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One individual posted a friendly notice on the lkml thread: "...Linus snapshots are available on a 3-hourly basis..." I hadn't fully realized the kind of worship this man gets...

A futex is a mutual-exclusion primitive that's based around file and file operations rather than some heavier mechanism. The idea is that the kernel doesn't keep track of all the folks locking the file and so on, with all the extra separate bookkeeping to handle when processes exit and so on. Futexes live mostly in user-space, making them very fast.

I don't pretend to know a fraction of the details--only that I've heard of them before and what their benefits are, roughly. Read more here.

Here's an mit lecture on the subject, converted from pdf by the mighty google.

Hey...here's "Modern Analog Field Computing", a virtual book. That might be too specialized.

And here's a good usenet post on this, posted by David F. Skoll of doe.carleton.ca back in '92:

In <1992Jan21.204757.17081@jsp.umontreal.ca> u1795@JSP.UMontreal.CA
(Zimmer Eric) writes:

> I'm curious...
>
> I'm trying to figure out how an analogic computer
> might work. Nothing technical, just the "basics".
>
> -How do they treat informations?

An analog computer treats information as voltage or current levels
(usually - I suppose it could use water or air levels, too. :-)) It
uses op-amps to perform arithmetic operations. (That's how the
"operational amplifier" got its name.) With op-amps, you can easily
do addition, subtraction, integration and differentiation, as well as
multiplication by a constant. You can also do more exotic things like
taking the log of a signal or the exponential by using diodes in the
feedback loops. Still more exotic circuits can multiply two signals.

> -What are they good for?

They have a couple of advantages over digital computers:

o They have the potential to be quite a bit faster, since analog signals
are involved. More efficient use is made of bandwidth.

o If the inputs and outputs are in analog form anyway, they eliminate
the need to do A/D and D/A conversion.

They suffer from many disadvantages:

o They're not as flexible. They're very hard to "program" - to
change the gain of an amplifier, for example, you need to change
a resistor value.

o They're not as accurate as digital computers can potentially be.
In a digital world, if you need more precision, you just use more
bits in your data representation. Analog computers are limited by
the precision of the electrical components, which can get very
expensive.

o They suffer from noise problems, device mismatches, etc. more than
digital computers.

o Memory is a problem - it's very difficult to maintain an accurate
analog signal in a storage cell.

> -Could they be the solution to some problems that
> seem uncomputable on a digital computer?

I don't know - my theory here is too weak. I know that A. K. Dewdney
wrote an interesting article about mechanical "gadgets" that can solve
certain problems much faster than digital computers. Anyone?

I saw one amazing computer in a Time-Life book about water.
Scientists constructed a model of a water table by representing each
square mile of table with four resistors and a capacitor. The values
were selected to match the porosity of the underlying rock. Water was
"pumped" from the model by applying a voltage step at the pump site,
and "water levels" could be monitored throughout the model with an
oscilloscope. The computer used thousands of components, but could
probably still outrun a Cray - it took only a few milliseconds to do
the entire computation! It calculated the "water level" at each node
in parallel - how's that for massive parallelism? I'd imagine that a
digital computer would be hard-pressed to match that over such a large
simulation. (Imagine passing a 10 000 node circuit to Spice...)

Oh...you were joking. Never mind.

If you're not against having to live in the Midwest, I've known a number of people (grad and undergrad), who went to Indiana to study this, and they all seemed happy.

You have to scroll down to see the movies. Or just use this link: http://www.astro.indiana.edu/~durisen/saturn/sat.m pg.

Unjust laws exist: shall we be content to obey them, or shall we endeavor to amend them, and obey them until we have succeeded, or shall we transgress them at once?

I know this well, that if one thousand, if one hundred, if ten men whom I could name--if ten honest men only--ay, if one HONEST man, in this State of Massachusetts, ceasing to hold slaves, were actually to withdraw from this co-partnership, and be locked up in the county jail therefor, it would be the abolition of slavery in America. For it matters not how small the beginning may seem to be: what is once well done is done forever.

• It's up to the copyright holder to decide if they want to use this oh-so-l33t new promotion method.

You're assuming that the current copyright laws are fair and just. Bribery and rigged electoral and legislative processes are largely not recognized as ligitimate government. So, although every other judge in America(tm) may agree with you, that doesn't invalidate the right of the people to rebel against laws that were not passed in their best interest.

Although we've have numerous laws put on the books extending the power of copyright, the burden of these injunctions on society may well by too costly to bear. If the people don't have a valid means of changing the law within the system, they have the inalienable right to choose a new law (or government if necessary)

Indeed, many people think copyright law has gone way too far in the US. The fight has moved into the courts. Whether you believe the law should follow the Framers' intent or the good of today's society, copyright law as it stands now is working far beyond the pale.

My experience is that most people who say they are good at anything actually suck. Particularly when it comes to computers.

Or, as Alexander Viro put it, Now, _I_ won't use the stuff I don't have a source for unless I have exceptionally good reason to believe that authors of that stuff are among the few percents of programmers who *can* find their arse without outside help. But that has nothing to do with licensing or any moral considerations and everything to the fact that I know what kind of crap most of the software is.

Indeed. And network administrators are no better in my experience than anyone else. A network administrator without the math skills necessary to understand in his gut why chatty protocols on a flat network will lead to packet-storms particularly doesn't inspire confidence.

2) From a message on LKML:

PS: flames about why we are supporting the XBox (a design of the Evil Empire) will be summarily ignored. I can only point you to it's HDTV, NTSC, PAL, and possibly VGA outputs, it's dvd/cd drive, and it's $199 USD price tag.

Not to mention M$ takes a loss for every hardware unit sold.

Uh-oh. Precedents aren't "owned" by the winner. So in our country, that means that anyone else can use it. Microsoft could use their lawyers pull a similar stunt against kernel.org, on the grounds of the historic writable NTFS issue.

Or, we could see this used as a means for attack for patent infrigement. The ISPs will be running scared, afraid of being sued, and will start getting block-happy about things.

Loho will send out threatening letters, resulting in Davezilla being blocked.
Forgent Networks could do some serious blacklisting of any site that hosted jpeg-editing software

The possibilities are endless for such a vague precedent. This could be quite the witchhunt-inspiring precedent.

Well yes, the executive always has controlled the armed forces, and even much of foreign affairs. However, the legislature could always just pass a law forbidding military action against X nation, and that'd be binding on the executive.

No it isn't. The president can invoke the War Powers Act of 1973. It allows for 60 days of war-like activity without the intervention of Congress. The president is required to consult with Congress first but that usually never happens. The issue of a president causing a war is only a problem when there is enough backlash to stop him/her from doing so. I'm not trolling but there won't be much backlash against a war ever since the Vietnam War caused so much division in the country. Anti-war advocates are generally written off as anti-American by the public and their cries for a halt to aggressiveness is largely ignored.

Blame the 60's and early 70's for america's war-like culture. Well, you can also blame other countries/organizations for trying to kill Americans just because they're Americans but people don't like to talk about that.

Nuts, you beat me to it.

Here's the 'press release' anyways. They sure as hell didn't have that when _I_ was in college. I don't imagine I had $5 bucks then either, so I suppose it doesn't matter.

Apparently, Visual Studio .Net is 6 CDs, because it's $5 per CD.

More information.

In the spirit of Civil Disobediance, he should go willingly if arrested -- he knows he is commiting a crime. Once arrested, he can try to get the DMCA overturned and we can support him financially.

Australia

ftp://ftp.planetmirror.com/pub/Mandrake/8.2/i586/ (Brisbane)
Austria

ftp://ftp.univie.ac.at/systems/linux/Mandrake/8.2/ i586/ (Vienna)

ftp://gd.tuwien.ac.at/pub/linux/Mandrake/8.2/i586/ (Vienna)
Belgium

ftp://ftp.belnet.be/packages/mandrake/8.2/i586/
Costa Rica

ftp://ftp.ucr.ac.cr/pub/Unix/linux/mandrake/Mandra ke/8.2/i586/
Czech Republic

ftp://ftp.cesnet.cz/OS/Linux/Mandrake/mandrake/8.2 /i586/ (Brno)

ftp://ftp.fi.muni.cz/pub/linux/mandrake/8.2/i586/ (Brno)

ftp://klobouk.fsv.cvut.cz/pub/linux-mandrake/Mandr ake/8.2/i586/ (Prague)

ftp://mandrake.redbox.cz/Mandrake/8.2/i586/

ftp://sunsite.mff.cuni.cz/OS/Linux/Dist/Mandrake/m andrake/8.2/i586/ (Prague)

http://ftp.fi.muni.cz/pub/linux/mandrake/8.2/i586/ (Brno)
Denmark

ftp://ftp.dkuug.dk/pub/mandrake/8.2/i586/ (Koebenhavn)

ftp://ftp.sunsite.dk/mirrors/mandrake/8.2/i586/ (Aalborg)
Estonia

ftp://ftp.aso.ee/pub/os/Linux/distributions/mandra ke/8.2/i586/
Finland

ftp://ftp.song.fi/pub/linux/Mandrake/8.2/i586/ (Espoo)
France

ftp://ftp.ciril.fr/pub/linux/mandrake/8.2/i586/ (Nancy)

ftp://ftp.club-internet.fr/pub/unix/linux/distribu tions/Mandrake/8.2/i586/ (Paris)

ftp://ftp.info.univ-angers.fr/pub/linux/distributi ons/mandrake/8.2/i586/ (Angers)

ftp://ftp.lip6.fr/pub/linux/distributions/mandrake /8.2/i586/ (Paris)

ftp://ftp.proxad.net/pub/Distributions_Linux/Mandr ake/8.2/i586/ (Paris)

ftp://ftp.u-strasbg.fr/pub/linux/distributions/man drake/8.2/i586/ (Strasbourg)

ftp://linux.ups-tlse.fr/Mandrake/8.2/i586/ (Toulouse)
Germany

ftp://ftp-stud.fht-esslingen.de/pub/Mirrors/Mandra ke/8.2/i586/ (Esslingen)

ftp://ftp.de.uu.net/pub/linux/mandrake/8.2/i586/

ftp://ftp.fh-giessen.de/pub/linux/mandrake/8.2/i58 6/ (Giessen)

ftp://ftp.fh-wolfenbuettel.de/pub/os/linux/mandrak e/dist/8.2/i586/ (Wolfenbuettel)

ftp://ftp.gwdg.de/pub/linux/mandrake/8.2/i586/ (Goettingen)

ftp://ftp.join.uni-muenster.de/pub/linux/distribut ions/mandrake/8.2/i586/ (Muenster)

ftp://ftp.leo.org/pub/comp/os/unix/linux/Mandrake/ Mandrake/8.2/i586/ (Munchen)

ftp://ftp.tu-chemnitz.de/pub/linux/mandrake/8.2/i5 86/ (Chemnitz)

ftp://ftp.tu-clausthal.de/pub/linux/mandrake/8.2/i 586/ (Clausthal)

ftp://ftp.uasw.edu/pub/os/linux/mandrake/dist/8.2/ i586/ (Wolfenbuettel)

ftp://ftp.uni-bayreuth.de/pub/linux/Mandrake/8.2/i 586/ (bayreuth)

ftp://ftp.uni-kassel.de/pub/linux/mandrake/8.2/i58 6/ (Kassel)

ftp://ftp.uni-mannheim.de/systems/linux/mandrake/8 .2/i586/ (Mannheim)

ftp://ftp.vat.tu-dresden.de/pub/Mandrake/8.2/i586/ (Dresden)

ftp://ramses.wh2.tu-dresden.de/pub/mirrors/mandrak e/8.2/i586/ (Dresden)

ftp://sunsite.informatik.rwth-aachen.de/pub/Linux/ mandrake/8.2/i586/ (Aachen)
Greece

ftp://ftp.duth.gr/pub/Mandrake/8.2/i586/ (Thrace)

ftp://ftp.ntua.gr/pub/linux/mandrake/8.2/i586/ (Athens)
Hong Kong

ftp://ftp.wisr.eie.polyu.edu.hk/linux/mandrake/8.2 /i586/
Hungary

ftp://ftp.linuxforum.hu/mirror/Mandrake/8.2/i586/
Ireland

ftp://ftp.esat.net/pub/linux/mandrake/8.2/i586/
Italy

ftp://bo.mirror.garr.it/mirrors/Mandrake/8.2/i586/ (Bologna)

ftp://ftp.edisontel.it/pub/Mandrake_Mirror/Mandrak e/8.2/i586/
Latvia

ftp://ftp.latnet.lv/linux/mandrake/8.2/i586/
Netherlands

ftp://ftp.nl.uu.net/pub/linux/mandrake/8.2/i586/

ftp://ftp.nluug.nl/pub/os/Linux/distr/Mandrake/Man drake/8.2/i586/

ftp://ftp.surfnet.nl/pub/os/Linux/distr/Mandrake/M andrake/8.2/i586/

ftp://ftp.wau.nl/pub/Mandrake/8.2/i586/ (Wageningen)
Poland

ftp://ftp.ps.pl/mirrors/mandrake/8.2/i586/ (Szczecin)

ftp://ftp.task.gda.pl/pub/linux/Mandrake/8.2/i586/ (Gdansk)
Portugal

ftp://ftp.dei.uc.pt/pub/linux/Mandrake/Mandrake/8. 2/i586/ (Coimbra)

ftp://tux.cprm.net/pub/Mandrake/8.2/i586/
Russia

ftp://ftp.chg.ru/pub/Linux/mandrake/8.2/i586/ (Chernogolovka)
Singapore

ftp://ftp.singnet.com.sg/opensource/linux/Mandrake /8.2/i586/
Slovakia

ftp://spirit.profinet.sk/mirrors/Mandrake/8.2/i586 / (Bratislava)
Spain

ftp://ftp.cesga.es/pub/linux/Mandrake/8.2/i586/ (Galicia)

ftp://ftp.cica.es/pub/Linux/Mandrake/8.2/i586/ (Sevilla)

ftp://ftp.rediris.es/pub/linux/distributions/mandr ake/8.2/i586/
Sweden

ftp://ftp.chello.se/pub/Linux/Mandrake/8.2/i586/

ftp://ftp.chl.chalmers.se/pub/Linux/distributions/ Mandrake/8.2/i586/ (Gothenburg)

ftp://ftp.du.se/pub/os/mandrake/8.2/i586/ (Dalarma)
Switzerland

ftp://ftp.pcds.ch/pub/Mandrake/8.2/i586/ (Neuhausen)

ftp://sunsite.cnlab-switch.ch/mirror/mandrake/8.2/ i586/ (Zurich)
Taiwan

ftp://linux.cdpa.nsysu.edu.tw/pub/Mandrake/mandrak e/8.2/i586/

ftp://linux.csie.nctu.edu.tw/distributions/mandrak e/Mandrake/8.2/i586/

ftp://mdk.linux.org.tw/pub/mandrake/8.2/i586/
Turkey

ftp://ftp.ankara.edu.tr/pub/linux/dagitimlar/Mandr ake/8.2/i586/ (Ankara)
United Kingdom

ftp://ftp.mirror.ac.uk/sites/sunsite.uio.no/pub/un ix/Linux/Mandrake/Mandrake/8.2/i586/ (Canterbury)
United States

ftp://ftp-linux.cc.gatech.edu/pub/linux/distributi ons/mandrake/8.2/i586/ (Georgia)

ftp://ftp.cise.ufl.edu/pub/mirrors/mandrake/Mandra ke/8.2/i586/ (Florida)

ftp://ftp.cse.buffalo.edu/pub/Linux/Mandrake/mandr ake/8.2/i586/ (NY)

ftp://ftp.nmt.edu/pub/linux/mandrake/8.2/i586/ (New Mexico)

ftp://ftp.orst.edu/pub/mandrake/8.2/i586/ (Oregon)

ftp://ftp.tux.org/pub/distributions/mandrake/8.2/i 586/ (Virginia)

ftp://ftp.umr.edu/pub/linux/mandrake/Mandrake/8.2/ i586/ (Missouri)

ftp://ftp.uwsg.indiana.edu/linux/mandrake/8.2/i586 / (Indiana)

ftp://linux-cs.tccw.wku.edu/pub/linux/distribution s/Mandrake/8.2/i586/ (WKU-Linux, Western Kentucky University)

ftp://mirror.aca.oakland.edu/linux/mandrake/8.2/i5 86/ (Michigan)

ftp://mirror.cs.wisc.edu/pub/mirrors/linux/Mandrak e/8.2/i586/ (Wisconsin)

ftp://mirror.mcs.anl.gov/pub/Mandrake/8.2/i586/ (Illinois)

ftp://mirrors.ptd.net/mandrake/8.2/i586/ (Pensylvania)

ftp://mirrors.secsup.org/pub/linux/mandrake/Mandra ke/8.2/i586/

ftp://uml-pub.ists.dartmouth.edu/mirrors/ftp.mandr akesoft.com/pub/Mandrake/mandrake/8.2/i586/ (New Hampshire)

ftp://videl.ics.hawaii.edu/mirrors/mandrake/Mandra ke/8.2/i586/ (Hawaii)

http://mandrake.dsi.internet2.edu/Mandrake/8.2/i58 6/ (For Internet2 academic institutions only)

Mark this one under -1 Subversive...

Seriously, though, if you believe that corporatism on the Internet is evil and must be fought, then surely supporting an underground resistance movement to fight and deface the corporate internet presence is a valid response?

Consider -- you read something like Thoreau's commentary on civil disobedience and he basically says that paying your taxes under an unjust regime is in itself a crime, and NOT paying your taxes is a virtue. Now, considering that our options for resisting the corporate takeover are non-existent since laws and social institutions are in place to enable their power (ie: automatic deduction of taxes from income, which the government distributes to corporations as it sees fit (in other words, corporate socialism)) there is no way to deny them the money they feel is owed to them, as Thoreau says he thinks we should do. In that sense, can we not regard this as theft as retalliate accordingly?

For instance, if a company is promoting immoral behaviour and has a web presence, is it not justifiable to go after their web presence, if this is the only way I can fight back?

(Don't mind me, I'm just trying to see how fast I can get "wrinkledshirt" into an FBI file.)

Much of the article you link to makes sterling sense, but how many porn movies really need to be over an hour long? I would argue that Betamax might have proven quite the boon to the porn industry, by helping to focus their screenwriting and editing efforts toward producing films with tighter dialog and more efficient plot development. No, I think in this case the consumer lost :)

Open your mind and you'll see that the triumph of VHS was the triumph of freedom versus the corporate vision of Betamax, a decision the consumers wisely made. The consumers made the right decision.

Why don't you ask the Internet Oracle?

Well, I guess it was just a matter of time. Now we have artificial hearts (pop-up warning), artificial lungs, and artificial kidneys. (I mean that we as a society have them available to us as a technology, not that we as individuals actually have those things inside us, though some of us no doubt do.)

How long before we also have artificial skin to hold our artificial hair? How long before we decide what to put in our artifcial stomachs with our artificial brains?

The human race is about to step aside to make room for the cybernetically enhanced. May God have mercy on our souls. My one request is that none of my organs run anything made by Microsoft. See you in the future.

Here is an interesting article about the Johns that you might find interesting.

Agreed. This is why you should follow the included links to more information. First, read the JPL press release. If you want information beyond that, I strongly suggest viewing the FAQ and animations on Alan's web page.

Disclaimer: I partially wrote the FAQ and created most of the animations, so I may be biased as to their quality. Constructive criticism is welcome.

Chuck

Agreed. This is why you should follow the included links to more information. First, read the JPL press release. If you want information beyond that, I strongly suggest viewing the FAQ and animations on Alan's web page.

Disclaimer: I partially wrote the FAQ and created most of the animations, so I may be biased as to their quality. Constructive criticism is welcome.

Chuck

is here, with a little more information on Lorentz and CPT violation.

You can very easily remap the control key to the caps lock key.

• Russ Kick's Outposts & Outposts 2
• Re/Search Pranks
• From Chocolate to Morphine
• How to Get High Without Drugs
• A gift certificate to Good Vibrations
• Exhibitionism for the Shy by Carol Queen
• Screw the Roses, Send Me the Thorns
• The Herbal Abortion Handbook
• Electroshock Scorpion 200
• ASP Baton (check local laws)
• The Whole Earth Review
• Hakim Bey's T.A.Z.
• Drawing Down the Moon
• Ain't Nobody's bussiness if you do

I get the sense that work in robotics is on the upswing, at least in academics. People like Olaf Sporns at Indiana or Dave Touretzky at CMU are doing interesting work with robots, but they aren't likely to get as much attention as laptops with wheels.

Click here

the image linked

Doctors don't swear to it anymore due to it being slightly stupid - here it is.

If I happen to break a law, like the DMCA, tough. The civil rights activists were breaking a law when they sat at the front of the bus and refused to get up. They said the law was unjust, they went to jail for it, and they won. I plan to do the same.

Except that's not the scenario you should anticipate. If you provoke the ire of the media monopolies, they won't have you arrested. They'll sic their lawyers on you. Which will tie up all your assets in litigation until you relent.

Nor should you expect society to respond to your actions the way it did to the Civil Rights movment. That was about fundamental matters of human dignity, like being able to sit down while riding the bus, or use a public bathroom, or buy a house, or do a thousand other things most of us take for granted.

Many people might think you also have the right to listen to a song without buying the whole album, or watch Sex and the City without subscribing to HBO. But let's get real: these issues will never inspire the same level of outrage and activism.

yep, I've submitted, but I don't think it's gonna be accepted. See here for more details:
http://www.uwsg.indiana.edu/hypermail/linux/kernel /0203.2/0009.html

This was my final year project thesis. Just remember the golden rule unstructured 2 structured == convert 2 XML I wrote a [very bad] program in C++/Perl/tcsh IPC=pipes to add XML tags to English, and then index them into a search engine which would use the lingual data stored in the XML tags to help the search.

NIST does a MASSIVE competition on this annually. I don't want to be an XML-buzzword whore <Arnold Schwarzenegger accent> (XML commando eats Green berets, C++, Java, Perl, COBOL for breakfast)</Arnold Schwarzenegger accent> but you can't beat XML for easily converting anything that you can make sense out of into computer readable format. Real h3cKoRs use SGML, but us underlings have to stick with things we can understand like XML. As for expandability, if we want to encode something else into the document, then just tag-it-and-go

It took me 200 hours to fish out all these links (before the Google days), I don't want anyone to have to waste as much time as I did feeding the search engines exotic foods. It's a year old so pardon me for the odd broken link, armed with these you could probably turn jello into XML ;-)

My favourite bookmarx
PROJect[21 links]
Beginners' Guide[13 links]
Berkeley Linguistics Dept. Course Summaries, general stuffzzzzzzzzzzzzzzCryptic IR Vocabulary defined
Explanations of weird words like hypernym zzzzzzzzzzzzzzHow do we produce and understand speech
How Inverted Files are Created - Univeristy of Berkeley zzzzzzzzzzzzzzNLP Univ. of Indiana, very good basics e.g. word sense d
Simple langauge - useful.... zzzzzzzzzzzzzzWhat is Natural Language Processing, links
What is POS tagging........ zzzzzzzzzzzzzzWord Sense Disambiguation defined
Word Sense Disambiguation in detail, scroll down far zzzzzzzzzzzzzzWord Sense Disambiguator - LOLITA (tested at MUC-7 and SENSEVAL competition as best)
XML for the absolute beginner

HTML, XML stuff + parsers[19 links]
Apache plug-in that uhhh does stuff with XML zzzzzzzzzzzzzzConvert COM to XML
convert XML, HTML to Unix pipeable formats zzzzzzzzzzzzzzconverters to and from HTML
expat XML parser zzzzzzzzzzzzzzHTML Tidy - converts HTML 2 XML + source code!!
Parse DB (RDBMS, whatever) to XML zzzzzzzzzzzzzzPerl-XML Module List
PHP Manual XML parser functions - what the hell are they talking about, PHP Virtual M... zzzzzzzzzzzzzzPublic SGML-XML Software
Pyxie - XML Processor for Python, Perl, etc. zzzzzzzzzzzzzzSGML+XML tools.org
The XML Resource Centre - massive number of links zzzzzzzzzzzzzzW4F wrapper - wrapper converts XML to HTML
XFlat - convert flat file into XML zzzzzzzzzzzzzzXML Parsers and other XML stuff
XML.com - Parsers, etc. zzzzzzzzzzzzzzXML-Data Catalog System - uhhhh looks close
XTAL's general converter - convert anything 2 XML

other Background[8 links]
Is Linux ready for the Enterprise, scalable... zzzzzzzzzzzzzzLinux reliability
Linux Versus Windows NT, Mark(sysinternals bloke) zzzzzzzzzzzzzzPC reliability (pcworld)
SPEC - Standard Performance Evaluation Corp. zzzzzzzzzzzzzzSystems benchmarks
TPC - Transaction Processing Performance Council zzzzzzzzzzzzzzUnix Beats Back NT In EDA Workstation Arena
Proper TREC(-8) QA systems[2 links]

pg. 387 LIMSI-CNRS pretty deep parsing[2 links]
More links....
NLP, IR links - lots to corpii, etc.

pg. 575 U. of Ottawa and NRL (shit system, got 0%)[1 links]
LAKE Lab
pg. 607! University of Sheffield (crap system, but OPEN SOURCE!)[2 links]
GATE - FREE IE app w`source code
LaSIE - ER, coreference, template (cv)

pg. 617 Univ of Surrey (inconclusive matches)[2 links]
System Quirk - Or is this their search system..... Hmmmmmm
Univ of Surrey - pointers (hopefully this is their WILDER search system...)

SMU - Pg. 65[1 links]
Natural Language Processing Laboratory at SMU

Textract[2 links]
Cymfony - Technology
Textract - State of the Art Information Extraction

Xerox uhhhhh maybe[1 links]
Xerox Palo Alto Research Center
(OVERVIEW) 1999 TREC-8 Q&A Track Home Page
NLP bloke, Univ Sussex


Tcl-Tk[4 links] Tcl tutorial
Tcl-Tk Contributed Programs Index
Tcl-Tk Resources, sources
TclXML - manipulating XML using Tcl-Tk
Artificial Natural Language - Is this what I'm trying to parse into...
Comparison of Indexers - Prise vs. Inquery vs. MG, etc.
Eagles - Language Engineering Standards
Language Technology Group - lots of modules!
LDC - Linguistic Data Consortium, lots of corpora
Lexical Resources
Links 2 resources, indexers.....
Lots of IR stuff, University of uhhh
Managing Gigabytes Indexer
Managing Gigabytes Manuals and stuff
Htdig search system
NLP & IR (NLPIR, NIST) Group
OVERVIEW OF MUC-7-MET-2
Perl XML Indexing - XML search engine type thing
Phrasys Language Processing Software Components (money)
QA HCI bullshit
SIGIR - TREC-type thing, resources
SMART indexer system documentation
Text REtrieval Conference (TREC) Home Page
The Natural Language Software Registry
Thunderstone IE and IR products
WordNet - FREE DOWNLOADABLE lexical English database

Page created with URL+, nice utility for working with internet shortcuts

Well, the scheme standard doesn't define a record type. Every usable Scheme implementation extends the standard with one, and they can in fact be defined with library functions in standard Scheme (based around vectors or lists, which are provided by the standard). But it does make scheme code less portable than it ought to be, because you're right, everybody wants to use structures for things.

As for designing programming languages, I encourage you to design one for yourself. There are books on the subject -- you might want to see if you can find a library that has a copy of Essentials of Programming Languages, it'll introduce you to a lot of the decisions you'll need to make as well as giving you ideas for how to implement whatever you decide to do.

I get the impression that this guy predicted there would be around 80,000 genes, and after the mappers showed there were many fewer, he decided to say that the mappers had their definition of gene wrong, or that they missed the genes. He's not exactly clear on that, except to reiterate that based on indirect evidence, he beleives there are 80,000 genes, if you define them properly.

The article says the 30,000 figure is close to a worm or a fruit fly. There's a better list here, which lists the gene counts for humans, mice, worms, etc. With their disclaimer that these counts are not yet complete, it seems that humans have 46,000 genes in this database, compared with 22,300 for a worm, 24,900 for a fruit fly, and 39,156 for a mouse. Exactly why this should be so unreasonable is beyond me. Maybe if we define the gene so that humans have 80,000, then fruit flies will have 60,000! After all, how can you draw a comparison if you pretend not to know the definition, eh?

http://www.indiana.edu/~rats/research/ppcc/

It's a way to show people a place that doesn't exist any more, for example...

Buy a pack of anaglyph 3D glasses online (get the red/cyan ones, not the red/blue ones) for about $0.50 a pair from Berezin, Rainbow Symphony, or any other company that sells them. Then start taking pictures! Take one picture, then very carefully shift the camera to one side 2.5 inches (or more, for superstereo -- this is what makes my pictures look much better than those taken by standard stereo cameras, even though I use whatever normal camera I can borrow) and take another. A tripod helps, but a little practice and you won't need one. The scene has to be perfectly still, but it works most of the time. Then you just bring the pics into any paint program that lets you access the separate color channels. Open up the image taken from the right, remove its red color channel, and replace it with the red channel from the left image. Do a little tweaking to make your chosen point of focus more clear (shift the red channel up, down, left and right until the thing you want to focus on looks normal when viewing all 3 channels at once), and voila! This is one of my hobbies, and it's pretty rewarding while still being inexpensive (especially with a digital camera). And best of all, you can easily make large cheap color photocopies of them and give them to your friends. (You can even get very cheap photographic prints made of the digital images. I tried dotphoto.com, but they seem to have applied some color correction which didn't make my latest pics turn out great. Gotta see if they can turn that off...) Try it, it's a blast.

http://php.indiana.edu/~dgsharp/anaglyphs

Or the crosseye method (two pictures side by side, cross your eyes to see them). I could be wrong, but I believe I've made the only existing stereograms of The Matrix. (Too bad I don't have a DVD, so the captures suck!) Here they are, just cross your eyes until the two images merge: http://php.indiana.edu/~dgsharp/stereograms/

Enjoy!

It's a way to show people a place that doesn't exist any more, for example...

Buy a pack of anaglyph 3D glasses online (get the red/cyan ones, not the red/blue ones) for about $0.50 a pair from Berezin, Rainbow Symphony, or any other company that sells them. Then start taking pictures! Take one picture, then very carefully shift the camera to one side 2.5 inches (or more, for superstereo -- this is what makes my pictures look much better than those taken by standard stereo cameras, even though I use whatever normal camera I can borrow) and take another. A tripod helps, but a little practice and you won't need one. The scene has to be perfectly still, but it works most of the time. Then you just bring the pics into any paint program that lets you access the separate color channels. Open up the image taken from the right, remove its red color channel, and replace it with the red channel from the left image. Do a little tweaking to make your chosen point of focus more clear (shift the red channel up, down, left and right until the thing you want to focus on looks normal when viewing all 3 channels at once), and voila! This is one of my hobbies, and it's pretty rewarding while still being inexpensive (especially with a digital camera). And best of all, you can easily make large cheap color photocopies of them and give them to your friends. (You can even get very cheap photographic prints made of the digital images. I tried dotphoto.com, but they seem to have applied some color correction which didn't make my latest pics turn out great. Gotta see if they can turn that off...) Try it, it's a blast.

http://php.indiana.edu/~dgsharp/anaglyphs

Or the crosseye method (two pictures side by side, cross your eyes to see them). I could be wrong, but I believe I've made the only existing stereograms of The Matrix. (Too bad I don't have a DVD, so the captures suck!) Here they are, just cross your eyes until the two images merge: http://php.indiana.edu/~dgsharp/stereograms/

Enjoy!

According to my university, the difference between science and art is two semesters of a foreign language.

But I'd have to echo the previous sentiments stating that technology and artistic media have always gone hand-in-hand. Artistic concept tends to be quite independent of technology, unless technology is its subject.

How about a plug for Hofstader's excellent "Godel, Esher, Bach"? Great read.

People always think about AI when they think of Lisp, but don't forget that some everyday applications are written in Lisp, such as Yahoo! Store.

All I need is a motivation.

Just like when I understood the idea of inheritance and the real OO code reuse, together with the idea of moving data to the foreground and that with a good data you need simple algorithms -- that day I understood, that I have to learn Smalltalk, Objective C, C++ and OO Perl.

Today I need to know why I need to learn how to think with the functional paradigm. It's a serious problem, which stops many people before they learn functional languages.

Many years ago I was writing C programs to process text, and I could do everything that way, I just didn't realize, that there were better ways to do the same. That was before I knew Regular Expressions, egrep, sed or Perl. Now I write Perl one-liners for tasks, which used to take me days of writing C code, but I didn't know that before, because "If the only tool you have in the toolbox is a hammer - every problem looks like a nail."

So now I ask for a reason to learn the functional way of thinking. I need to know it before I actually learn them, just to have a strong imperative. Learning the new way of thinking is a long and hard process, I just want to know what waits for me at the end.

I hope someone who know that reason, will tell me and those who also need it, why it's worth the efford. Thanks in advance.

-- Your Anonymous Coward who wants to learn new ways of thinking...

Despite the fact that people with low IQ scores tend to reproduce faster than people with high scores, it is a myth that people are becoming less intelligent. In fact, the opposite is the case.

The Flynn effect, discovered by James Flynn, shows that IQ test scores have been increasing 5 to 25 points per generation in every country which has been studied, over the past century. The average person today would score at near-genius levels on tests of a century ago.

And don't think it's just that we get more schooling today. The greatest increases are on those subtests which have the least reliance on concrete knowledge, tests which are purely abstract and require people to look for patterns and solve problems in a flexible way. That's exactly what most people mean by "intelligence".

The Flynn effect is not widely known, perhaps because people prefer to believe that the world is getting worse. The idea that we are getting smarter doesn't fit with our prejudices. If people would come to understand and believe the truth about human progress in the past century they might have a clearer understanding of the future which lies ahead. Our descendants will be smarter, richer, and more talented than we can imagine.

I hope you moderators appreciate this is just this guy's idea, and not actually the current release versioning system used for 2.5. The fact that he made 2.5.3 bold would lead you to believe otherwise.

Actually, it was my idea (posted to the linux-kernel mailing list on May 10, 2000), but the other poster above didn't bother to attribute credit for it. (Although I think it was really more of a sarcastic comment on 2.5.3's stability, the way that section was bolded.)

That was an idea I came up with off the top of my head, looking for a way to move the "should be stable but oops, not" kernels out of the "stable" series into the "development" series (thinking of 2.2.0 for example) -- by adding a fourth digit to indicate the status, so that release candidates could get production testing before getting branded as "stable". Once a fourth digit was added, I figured that I might as well try to fill in the other numbers with vague-but-useful state indicators for earlier stages of development. That post to linux-kernel was my first attempt, off the top of my head.

I developed this idea further, in response to some of the discussion on linux-kernel about my idea, but in the end I decided against using it. My brother convinced me that encoding this much meaning into numeric identifiers required a lot of advance knowledge about the system to make any sense of the version numbers, and harried system administrators wouldn't take the time to learn.

I finally decided to use a different approach, where "stable" releases are all-numeric numbers (e.g. 1.0.0) while "development" releases always contain an alphabetic intended-state tag (e.g. 1.0.0.beta.1) and discarding the even/odd notion from Linux. This way, development versions are more self-identifying, and release candidates (suitable for production testing) would have an "rc" tag (e.g. 1.0.0.rc.3).

The idea is that the "stable" release (e.g. 1.0.0) would be completely identical to the last "rc" release (e.g. 1.0.0.rc.3) except for the version number change. If there's a temptation to add "one last patch" (no matter how minor), make a new "rc" version and let it make the rounds first. This would avoid embarassments like 2.2.0 and certain 2.4.x releases, which are marked "stable" by their version number, but were quite unstable in practice...

I tried to include my writeup of the all-numeric system I ended up with before I gave up on it, but Slashdot's "lameness filter" rejected it. Maybe it's a sign. :-) (Interested parties can send me email and I'll mail a copy of the writeup...)

Damn straight.

w3

emacs-w3m

The response I received from a number of kernel developers was that there wasn't such a thing really but it would be great if I did the work of organizing it.

SunSITE.dk seemed to be the best site of the many kind folks who offerred to host it, and so was born The Linux Quality Database.

What my plan was, and is, to organize serious QA efforts among people other than the normal kernel developers, in support of the developers, so they can get faster and more thorough feedback on their code.

Unfortunately, my consulting work has always been very hectic, and so I have not been able to do the work on this that I want to, at least not yet. Things are getting a little more rational in my business, so I have high hopes for resuming my work on it sometime soon.

There is something of value on the site that can help everyone though, I wrote a few articles on the topic of linux kernel and web application quality. The articles of interest to kernel testing are:

• Why We Should All Test the New Linux Kernel
• Using Test Suites to Validate the Linux Kernel

I was happy to see that the Open Source Development Lab took advantage of the GFDL on the articles and reproduced them at its own site here.

Some might ask why I don't use an existing bug database such as bugzilla. I may well adapt bugzilla, I'm still trying to figure out what to do, but a central part of what I plan is a bug database optimized for tracking kernel bugs.

A database user will be able to enter in the configurations of the machines they have at their disposal, drawing on a database of known hardware, and give names to particular configurations.

When they report a bug, they can report the bug against selections from a list or menu of the configurations they have previously configured.

Also, they can upload the kernel .config file used in the kernel build.

Doing this will allow developers who are researching bugs to determine whether their code has been used on certain hardware, or to do boolean searches on both hardware and .config options to find out about interactions of kernel code with hardware.

I think bugzilla could be expanded to do this, or another bug database, but this is not a capability in any bug database I've used so far, either open source or proprietary ones at companies I've worked for.

Another option for the bandwidth-limited are the web archives, where you can somewhat easily pick out the topics of interest.

The only word of warning is that people don't change the thread subject lines by convention, so the subject almost never matches the particular flame war that's going on. (The Kernel Traffic summaries generally ignore most of the interesting flamage, focusing on the prouncements of the bigwigs.)

There is also a usenet front-end (which I think is what Linus uses), as well as a Google archive

When the university I work for (www.indiana.edu) started having problems with bandwidth because of file sharing in the dorms, they added another DS3 and routed all residence hall traffic over that link. Now we have one 45Mbps connection for university use and another for residence halls and greek houses.

Unfortunately, SOAP is a bit heavy for the most simple web services (what ever it means to microsoft).

SOAP is the standard protocol accepted INDUSTRY WIDE for web services. This is not just across companies from Microsoft to Sun to Oracle, etc. but across programming languages from C# to Java to Perl.

The cost of using soap means the XML has to use DOM and it has to validate the required nodes.

One does not need a DOM to validate an XML document. There are many validating SAX readers and in fact there also validating Pull-based XML APIs like Microsoft's XmlValidatingReader or XPP.

It's too bad microsoft's whitepapers don't credit the orginal authors, since a lot of people worked to push XML forward. In some ways, it feels like SOAP and .NET is a bastardized version of Burners Lee's vision of a semantic web using XML web services and RDF. Perhaps all the press .NET has generated for XML services will help create the critical mass needed to get semantic web [w3.org] moving.

Now it is clear you have no idea what you are talking about. The push for the semantic web is a push for a richer web experience by adding more meta data to the content of the web.

SOAP is a distributed computing protocol similar to predefined protocol the Internet Inter-ORB Protocol (IIOP) for CORBA, the Object Remote Procedure Call (ORPC) for DCOM, and the Java Remote Method Protocol (JRMP) for Java/RMI but defined in XML instead of a binary format.

It has been done lots of times. Based upon chromosomal organization here and based upon DNA sequences here, for example or here for a good set of lecture notes on the topic.

Hmm you're right (more info). I wasn't aware of that... About the dollar vs euro: I understand the political independance is very important, but that's not what the parent of this thread was talking about at all (so neither was I). The dollar on itself isn't any better than the euro with regard to privacy etc. It's only the political situation of the dollar that makes it better at the moment. And I think the advantages (stimulation of the economy) will outweigh the disadvantages (having to prove the currency again) in the long run. Or should I say "I hope"?:)... Thank you for your clarification.