Slashdot Mirror

And, BTW, what about Latex? There are plenty of books (not just journal papers, but *books*) in Comp. Sci. and Mathematics that are typeset in Latex. I mean, high quality books, e.g. "Introduction to Algorithms" by Cormen, Leiserson, and Rivest, or Modern Computer Algebra by von zur Gathen and Gerhard. You cannot say they are done in a "Kinko's-type place". And yes, both of them are typeset in Latex.

Exactly.

To the Mozilla Developers. Take this opportunity to be radical. Let's go back and view what the browser is and what it could be. I suggest that they take a look at things like:
DashBoard.
Haystack
and Echo.
Information begs to be consolidated and made useful. We can do more with the browser then just view static stateless pages.

What We Can Learn From BSD
By Chinese Karma Whore, Version 1.0

Everyone knows about BSD's failure and imminent demise. As we pore over the history of BSD, we'll uncover a story of fatal mistakes, poor priorities, and personal rivalry, and we'll learn what mistakes to avoid so as to save Linux from a similarly grisly fate.

Let's not be overly morbid and give BSD credit for its early successes. In the 1970s, Ken Thompson and Bill Joy both made significant contributions to the computing world on the BSD platform. In the 80s, DARPA saw BSD as the premiere open platform, and, after initial successes with the 4.1BSD product, gave the BSD company a 2 year contract.

These early triumphs would soon be forgotten in a series of internal conflicts that would mar BSD's progress. In 1992, AT&T filed suit against Berkeley Software, claiming that proprietary code agreements had been haphazardly violated. In the same year, BSD filed countersuit, reciprocating bad intentions and fueling internal rivalry. While AT&T and Berkeley Software lawyers battled in court, lead developers of various BSD distributions quarreled on Usenet. In 1995, Theo de Raadt, one of the founders of the NetBSD project, formed his own rival distribution, OpenBSD, as the result of a quarrel that he documents on his website. Mr. de Raadt's stubborn arrogance was later seen in his clash with Darren Reed, which resulted in the expulsion of IPF from the OpenBSD distribution.

As personal rivalries took precedence over a quality product, BSD's codebase became worse and worse. As we all know, incompatibilities between each BSD distribution make code sharing an arduous task. Research conducted at MIT found BSD's filesystem implementation to be "very poorly performing." Even BSD's acclaimed TCP/IP stack has lagged behind, according to this study.

Problems with BSD's codebase were compounded by fundamental flaws in the BSD design approach. As argued by Eric Raymond in his watershed essay, The Cathedral and the Bazaar, rapid, decentralized development models are inherently superior to slow, centralized ones in software development. BSD developers never heeded Mr. Raymond's lesson and insisted that centralized models lead to 'cleaner code.' Don't believe their hype - BSD's development model has significantly impaired its progress. Any achievements that BSD managed to make were nullified by the BSD license, which allows corporations and coders alike to reap profits without reciprocating the goodwill of open-source. Fortunately, Linux is not prone to this exploitation, as it is licensed under the GPL.

The failure of BSD culminated in the resignation of Jordan Hubbard and Michael Smith from the FreeBSD core team. They both believed that FreeBSD had long lost its earlier vitality. Like an empire in decline, BSD had become bureaucratic and stagnant. As Linux gains market share and as BSD sinks deeper into the mire of decay, their parting addresses will resound as fitting eulogies to BSD's demise.

Counter Terrorisim Information Awarenes with Government Information Awareness here

The MIT teams evolution is similar if less extreme. The current car is a moderately streamlined high-deck-and-bubble job with its wheels unshrouded. The 1999 car has a similar body but shrouded wheels.

In fact, more or less streamlined high-deck-and-bubble designs seem to be the theme of this years race. These vehicles look hugely vulnerable to crosswinds.

The MIT teams evolution is similar if less extreme. The current car is a moderately streamlined high-deck-and-bubble job with its wheels unshrouded. The 1999 car has a similar body but shrouded wheels.

In fact, more or less streamlined high-deck-and-bubble designs seem to be the theme of this years race. These vehicles look hugely vulnerable to crosswinds.

People keep hacking them.

What We Can Learn From BSD
By Chinese Karma Whore, Version 1.0

Everyone knows about BSD's failure and imminent demise. As we pore over the history of BSD, we'll uncover a story of fatal mistakes, poor priorities, and personal rivalry, and we'll learn what mistakes to avoid so as to save Linux from a similarly grisly fate.

Let's not be overly morbid and give BSD credit for its early successes. In the 1970s, Ken Thompson and Bill Joy both made significant contributions to the computing world on the BSD platform. In the 80s, DARPA saw BSD as the premiere open platform, and, after initial successes with the 4.1BSD product, gave the BSD company a 2 year contract.

These early triumphs would soon be forgotten in a series of internal conflicts that would mar BSD's progress. In 1992, AT&T filed suit against Berkeley Software, claiming that proprietary code agreements had been haphazardly violated. In the same year, BSD filed countersuit, reciprocating bad intentions and fueling internal rivalry. While AT&T and Berkeley Software lawyers battled in court, lead developers of various BSD distributions quarreled on Usenet. In 1995, Theo de Raadt, one of the founders of the NetBSD project, formed his own rival distribution, OpenBSD, as the result of a quarrel that he documents [theos.com] on his website. Mr. de Raadt's stubborn arrogance was later seen in his clash with Darren Reed, which resulted in the expulsion of IPF from the OpenBSD distribution.

As personal rivalries took precedence over a quality product, BSD's codebase became worse and worse. As we all know, incompatibilities between each BSD distribution make code sharing an arduous task. Research conducted at MIT found BSD's filesystem implementation to be "very poorly performing." Even BSD's acclaimed TCP/IP stack has lagged behind, according to this study.

Problems with BSD's codebase were compounded by fundamental flaws in the BSD design approach. As argued by Eric Raymond in his watershed essay, The Cathedral and the Bazaar, rapid, decentralized development models are inherently superior to slow, centralized ones in software development. BSD developers never heeded Mr. Raymond's lesson and insisted that centralized models lead to 'cleaner code.' Don't believe their hype - BSD's development model has significantly impaired its progress. Any achievements that BSD managed to make were nullified by the BSD license, which allows corporations and coders alike to reap profits without reciprocating the goodwill of open-source. Fortunately, Linux is not prone to this exploitation, as it is licensed under the GPL.

The failure of BSD culminated in the resignation of Jordan Hubbard and Michael Smith from the FreeBSD core team. They both believed that FreeBSD had long lost its earlier vitality. Like an empire in decline, BSD had become bureaucratic and stagnant. As Linux gains market share and as BSD sinks deeper into the mire of decay, their parting addresses will resound as fitting eulogies to BSD's demise.

What We Can Learn From BSD
By Chinese Karma Whore, Version 1.0

Everyone knows about BSD's failure and imminent demise. As we pore over the history of BSD, we'll uncover a story of fatal mistakes, poor priorities, and personal rivalry, and we'll learn what mistakes to avoid so as to save Linux from a similarly grisly fate.

Let's not be overly morbid and give BSD credit for its early successes. In the 1970s, Ken Thompson and Bill Joy both made significant contributions to the computing world on the BSD platform. In the 80s, DARPA saw BSD as the premiere open platform, and, after initial successes with the 4.1BSD product, gave the BSD company a 2 year contract.

These early triumphs would soon be forgotten in a series of internal conflicts that would mar BSD's progress. In 1992, AT&T filed suit against Berkeley Software, claiming that proprietary code agreements had been haphazardly violated. In the same year, BSD filed countersuit, reciprocating bad intentions and fueling internal rivalry. While AT&T and Berkeley Software lawyers battled in court, lead developers of various BSD distributions quarreled on Usenet. In 1995, Theo de Raadt, one of the founders of the NetBSD project, formed his own rival distribution, OpenBSD, as the result of a quarrel that he documents on his website. Mr. de Raadt's stubborn arrogance was later seen in his clash with Darren Reed, which resulted in the expulsion of IPF from the OpenBSD distribution.

As personal rivalries took precedence over a quality product, BSD's codebase became worse and worse. As we all know, incompatibilities between each BSD distribution make code sharing an arduous task. Research conducted at MIT found BSD's filesystem implementation to be "very poorly performing." Even BSD's acclaimed TCP/IP stack has lagged behind, according to this study.

Problems with BSD's codebase were compounded by fundamental flaws in the BSD design approach. As argued by Eric Raymond in his watershed essay, The Cathedral and the Bazaar, rapid, decentralized development models are inherently superior to slow, centralized ones in software development. BSD developers never heeded Mr. Raymond's lesson and insisted that centralized models lead to 'cleaner code.' Don't believe their hype - BSD's development model has significantly impaired its progress. Any achievements that BSD managed to make were nullified by the BSD license, which allows corporations and coders alike to reap profits without reciprocating the goodwill of open-source. Fortunately, Linux is not prone to this exploitation, as it is licensed under the GPL.

The failure of BSD culminated in the resignation of Jordan Hubbard and Michael Smith from the FreeBSD core team. They both believed that FreeBSD had long lost its earlier vitality. Like an empire in decline, BSD had become bureaucratic and stagnant. As Linux gains market share and as BSD sinks deeper into the mire of decay, their parting addresses will resound as fitting eulogies to BSD's demise.

Cilk is my favorite. It's not a general C language (although it is a superset), but I've used it and it's pretty nifty for distributed problems.

Blogdex and Daypop already are close to this, by keeping track of what the current popular links are. Every time a weblog links to something, it's a vote for that URL. That's the closest to democratization of the media if I've seen yet.

The only thing that needs to happen to match your view is personalization through a web of trust. Perhaps a person's FOAF defines who's opinions they value, and their RSS Aggregregators will rate stories accordingly. I think NewsMonster is working on something like this, but I don't know if it's implemented yet.

From the
FAQ:

GNO contains components that originate with a variety of flavors of UNIX. These include 4.3BSD, XINU, and SYSV. It is mostly BSD. As of GNO v2.0.6, GNO has become closer to 4.4BSD. Work is in progress to make it as compliant as possible to POSIX 1003.1 and POSIX 1003.2.

-uso.

FYI -- MIT hack - buzzword bingo occurred when Al Gore came to campus

http://chuma.cas.usf.edu/~dking3/real_ultimate_p ow er.htm


Wizards are sooooooooooo sweet that I want to crap my pants.

Facts:

1. Wizards are mammals.
2. Wizards fight ALL the time.
3.The purpose of the wizard is to flip out and kill people.

REAL Ultimate Power!!!


Geeks are sooooooooooo sweet that I want to crap my pants.

Facts:

1.Geeks are mammals.
2.Geeks think hard ALL the time.
3.The purpose of the geeks is to dominate the internet.

Do consumers have the right to spy on the government?

How will they stop us.

the Government Information Awareness website
Too bad I really dont think they have much of a chance against the RIAA's money bags. I think anyone that supports this effort should put their money where their mouth is. I mean if you are adamant enough to boycott the RIAA arent you saving at least $15 that could go to a good cause such as this?

while making sure laws remain open is a good and necessary thing to maintain a transparent state with de jure authority, it only goes so far. if the laws are open but the interests, motivations and business dealings of lawmakers remain opaque then the openess is not complete.

mit (yep, the massachussets institute of technology) has been running a site for a while now dedicated to allowing citizens to monitor and research their legislators (and executives). the mission statement says it all:

To empower citizens by providing a single, comprehensive, easy-to-use repository of information on individuals, organizations, and corporations related to the government of the United States of America.

To allow citizens to submit intelligence about government-related issues, while maintaining their anonymity. To allow members of the government a chance to participate in the process.

the full site is at: http://opengov.media.mit.edu/

it's a good read.

For dossiers on government officials Government Information Awareness

Cheers,
W00t

BTW, "Endian" actually has nothing to do with computers. In Gulliver's Travels (1726), Jonathan Swift satirized ideological/religious war by mentioning a conflict between two groups who differed on the correct way to crack an egg: the big end, or the little end? The Jargon File credits Danny Cohen with introducing this metaphor to the net, in an attempt to calm down an ongoing flame war over address schemes. In any case, almost nobody who uses these terms seems to have heard of Swift or Cohen!

Also in the post today is an article on one persons response to total information awareness: Government information awarness.

GUESS WHAT? YOU GET TO FLY TO ANOTHER STATE TO DEFEND YOURSELF EVEN IF YOU'RE INNOCENT!

This has already happened. In 1994 a (married) pair of California BBS owner/operators were tried and convicted on Tennessee porn charges.

CUDigest report

It's a particularly bad idea when an official in some other state decides to set you up for the fall.

There was a Mac version (or equivalent) of this called asciiMac released for MacHack in 1998.

Charles Vest, the president of MIT, published a statement in September of 2002 which dealt directly with the issue of openness in universities, particularly regarding scientific research. Although this particular endeavor doesn't specifically fit that category, his words still pertain. I've copied the most notable ones below; the entire statement may be found here.

"By and large, the academic community has treated this as a reasonable approach and, of course, will comply with the law. But even this seemingly straightforward approach is not without a huge potential price to be paid in the advancement of science, and therefore in our health and welfare. The MIT Ad Hoc Committee on Access to and Disclosure of Scientific Information was deeply concerned about the path down which we may be starting, noting that the Secretary of Health and Human Services has the statutory power to expand the list of select agents. The Committee expressed the view that we could soon arrive at a level of restriction of access to materials by our students, faculty, or staff on the basis of their citizenship, for example--something that would be incompatible with our principles of openness, and would cause us to withdraw from the corresponding research topics on our campus. "

Hopefully this doesn't come to pass, but if it does, I have some faith in MIT's ideals of openness over funding.

taken from this page: http://opengov.media.mit.edu/GIA/data.jsp

If you look at the flowchart they have, it actually takes quite a bit of effort to get information onto the system, as two of the possible four results of the system lead to the information being discarded. Check out the flowchart, and read the page - It covers a lot of important stuff.

If you read about the data collection method it seems that they are creating a database that is a cross between what you could find on google and information submitted by anyone ala IndyMedia.

Hopefully it results in solid information and not this type.

Looks like the fact-checking needs a little work, as shown here...

This project has scant little information on the various politicians I searched for. John Ashcroft's entry merely has his position, and who appointed him to it. Not to be a conspiracy theorist, but.... CONSPIRACY!
...

In all seriousness though, this actually seems like a good thing, but it needs more meat to fill up the information pages.

Forming the plural is always dependant on the language in which you are using the word.

The default plural form for native english speakers is adding a "s" to the end of the word.

Some latinophiles might insist on using the correct latin plural form in the english language. I don't know about the english language, but it is très chic to use those archaic latin or greek plural forms in german (like "Atlanten" as plural for "Atlas" instead of the german form "Atlasse").

However, virus is a widespread word of latin origin that is today used in a very different context. Originally meant to mean "disease", it is nowadays used to describe disease-causing agents (the viruses in the biologic/medical field) and "computer-disease-causing" agents (the viruses in the IT-field). This shows that it has little in common with the original word and might thus be regarded as an english word. So it is safe and ok to say "viruses".

For an interesting read I'd recommend you Steven Pinker's Words and rules.

I remember a story (urban legend maybe) about a small plane that was whort on landing and crashed into a restaurant just across the street from the airport.

Maybe it was this?

"Jet Skids Off Runway in L.A., Stops Yards from Gas Station:

"A Southwest Airlines jet carrying 137 passengers and five crew members careened off a Burbank Airport runway Sunday night, skidding to a stop on an adjacent street where it hit a car. Three people were slightly injured."

A while back, MozillaZine ran Mozilla being used at universities.

Houston, MIT, Durham, Cambridge and The Helsinki University of Technology all use Mozilla in one form or another.

Just like last time...

1965

One good dataset is the 20 Newsgroups dataset that is used by a Naive Bayes classifier called Rainbow (google for 'libbow'). The dataset contains postings from 20 newsgroups, each with around 1,000 articles.

Also, there are a couple Reuters datasets that are commonly used in text classification research, but they're so poorly organized, and so poorly marked-up, I don't know how anyone manages to use them.

You could always try using a one handed dvorak setup. Then you don't have to buy any new hardware just rearrange the keys on an old junker keyboard. And if you find you like the layout you can move to the standard Dvorak layout once/if you hand heals. Heck you can even get X keysym files.

I remember reading a rant by C.S. Lewis describing this very thing...

That sounds like this one here (about three-quarters of the way down the page).

Aha! but you forget the Morris worm, the very first worm to ever hit (and pretty much bring down) the internet. UNIX hosts can be targeted. Personally I don't think a *NIX worm would target client software but rather the server-side like Morris did. Apache? Sendmail? Ssh?

True, it is very unlikely but certainly not impossible.

Here I was expecting to see a police car on Amazon's banner, or a watermark of Artoo in the background, or a magic pi ball somewhere.

Dammit.

P.S. Go here if you don't get this post.

But - that's only part of the goal. Ultimately, I believe that the goal of Planetlab is to help transition these research technologies into deployed, useful services; so the network becomes more than just a research platform, it becomes the next DNS infrastructure, or the next Akamai, or the next Napster (ok, ok, don't sue!).

So, some of the examples the article cited are pretty illustrative. For example, the MIT Chord project is a Distributed Hash Table. DHTs are a peer-to-peer storage/retrieval system that allow completely decentralized resource sharing between cooperating hosts. And so on, and so on. The hope of the PlanetLab folk is that some of these projects will become the foundation for the next Internet architecture, or internet middleware, or whatever it is you want to call it -- the next set of critical services that change the way we use the 'net.

But even before that, Planetlab is one heck of a useful research tool. There are several papers at this year's Sigcomm conference (big computer networking conference) that took their measurements using Planetlab. There are a number of other papers and projects in the pipeline that're using planetlab as their research testbed. The cool thing about planetlab is that it's now considerably larger than most prior testbeds, and has a lot more momentum for future growth. Full disclosure: I spend a part of my time working on planetlab, but this post is not any kind of official view, it's just my interpretation.-

OGG is a damn good codec. Like mp3, it takes advantage of psychoacoustics of human hearing to gain huge compression ratios. OGG is superior to mp3 in pretty much every respect. I doubt FLAC can better than 60% similar to other LL codecs. What about patent encumbrances? Audiophiles are just as smart as they are spend-thrift.

You'd also find this interesting and useful:

The Blogdex at MIT - the "weblog diffusion index"

Steve Albini's much more thorough and interesting rant (from 1998), The Problem with Music

Courtney Love was sticking up for artists rather loudly during her lawsuit with Vivendi Universal, but shut up quickly after receiving a nice, fat settlement.

I wish I could say it surprised me.

f its the size of 1 mm, shouldn't it be called a "milli-engine"?

I think they are naming it after the size of the moving parts...

Also... MIT Gas Turbine Lab Micro-Turbines

Have you checked out the MIT OpenCourseWare?

Their strategy seems well thought out and could be a model for other similar efforts. I seem to remember that it's going to cost them on the order of $100 million to achieve their goal of _all_ MIT course material online.

Have you checked out the MIT OpenCourseWare?

Their strategy seems well thought out and could be a model for other similar efforts. I seem to remember that it's going to cost them on the order of $100 million to achieve their goal of _all_ MIT course material online.

Ok, after googling for a little bit (I will never MSN anything!), I found a site who has done just what you were describing with MPEG video.

http://www.ai.mit.edu/~brussell/research/sres/data /

Anyways, it seems that without proper filtering, the output looks REALLY weird. (look at they guy walking in a circle in front of the quilt) It seems that the motion vectors from the MPEG get taken in as part of the detected edges somehow! Thus, this would be most useful for uncompressed analog video as an input.

Is this book really as authoratitive as it tries to appear?

I had a quick scan over it, and while I'm reluctant to judge on first impressions, I couldn't help feeling that it had a lot of breadth but not much depth. It struck me as somewhat similar in style to the wizard book, though obviously with wider coverage.

I had the same immediate reservation as you did: the OOP section seemed weak compared to established "classics" in the field. Failure to mention things like LSP is unforgivable in a book aiming for a theoretical approach. The offhand comment about "whatever that means" in reference to sending messages to everything didn't much help, either; I'm guessing anyone who's used a language like Smalltalk or Ruby would be quite comfortable with the idea.

All of that said, there appears to be a lot of useful and worthwhile material in the book, and I'll certainly be dipping into other parts of it as time allows over the next few days. It's only a preprint, and I only looked at one section in any real detail at all, so I'll give it the benefit of the doubt for now.

Is this book really as authoratitive as it tries to appear?

you are allowed HTML markup:

Here's the link now.

justa simple {a href="URL"} link {/a}

replace the {} with greater and less than.

VSTa is a free software OS inspired by QNX and Plan 9. Very nice looking, although when you run it very disappointing (it's slow).

Much more interesting to me is the concept of exokernels, a completely different OS organization which allows for /extremely/ fast operation. Some have suggested that Linux be refactored into an exokernel-like arrangement for multiprocessing: rather than trying to build a 256-processor single memory image Linux kernel (with all the horrid locking issues that implies), just build a 4 processor kernel, and when more processors are available, run multiple instances of it under an exokernel.

(The most significant person who's pushing for this plan for Linux, by the way, is Larry McVoy, notorious author of BitKeeper.)

-Billy

Actually, in most states the speed limit is a suggested value for safe travel. Unless the sign has the word "max" on it, in which case it becomes an absolute speed limit. Here are a few articles to explain further: article 1 and article 2

-Ab