson is to get users to provide value for each other, even if the site's ultimate goal is selling widgets.

And this argument:

It appears that open source is the "natural language" of a networked community. Given enough developers and a network to connect them, open-source-style development behavior emerges.

seems to refer almost directly to Moglen's Metaphorical Corollary to Faraday's Law:

Michael Faraday first noticed what happened when he wrapped a coil of wire around a magnet and spun the magnet...So Moglen's Metaphorical Corollary to Faraday's Law says that if you wrap the Internet around every person on the planet and spin the planet, software flows in the network.

But I dunno, maybe these arguments only make sense to the minority of internet users who actually contribute content (if only to sites like Slashdot).

Note: I'm not singling you out for this, there are a bunch of such statements in the threads below, you were just the first.

You aren't serious are you? I simply cannot believe that you got modded up as 'insightful'. Where would you be without the vikings or Columbus? (I'm assuming that you live in the U.S., if not, please insert appropriate exploratory hero). Exploration is central to what it means to be human. Not exploring is not an option. The only question that remains is 'How?'

One of the things that you cannot avoid when exploring is changing an environment, not to mention that no environment on Earth (or anywhere else, for that matter) is static, it's going to change anyway. From quantum mechanics to sociology, the mere presence of an observer changes the environment to be studied.

It is the job of scientists who are exploring previously shut off or shut in environments to do what they can to minimize the change caused by their presence. That's what guidlines and ethics committees are for. Do you for one instant think that any plan for exploration of this previously unknown ecology is not going to pass through the hands of some ethical authority?

You, sir, have no idea of how science really works. For a wonderful example of how science is really done around fragile and unexplored ecosystems, feel free to educate yourself by googling for Lake Vostock. Scientists have put off their attempts to explore the lake for years because of fear of overt contamination (specifically the micro-organisms that live in the gasoline used to lubricate the drill-bits, amongst a host of others). Here is another good article that explains just how acutely aware of the ethical decisions scientists are.

Reactionary attitudes like yours serve absolutely no one and simply prove that you haven't bothered to learn how real scientists go about their work before posting smarmy comments.

"BASIC (standing for Beginner's All Purpose Symbolic Instruction Code) was written (invented) in 1963, at Dartmouth College, by mathematicians John George Kemeny and Tom Kurtzas[sic] as a teaching tool for undergraduates. BASIC has been one of the most commonly used computer programming languages, a simple computer language considered an easy step for students to learn before more powerful languages such as FORTRAN" (Kurtz is the correct spelling)

http://inventors.about.com/library/inventors/blbas ic.htm

So the first version of BASIC that was ever written was Dartmouth BASIC and it ran on a GE-265 mainframe (created by General Electric). A bit of trivia: The first BASIC program ran on May 1, 1964 at 4:00 am.

http://www.columbia.edu/~jrh29/kemeny.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BASIC_programming_lan guage#History (has a big list of dialects)

Bill Gates, Paul Allen, and Monte Davidoff wrote a version of the BASIC programming language for the Altair in 1975, which, incidentally, was Microsoft's first product--he went on to produce BASIC interpreters for many different processors.

Apple and Microsoft: The first BASIC for Apple, called Integer BASIC was written by Steve Wozniak. Microsoft offered to sell them their BASIC but Steve Jobs told them they already had one, and if needed, they "could write a better one in a weekend". Apple later needed a floating-point version of BASIC, and since Wozniak was too busy with other projects, they bought Microsoft's floating-point BASIC--it was called Applesoft. As is the standard with Microsoft products, there were initially some bugs, instability, and memory hogging that had to be worked out. Some speculate that if Apple hadn't bought Microsoft's version, Microsoft would have gone under--Apple was able to buy it for a flat fee of $10,500 (and no royalties).

http://apple2history.org/history/ah16.html#Appleso ftI