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• http://www.n1bug.net/tech/laser/alc_wa6ejo.html
• http://www.messaggeri.it/xoptoelettronica.htm
• http://www.hut.fi/Misc/Electronics/circuits/laserl ink.html
• http://www.repairfaq.org/sam/laserdps.htm
• http://www.qsl.net/wb9ajz/laser/data/cheepo.txt
• http://www.clansullivan.com/joseph/projects/laser. htm

Based on this photograph .
I would have thought -all- members of the finnish army were internet addicts.

I implemented a random terrain generator and a random house generator (3D), and made it a MOG. Plus some other sweet stuff like a cool AI system and lots of wild speculation. ;)

http://www.hut.fi/~vhelin/dippa.ps

Nethack, of course. :) You could also include the graphical Falcon's Eye front end on the list.

Jouni

But why, oh why they couldn't use the same modulation in both terrestial and cable networks? (Yes, it is technically possible to broadcast DVB-T over cable -- it is frequenly done in the cable network of the campus area of HUT. ) Now, if you move to a new apartment and it has cable connection instead of roof antenna or vice versa, you'll need a new receiver; even the TVs with built-in DVB receivers still does not seem to have dual receivers, save then the set-top-boxes.

Practically we now have two different television standards in one county, which rather sucks!

IE 5.x doesn't do doctype switching: it is always in "quirks mode". IE 6 will switch to standards-compliance mode with the proper doctype, as long as the doctype is the absolute first thing in the (X)HTML document (i.e. no comments or xml prolog), and the doctype is well-formed. Some more info on doctype switching can be found here.

Either their site has been slashdotted, or their webserver is running on a C=64.

• shell: bash
• editor: vim
• email: mutt
• audio playback: cplay front-end
• mixer: aumix
• irc & im: irssi
  • im/irc gateway: bitlbee
• web browser: w3m
• p2p:
• • client:giFTcurs
  • daemon:giFT
• news aggregator: raggle

cplay

Simple, clean, no frills. Why eyecandy when you can only listen to music?

I am so glad that they stuck with it. Out of all the Ultima remakes this is the one I have been most exctied about. Few realize how daunting remaking a game as epic as an Ultima can be, and even fewer have the intestines to pull it off (IIRC no one really has, I might be wrong, though Exult doesn't count...)

Many a promising remake has been called off and others languish.

I guess the bottom line is...remake or not, these days making a good computer game is tough business indeed.

Ledcontrol is your friend! I use it to indicate when I have new mail but you could easily use it to turn the LED off altogether.

Hmm...I have set up my caplocks key to blink in response to network activity, faster when there is more, slower when there is less. I've got the Scroll Lock for cpu, and I haven't thought of a use for Num yet. This great hack can be done with a program called ledcontrol.

Anybody else think the antenna looked similar to the spooky wavy antenna that shows up in the Star Trek TOS episode: Shore Leave just before somebody's "wish" is about to be fulfilled?

Maybe it's just me....sorry. I'd post a screenshot if I had my StarTrek TOS CDs with my right now. Maybe I'll post it in reply to this message later if anybody's interested. Sorry if it's just me.

If you mean _that_ Rogue, it sparked a whole genre.

If you mean _that_ Rogue, it sparked a whole genre.

All contributions are checked and rewritten by company developers thus not diluting the copright ownership of the product.

Absolutely fascinating idea.

I've worked in neuropsychology and neurology, and there's this phenomenon that often occurs where you meet a patient, and know they're dysmorphic in an identifiable way, but can't quite place what's different about them. These individuals often go through years, if not decades, of unsuccessful genetic testing to try to match them with a syndrome.

Perhaps your suggestion could help in such cases. More generally, it might improve research, by allowing for quantification of features more accurately. Then you could say with some precision that feature X tends to be associated with gene Y. This might actually lead to a revolution in the way that neurogenetic syndromes are conceived of and neurodevelopmental trajectories are modeled.

Having said that, I'm not sure that an eigen decomposition approach is the most effective. As I understand it, this method is based on a decomposition of a covariance matrix, and is therefore essentially limited to breaking down features into linear components. It only models through the second moment of a distribution (means and variances).

My guess is that more accurate results could be obtained by using something that models statistical dependencies in general, rather than just covariances. This could be done by using independent components analysis, for example, rather than principle components analysis.

burrocrats

Rulers of the underground tunnels? ;)

The Commodore 64 with 64k of ram. It didn't have 65536 bytes of ram but 65025 bytes of ram. ALMOST 64ki.

Wha? The C64 had a full 65536 address space #0000 to #FFFF. Of course some of it was ROM and some of it was RAM and some of it was system RAM and some of it was user RAM (and some of it was reserved for cartridge ROM).

Personally I am not going to start using mebibytes for things that have been traditionally measured in megabytes. I'm just used to the fact that hard drives are actually smaller than advertised. As for transmission rates on networks... I don't know. I don't care how the device itself is rated, but we should be measuring transfer rates by how much memory the data would fill (i.e. amounts measured in base 2).

Powers of ten work great for people who are doing math on their fingers, but powers of two work much better for computers.

You can't replace all linear nets with a single neuron. A single neuron cannot perform XOR.

And linear neural network can't perform XOR. (Feel free to provide proof that it could.) http://www.cis.hut.fi/Opinnot/T-61.261/luennot2003 /lect8.pdf states on page 31 that XOR problem is not linearly separable in the original input space, so you have to make a conversion into nonlinear space. (They use Gaussian in the example.

Here notation [a b] stands for vector which has elements a and b and . stands for inner product.

If there are two linear neurons (N1,N2) connected to a linear neuron (N3), so that their weights are w1, w2, w3 (=[w3_1 w3_2]), biases b1, b2 and b3 and inputs x1, x2, their output at N3 is
w3.[y1 y2] + b3 = w3.[w1x1+b1 w2x2+b2] + b3 =
w3_1*w1x1+w3_1*b1 + w3_2*w2x2+w3_2*b2 + b3 =
[w3_1*w1 w3_2*w2] . [x1 x2] + b3+[w3_1 w3_2].[b1 b2] = w4 . [x1 x2] + b4

Which proves that you can replace neurons in feedforward linear networks with fewer neurons until you reach at one neuron / output. Having more inputs doesn't affect this.

On the subject of software debugging techniques, I'd like to point out visual testing, which (basically) allows you to try out method calls and fiddle with variables and examine the results (including execution history) graphically. MVT is a prototype visual testing tool for Java.

On the subject of software debugging techniques, I'd like to point out visual testing, which (basically) allows you to try out method calls and fiddle with variables and examine the results (including execution history) graphically. MVT is a prototype visual testing tool for Java.

When one has made a decision to kill a person, even if it will be very difficult to succeed by advancing straight ahead, it will not do to think about going at it in a long roundabout way. One's heart may slacken, he may miss his chance, and by and large there will be no success. The Way of the Samurai is one of immediacy, and it is best to dash in headlong.

I.e., although three years creating a system on which to do X - when X is the (original, mind) goal - probably can be argued to be somewhat 'wasteful of dev. time', the act of creating Mono must have given the community a lot of new, deeper insights. They surely became better developers during (because of) the effort.

It did nothing for X during that time, but the goals might have shifted away from X even - because of insights gained during the creation of Mono. With new understanding, X might not look so good any longer, Y is what should be done instead. Now, Y requires the Duo stack so ... ;)

As frightening as this "vulnerability" sounds, this is nothing really new; other TCP weaknesses are syn floods (not quite the same thing, but somewhat similar -- in fact, this vulnerability might as well be called a "RST flood"), connection hijacking (by sniffing packets and sending spoofed packets with the correct sequence numbers), and so on. It's also an implementation issue that is largely caused by implementations having loose checking of TCP sequence and ack numbers, or accepting too large of a window of sequence numbers.

I wouldn't say TCP is broken or that some other solution would be much better; it would be tough to design a transport protocol that is still simple (and doesnt use CPU burning hashing/encryption techniques) that wouldn't have these sorts of vulnerabilities (especially since it's so easy to spoof IP packets); calling this vulnerability severe is like screaming that highways are fundamentally unsafe because someone could point their car the wrong way and start smashing into oncoming traffic.

-fren

I don't have any problem using yum (or see this for some helpful info) these days. It uses apt-get to resolve rpm dependencies fine on both my YellowDogLinux machine as well as my Redhat9 machine. The trick is having the right repository (freshrpms works great for me).

The mathematical literature is full of errors, oversights, invalid proofs, unstated assumptions, and probably even a certain share of deliberate fraud. See Lounesto's misconceptions of research mathematicians for one expert digging into the mathematical literature.

Computers are far better at ferretting out oversights, missing assumptions, and making sure that every t is crossed and i is dotted. If a software system for doing proofs has shown itself to be fairly reliable on a bunch of samples, I'd trust it a lot more than I'd trust any working mathematician to carry out a complex proof correctly.

ADOM was a great game. I really should go back and play it again. Did he ever release the source like he said he was going to?

For those who don't know ADOM is a roguelike game which is entirely rendered in ascii text in a terminal window.

What always drew me to roguelikes was the fact that, without flashy graphics, they had to depend entirely on their playability and depth of content in order to gain popularity. In other words, if your character is just an at-sign and your BFG is just the text "(right hand) BFG" in inventory, then something other than the picture of a hulking muscular guy holding a large phalic symbol spewing forth glowing bolts of death has to be there to keep you playing... In the case of ADOM it was an intricate quest system that spanned an entire countryside, and involved several dungeons, towns and special areas. The magic system was awesome and the HUGE list of playable races and classes was just great.

I also recommend Nethack, Angband, Omega and even the relatively light Larn.

The fact that you bring up Doom 2 really makes the poster's point for them. Frankly the closest thing to Diablo was Gauntlet, and the two are distinctly different games. I think that Diablo qualifies as revolutionary and not just evolutionary, not least because anyone can play it.

You are just ignorant. Diablo is a commercial roguelike. Those games are called roguelike, because they all resemble the clasic game "rogue". In those games you control a character that ihas stats just like in a RPG, but the focus is on exploring a dungeon, and killing endless waves of monsters.

The most famous roguelikes today include:

-Nethack
-ADOM
-Angband
-Diablo (of course!)

Of those four, the best is clearly Angband, because it is based on the Tolkien Universe (you get to kill Morgoth, the master of Sauron), but mainly because it is the roguelike in which you kill more monsters :)

Yeah, Diablo it is jusr a dumbed down roguelike, with actual graphics instead of ascii. Since Roguelikes are great games, Diablo was a success.

Upcoming talk and demonstration on the development of Brain-Computer Interfaces: http://www.notacon.org/speakers.html#lowne (shameless plug)

Invasive, motor-cortical BCI development at Utah: http://www.bioen.utah.edu/cni/Projects/Motor.htm

Mike Gibbs' work with BCIs at Oxford University's Robotics Group: http://www.robots.ox.ac.uk/~mgibbs/research.html

The Neural Prostheses program at the National Institutes of Health includes calls for proposals in BCI development: http://www.ninds.nih.gov/npp/

The University of British Columbia's BCI research group: http://www.ece.ubc.ca/~garyb/BCI.htm

Results of the 2003 Brain Computer interface competition (focuses on signal processing techniques): http://ida.first.fraunhofer.de/projects/bci/compet ition/results/index.html

BCI development at the Cognitive Science and Technology group at the Helsinki University of Technology: http://www.lce.hut.fi/research/bci/

Dr. Jessica Bayliss's BCI work and extensive bibliography (very important, seminal work on BCI development): http://www.cs.rit.edu/~jdb/research/ and http://www.cs.rit.edu/~jdb/research/baylissThesis. pdf

Dr. Charles Anderson's work at Colorado State University with EEG pattern classification in BCI systems: http://www.cs.colostate.edu/eeg/index.html

Manchester University's Toby Howard has written some good articles on BCIs, mostly for Popular Science: http://www.cs.man.ac.uk/aig/staff/toby/research/bc i/

Dr. Michael Black at Brown University teaches a course in BCI development: http://www.cs.brown.edu/courses/cs295-7/home.html

Cyberkinetics, Inc. makes medical-use BCIs: http://www.cyberkineticsinc.com/

Mainstream science, however, is all about proof, and if you don't have it, you get reamed. If you rely on unstated assumptions that turn out to be false, you get reamed. If you make errors, you get reamed when someone double-checks your work

You are wonderfully naive about how real, main-stream science works.

At the fringes, yes

No, not just at the fringes--core, mainstream science is driven by personality, ego, unproven assertions, fashion, popularity, and other irrational considerations. The way in which a proof is presented is more important than whether it is actually correct. Scientists are no more critical thinkers than any other profession.

Seriously. Show me an unfounded belief, error, or unstated assumption that has stuck around in physics, chemistry, biology, or any other scientific field for a signifigant period of time. Something that is clearly and demonstrably false, yet which the mainstream community refuses to correct. Good luck.

Have a look here. Lounesto looked at Clifford algebras because that's what he was an expert on, but his experience is pretty representative.

Well, many finnish ISPs offer bundle deals on AV and firewall software with their connections, and atleast the campus network of Helsinki University of Technics cuts infected machines. And IMO cutting spam drones is the right thing to do, but determinating what is infected and what ain't can be little tricky at times.

As part of my Ghosts of Slashdot project, I grabbed a copy of this article before it went "live". There was a Slashdot outage at about that time, so I don't know if CmdrTaco & co. decided to change the text, or if it was lost and had to be re-created.

Same submitter, same "dept."... just the title and story text has changed.

Play Those Classic Video Games Virtually Anywhere
Posted by CmdrTaco in The Mysterious Future!
from the emulating-the-classics dept.
Iphtashu Fitz writes "If you're like me your introduction to video games decades ago was something like the Atari 2600, and you also pumped untold hundreds of quarters into arcade games like Space Invaders, Defender, and Asteroids. Well according to a Wired News article you can now play these and many more of those classic games in their original format on your PC, Mac, Playstation, XBox, or Gamecube. X-Arcade has an emulator & arcade-style interface that they claim will let you play over 4000 of the classic games on any of these modern gaming systems. Or if you'd prefer to play the actual arcade games from the 1980's then it might be time for you to take a trip to New York where the American Museum of the Moving Image is holding an exhibition where you can play these classics. Game emulators can be found linked from the museums website as well as through Retrogames." Much easier than building your own Cabinet.

I'd use Wireless USB in preference to Bluetooth if they can get the crypto and security right. The key exchange is messed up, the encryption they used has real problems, and they elected not to include the most important component - strong authentication - meaning that it's possible (for example) for someone to inject false keystrokes if you use a Bluetooth keyboard. (about Bluetooth security Schneier talks about the keyboard injection attack)

What I want to hear is that David Wagner, Ross Anderson and Don Coppersmith have been called in to design the security for this new protocol. Then we might see something half decent.

Code after the standards not browsers, try to make the code as semantic as and always use a proper doctype, i usually recommend a sctrict-dtd.

but when choosing a doctype, you choose you should choose one that triggers the standard compliance rendering mode in the diffrent browsers. see here for a list http://www.hut.fi/~hsivonen/doctype.html

Quirksmode.org is a nice place to check out which javascript and css properties that is supported in the diffrent browsers. this css overview has been very helpfull http://www.quirksmode.org/css/contents.html

20 minutes to mars and back? Light speed won't cut it when we talk about going anywhere farther than the moon.

Its more than just the long delay. Interplanetary networking is quite tricky due to the limited bandwidth, line-of-sight interruptions, the need to slew expensive high-gain antennas into precise scheduled pointing directions, as well as the massive levels of latency.

If you want to learn about implementing operating systems, you could follow Operating Systems Project course just started at my university. All the materials, exercises and documentation (ignore the bits about ordering handouts, needed manuals are provided in PostScript and PDF) are in English and available to anyone but you'll miss the lecturing course that takes place at the moment and which is intended to be taken at the same time (they use Tanenbaum's Modern Operating Systems, 2nd ed.) and you won't get any feedback for the work you do of course. You use BUENOS (Buenos is a University Educational Nutshell Operating System). It's a small skeleton OS, developed for this course. You have a framework and development environment but during the course you'll implement the guts of the OS. Looks very interesting stuff. Unfortunately due to time constraints I couldn't take the OS project course this spring, just doing the lecturing part.

If you want something runnable on your PC, then this probably isn't what you want, though, but for learing about operating systems, it might be useful.

If you want to learn about implementing operating systems, you could follow Operating Systems Project course just started at my university. All the materials, exercises and documentation (ignore the bits about ordering handouts, needed manuals are provided in PostScript and PDF) are in English and available to anyone but you'll miss the lecturing course that takes place at the moment and which is intended to be taken at the same time (they use Tanenbaum's Modern Operating Systems, 2nd ed.) and you won't get any feedback for the work you do of course. You use BUENOS (Buenos is a University Educational Nutshell Operating System). It's a small skeleton OS, developed for this course. You have a framework and development environment but during the course you'll implement the guts of the OS. Looks very interesting stuff. Unfortunately due to time constraints I couldn't take the OS project course this spring, just doing the lecturing part.

If you want something runnable on your PC, then this probably isn't what you want, though, but for learing about operating systems, it might be useful.

If you want to learn about implementing operating systems, you could follow Operating Systems Project course just started at my university. All the materials, exercises and documentation (ignore the bits about ordering handouts, needed manuals are provided in PostScript and PDF) are in English and available to anyone but you'll miss the lecturing course that takes place at the moment and which is intended to be taken at the same time (they use Tanenbaum's Modern Operating Systems, 2nd ed.) and you won't get any feedback for the work you do of course. You use BUENOS (Buenos is a University Educational Nutshell Operating System). It's a small skeleton OS, developed for this course. You have a framework and development environment but during the course you'll implement the guts of the OS. Looks very interesting stuff. Unfortunately due to time constraints I couldn't take the OS project course this spring, just doing the lecturing part.

If you want something runnable on your PC, then this probably isn't what you want, though, but for learing about operating systems, it might be useful.

If you want to learn about implementing operating systems, you could follow Operating Systems Project course just started at my university. All the materials, exercises and documentation (ignore the bits about ordering handouts, needed manuals are provided in PostScript and PDF) are in English and available to anyone but you'll miss the lecturing course that takes place at the moment and which is intended to be taken at the same time (they use Tanenbaum's Modern Operating Systems, 2nd ed.) and you won't get any feedback for the work you do of course. You use BUENOS (Buenos is a University Educational Nutshell Operating System). It's a small skeleton OS, developed for this course. You have a framework and development environment but during the course you'll implement the guts of the OS. Looks very interesting stuff. Unfortunately due to time constraints I couldn't take the OS project course this spring, just doing the lecturing part.

If you want something runnable on your PC, then this probably isn't what you want, though, but for learing about operating systems, it might be useful.

Britannia, for example, would work as a game name

According to this page:

ELECTRONIC ARTS, ORIGIN, UltimaTM and Britannia are trademarks or registered trademarks of Electronic Arts Inc. in the U.S. and/or other countries. ORIGINTM is an Electronic ArtsTM brand. Lord British is a trademark or registered trademark of Richard Garriott in the U.S. and/or other countries.

It sounds like EA's got their bases covered on the trademarks. Fortunately, since the project is pretty low-key, it would be really easy to just change the name(s) if it ever came up. I am glad that it got Richard Gariott's blessing, and I hope that it is able to keep all of the original Ultima names. I do think that the names, places, titles, etc add alot to an Ultima game (famaliarity, authenticity, etc) and it would be a shame to see EA put a halt to this.

Yeah, building regulated power supplies with the 78xx (and 79xx chips for the negative rail) is pretty stock. If you are hoping to run your computer off one.. well... I wouldn't bother. By the time you stack enough of these to give you the required amperage, you may as well buy a good quality switching power supply. (A 7805 gives you 5V/1A. Ie 5 watts... which is about one buggerallth of what a modern computer draws). Still, if you are interested, grab a couple of big polarized electrolitic capacitors, stick one either side of the 78xx, tie the middle pin to ground, the inputs and outputs as marked.. and there you go. Not difficult. Here is one of the many sites that talk about this chip Note that the voltage may be ajusted by using resistors on the input and middle pins.

PNG hasn't caught on because Internet Explorer has yet to properly support it.

PNG is as functional as non-animated GIF in Internet Explorer 5+, the problems are with a non-binary alpha value (totally opaque works, totally transparent works, nothing else does).

The gamma support is the only area where it fails against the GIF format for static images. Gamma correction is built into the PNG format, whereas GIF took the approach of "don't worry about it". Differing gamma correction means that you often get mismatched colours between PNGs and neighbouring coloured areas. In practice, you can solve this for everything but older versions of Safari and Opera by configuring your graphics editor to remove all gamma information.

For more information, read The Sad Story of PNG Gamma "Correction".

I haven't checked the tally yet, but last time I checked, Israel had a confortable lead in kills. They'll probably make the playoffs.

"How come we play war and not peace?"

Substitute nation X and nation Y for USA and USSR.

Here is a simple demo picture I made of the effect. Does everyone see blue as closer than the red?

for the full list of doctypes and how browsers interpretes them go to http://www.hut.fi/u/hsivonen/doctype.html

NetHack can be graphical. Never heard of Falcon's Eye? It's graphical, mouse driven and a pretty good interface for NetHack.

Even Zangband has graphical clients... Tile based, but a far cry from pure ASCII symbols.

We also have this image of what it's like to have a family, and it's basically what you see in 60s sitcoms. Owning a house with a yard and a white picket fence in a nice neighborhood, it's really important to us, and a lot of people are willing to make big sacrifices to get it. I don't know if that's quite as big a deal to you guys down under.

I'm more worried about Joe Schmoe, who with a home-made or Chinese-manufactured scanner would be able to calculate your net worth at the very moment he passes you on the street. This is a hypothetical guy who would be able to magically divine that you were carrying a 40gb iPod, a top-of-the-line Thinkpad, a cameraphone, PDA, Coach wallet, Cartier watch, and mark you as the fattest target on the block even though you have none of these things in plain view.

Mobile-phone scanners have existed for the purposes of hijacking and cloning mobile phone numbers, so I can't see it taking very long for an intrepid, technically proficient miscreant to take advantage of this great new technology which identifies individual items.

Anyone who's spent a couple of years in NYC knows that you don't count your money out in the open or wave expensive things around in the air. Imagine if they put RFID tags in our paper currency. You'd be able to tell how much money someone was carrying, without their knowing it. Just the same, someone else would be able to peer into your wallet, and even know what brand your wallet is. Same said person would be able to walk down the block inconspicuously scanning the trunks of cars in the hopes of coming across a stash of goodies, and any packages left on doorsteps, any mailboxes he passes along the way. How scary is that?

Am I missing something? Is the idea that just about *every* consumer-goods-item will have an RFID tag?

The package inlcudes source code to produce Sammon Maps in Postscript format. These can be very useful tools for finding clusters in data. What they revealed about UK higher education institutes was eye opening.

Matt...
--
A man hears what he wants to hear and disregards the rest.

Every single app that I would want to run is already available and runs under Linux natively. For example:

mozilla, neverwinter nights(w/ expansion pack), gcc, gdb, make, gnuplot, bc, gimp, icebreaker, valgrind, electric fence, Crossfire, LyX, angband, Nethack (falcon's eye), vim, XFree86, pekwm and netpbm.

There are few apps that I run that are not on that list. Really, if you think about it. On any computer system the top 90% of the apps you run could probably be counted on one hand.

But I'm one of those unusual people who has his laser printer working in Linux and only has a windows box to test the software I write. I compile the windows version on Linux of course. (using these scripts to build the cross compiler).

Aviation, maybe not, but he was definitely thinking of space:

http://www.tml.hut.fi/Studies/Tik-110.350/1998/Ess ays/leos.html

"Teledesic Craig McCaw, founder of McCaw Communications and Bill Gates of Microsoft, have teamed up to launch a broadband Mobile Satellite System (MSS) called Teledesic in 2002. The system will deploy LEO 288 satellites in low earth orbit and offer a range of multimedia services to briefcase-sized terminals.[3] "