Slashdot Mirror

Reminds me of the distance hack in the Infinite Corridor. From hacks.mit.edu:
http://hacks.mit.edu/Hacks/by_year/1997/infinity_r ods/
http://hacks.mit.edu/Hacks/by_year/1997/infinity_r ods/poster_text.html

Reminds me of the distance hack in the Infinite Corridor. From hacks.mit.edu:
http://hacks.mit.edu/Hacks/by_year/1997/infinity_r ods/
http://hacks.mit.edu/Hacks/by_year/1997/infinity_r ods/poster_text.html

And yes, the local police do use the marks as references when writing accident reports.

You ought to read "If at all Possible, Involve a Cow." -- it's about college pranks, and has nice sections on both MIT and Caltech. A nice afternoon's diversion, at least... motivation for one's own college prank career at the worst.

And yes, the local police do use the marks as references when writing accident reports.

You ought to read "If at all Possible, Involve a Cow." -- it's about college pranks, and has nice sections on both MIT and Caltech. A nice afternoon's diversion, at least... motivation for one's own college prank career at the worst.

The measurement used was the "Smoot" after fraternity pledge Oliver Smoot - here's the offical story of how the "Smoot" measurement came to be.

http://web.mit.edu/museum/fun/smoots.html

I do not have any experience with their products, but the solution offered by this company seems simple and functional. Their system consists of an apparatus that turns pages of your book automatically, scans, turns, scans, turns. The result you can naturally pass to OCR.

Now, if I was to digitize all my books, I would try to create te the 4DigitalBooks kind of solution myself. The only tricky part is to find a cheap enough way to turn pages automatically, see also Kris Mckenzie's automatic page turner, still the best start is this document which is a proposal and overview on how to create an automatic page turner from pieces, the total cost is $459.

Do you want to be a professional programmer / software developer / software engineer? Or would you be satified being a hack (not a hacker) programmer that writes one-off (web) scripts?

If you want to be a white-collar professional type, expect to be like any other professional, and get the best education you can. Which is typically at least a four year bachelors degree.

You can get an entire BSc Computer Science via correspondance, online or via postal mail. Look at any university in US, you very well may qualify for financial aid, or low-interest student loans.

Then follow this method:

1) Get an education, (knowledge that will not become out of date)
a) understand computers (a la Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs)
b) mathematics
c) history of computing
d) programming in the small
e) programming in the large
f) software engineering
g) networking
h) professional presentations and writing skills
i) algorithms and data structures
j) database systems (RDBMS, OO databases)
etc.

2) Training (skills of tools and techniques, that will have to be maintained)
a) programming language (e.g. C, Pascal, Java, C++, whatever)
b) database (Oracle, PostgreSQL, MySQL)
c) operating systems (VMS, Unix, Linux, W2K, Plan 9)
d) project mangement

Note: Training does not need to be formal, and tends to be more expensive. I did most of my either at university, or on the job.

3) Experience
I think you can figure this one out. I should point out that testing, QA is often an easier to get into than the programming department. Also debugging skills, and seeing what can go wrong (Risks Digest) will hopefully make you a safer programmer.

This seems like a trivial statement, though underemphasized in the popular media. Any organelle or chemical that is passed from parent to progeny is "cellular information"

Microbes have had billions of years more than homo sapiens to "discover" and test new anti biotics, it would be remarkable if we had surpassed them in cleverness in the few centuries we've studied them. We have gotten better at somethings though; 16 years ago if you wanted to clone a gene, the typical way to do it was to insert it into the E. coli genome, wait for the bacteria to divide several times and harvest the dna. Now its often done using polymerase chain reaction (though this does still require using a DNA polymerase from a thermophile, so we can't quite declare independence from the rest of nature.)

has a rig that will hook up to you typical unix box. Pretty pictures too.

http://affect.media.mit.edu/AC_research/sensing.ht ml

By adulthood, Mendeleev's periodic table of the elements is firmly planted in a typical mind either as a tool for study or proof of mystical forces at work in nature. There are alternative structures: some clever and others using alternate media, extensions to the table providing nuclear structure, fermi surfaces, and line spectra.

Still others are extraordinarily cross-thematic, merging chemistry with comic books, poetry or haiku. But only the grouping-nature of the columns is retained in rejected elements, condiments and beer. Eventually the elements and the periodic qualities have been lost entirely, reducing the periodic table to a design template for topical lists of funk and rock music, comedy and TV shows, famous mathematicians and presidents, even SGI products. Soon a complete breakdown of the scientific aspect yields no similarity to the original, becoming a glorified table, a marketing tool, or hype itself. There is mounting evidence of a conspiracy.

http://affect.media.mit.edu/AC_affect.html, and description

Affective computing is computing that relates to, arises from, or deliberately influences emotions. Our research focuses on creating personal computational systems endowed with the ability to sense, recognize and understand human emotions, together with the skills to respond in an intelligent, sensitive, and respectful manner toward the user and his/her emotions. We are also interested in the development of computers that aid in communicating human emotions, computers that assist and support people in development of their skills of social-emotional intelligence, and computers that "have" emotional mechanisms, as well as the intelligence and ethics to appropriately manage, express, and otherwise utilize these "emotions." Embracing the latter goal of "giving machines emotions" is perhaps the most controversial, and is based on a variety of scientific findings, which include indications that emotion plays a crucial role in enabling a resource-limited system to adapt intelligently to complex and unpredictable situations.

...

We understand that this research may involve gaining access to the emotional life of a person, including information that may be highly personal, intimate, and private. This work is inherently motivated by respect for human feelings, and therefore must respond with respect to a person's desire for privacy. Our default is to protect a person's privacy throughout our research, as well as in the tools we develop. We appreciate the potentially sensitive nature of our work, and feel strongly that the work we do adheres both to the highest ethical standards and the most fundamental human values. We made an effort to detail this policy.

Sig: What Happened To The Censorware Project (censorware.org)

http://affect.media.mit.edu/AC_affect.html, and description

Affective computing is computing that relates to, arises from, or deliberately influences emotions. Our research focuses on creating personal computational systems endowed with the ability to sense, recognize and understand human emotions, together with the skills to respond in an intelligent, sensitive, and respectful manner toward the user and his/her emotions. We are also interested in the development of computers that aid in communicating human emotions, computers that assist and support people in development of their skills of social-emotional intelligence, and computers that "have" emotional mechanisms, as well as the intelligence and ethics to appropriately manage, express, and otherwise utilize these "emotions." Embracing the latter goal of "giving machines emotions" is perhaps the most controversial, and is based on a variety of scientific findings, which include indications that emotion plays a crucial role in enabling a resource-limited system to adapt intelligently to complex and unpredictable situations.

...

We understand that this research may involve gaining access to the emotional life of a person, including information that may be highly personal, intimate, and private. This work is inherently motivated by respect for human feelings, and therefore must respond with respect to a person's desire for privacy. Our default is to protect a person's privacy throughout our research, as well as in the tools we develop. We appreciate the potentially sensitive nature of our work, and feel strongly that the work we do adheres both to the highest ethical standards and the most fundamental human values. We made an effort to detail this policy.

Sig: What Happened To The Censorware Project (censorware.org)

.. has some good information

I'd suggest reading AffectiveComputing by Rosalind Picard from MIT Press, her homepage is here and interview on First Monday and the MIT homepage at MIT

I'd suggest reading AffectiveComputing by Rosalind Picard from MIT Press, her homepage is here and interview on First Monday and the MIT homepage at MIT

As a previous poster put it, staying with a company malicously and sabotage their code (they are paying you to wreck their company). Then when they fire you, tell the BSA that they are running illegal software (my friend did that, he got a bounty plus revenge plus his other friend got a "software auditing" job at that same company - LOL!). Read Sun Tzu's The Art of War. There are far subtler things that you can do than ploughing a plane into WTC. Tell the police and EFF about the fact that they altered the policy with incorrect notification, and invite the people that wrote angry letters to participate in a class action lawsuit (dangle the carrot in front of them). Then screw them with any official bodies, e.g. report Doctor malpractice to the American Medical Association, report teachers as being child molestors, this'll bring a whole pile of trouble on their heads regardless of whether they're innocent or guilty. Get the company's customer list and start rumours that this is a great conspiracy, "They started Phase 1 by releasing customer personal data - you are next, then our suppliers. This is what they're going to do - yada yada. I'm an anonymous whistleblower" (embedding a lie within a truth makes the lie more convincing). Remember Star Wars: Phantom Menace, "he is a good man, but is mired by baseless allegations of corruption". You must make these baseless allegations.

Blowing your top and quitting in protest strips you of the most powerful weapons you possess. This is why coders keep getting manipulated. We simply can't get things done and don't know how the world actually works compared to sales people and marketing people. Companies know that if they piss of sales and marketing, they'll have the company on its knees within days.

Remember: subterfuge, subterfuge, subterfuge. Of course keep it as anonymous as possible, don't get slapped with libel or lander charges.

Score: -1, Malicous, cunning, caniving, grazing legality.

• Poor weather (especially in the North East) means that you can't observer frequently enough to have good odds of being the first one to see something because you will be clouded out far too often. Truly serious comet hunters move to Arizona to have enought clear skys to have good odds.
• Today most comets are found by professional searches such as linear with bigger scopes. That doesn't leave much left for amateurs
• Equipement maybe affordable for SillyValley stock holders but not for the masses out there. Min. req. these days for comet hunting is about a 20" or 22" obsession scope. That's the trend in recent amateur discovery such as comet Petriew
• to find stuff that faint you need to be several hours out of town to get a dark enough sky becuase you work in a big town to affoard all the equipement. Avoiding light pollution is essential to see stuff that faint so you can't do it often enough

So SOHO is actually a playing field leveler in that sense and makes comet discovery more accessible than before. Sure the is less glory that doing it the old fashion way. It's free, always good weather, timely data. It's also the only legitimate way to get your name in the heavens instead of buying stars which is nothing more than a scam IMHO. So, sure, it's sure a much bigger kick to find one at the eyepiece but a SOHO one still counts in my book.

First of all - please read the Modern Hippocratic oath to get a feel of the sheer gravity that the oath actually represents. Then imagine the programmers oath

"Wherever I can, I will code many hidden easter eggs without the project managers consent or knowledge to provide the end users something to do. Also, I shall endeaver to ingest large quantities of mountain dew."

I mean, I can think of a few professions above programmers I want to take an oath (How about the short order cook that spit in your food last week huh?)

Second of all - How can you even compare the concept of upholding the ability to save and improve physically the life of an indivdual without corruption to a programmer? How is coding spam similar to endangering a life for unethical pursuits?

Third of all - WHO CARES? Oaths are meaningless in a captalistic society such as ours. Want proof? Lets take a quick tour down career avenue and look at the professions that take oaths - Lawyers (hmm, they seem to be a respectable bunch), Elected Officials (don't get me started), Judiciaries (Not too bad in his arena) and Public Safety officals (Rodney King, Malice Green, etc. etc.) Not to open a can of worms but the ORIGINAL Hippocratic Oath actually had a section condeming a doctor to perform an abortion so theoretically doctors that perform abortion break their oaths (I agree to the modern version expressed above and my political viewpoints on abortion are hopefully not reflected!)

To compare the importance of upholding the importance of ethics in the medical profession to a coder writing spam, spyware or other such "annoyances" is ABSURD.

the creating community connection project might be of interest. while it's a little dated, an online paper [pdf], gives "...an overview of the C3 system, a description of the research design and methodology, a summary and discussion of the results obtained via one-on-one interviews with each family conducted in August 2000, as well as follow-up site-visits with a targeted sample of families during the months of March and April 2001, and finally, lessons learned and a step-by-step recommendations for future initiatives."

if you're in the seattle area around may 16-19 you might want to check out the shaping the network society, which is going to have presentations galore on wired and wireless community networks.

the creating community connection project might be of interest. while it's a little dated, an online paper [pdf], gives "...an overview of the C3 system, a description of the research design and methodology, a summary and discussion of the results obtained via one-on-one interviews with each family conducted in August 2000, as well as follow-up site-visits with a targeted sample of families during the months of March and April 2001, and finally, lessons learned and a step-by-step recommendations for future initiatives."

if you're in the seattle area around may 16-19 you might want to check out the shaping the network society, which is going to have presentations galore on wired and wireless community networks.

Adobe Software Patent Policy
Software Patent Institute Members

Go to Madnick's home page at MIT. It looks to me like the guy is stuck in the 1970's somewhere and he just seems deeply in love with big corporations--but judge for yourself. There's little experience listed there with desktop machines, the consumer market, or modern software systems.

His written testimony is quite funny. He writes things like (I'm paraphrasing) "if we do this, it would help Microsoft's competitors and hurt Microsoft" (yup, that's the point of an antitrust remedy), "this would mean that consumers might have to choose from many different components" (yup, again, that's the point), and "opening up would expose Microsoft's intellectual property" (again, that's the point: the value of much of Microsoft's so-called "intellectual property" lies in their monopoly position, not in some kind of innovation or technical contribution).

It's good that this guy exposed himself for what he really is: a hired gun with little expertise in the area he is testifying on.

Microsoft's last big-name hired Gun was Gregory Mankiw from Harvard, who stated big and bold that "delaying the release of Windows would be like throwing sand in the gears of human progress", but then later had to admit that he knew absolutely nothing about computers and just kind of thought that he thought Microsoft was good because monopolies in general were good (as a modern Harvard economist, he didn't quite put it that way, but that's what it amounted to).

Ok so MS actually thinks their business can not be characterized as "high prices and inferior products", and is taking issue with what they see as a turnabout by somone they might wish to see as an ally.

Clearly MS is very chipped off that the people who largely won IBM's defense in that case now are giving testimony suggesting that MS is in violation of antitrust law.

I attended a lecture by Fisher in the mid-80s where he delineated that IBM had:

• Made coporate policy back in the '30s that they wanted to become *big*
  and were not going to screw that up by running afould of anti-trust laws
  
• Never lost a private antitrust suit (as of '84) - there had been 25 or so

The government's case (brought in the closing days of the Johnson administration) had been seriously flawed (e.g. claiming that IBM 'controlled' 70% of the US computing market, they included plug-compatible competitors in IBM's market share while not counting the 2nd largest manufacturer of the time (DEC) in the caculation)

One difference here of course is that MS *has* been found to be a monopoly and (imo) has based much of its strategy on hurting competitors instead of helping customers. Personally I think MS has beleived from the beginning that if they are simply 'excellent' and compete hard they will win, and the notion that they have indeed been found in violation of antitrust is just a foreign idea.

IBM is a tough competitor in many areas, but they mostly seem to behave themselves in the manners that a potentially monopoly player is required under US law and regulation: They license IP, they publish detailed specs, they do not pre-announce products in a manner that would be found to be anti-competitive (and yes there's been a lot of controversy on this last one).

As for pulling witnesses 'Because the trial is going so well' ... ok they're doing better then in the actual trial but clearly the non-settling states had plans to get more mileage still from MS's witnesses than MS would gain.

Just hoping this judge manages more than a wrist-slap. MS bullied the govt' out of their first forray in '95 and then proceeded to wiggle around the few penalties that were set ... maybe it'll be different this time

Confusion may arise from his title (as listed in the MIT directory), "J N Maguire Prof Of Info Tech".

Incredible! From his bio

Dr. Madnick is a prolific writer and is the author or co-author of over 250 books, articles, or reports including the classic textbook, Operating Systems (McGraw-Hill)

Maybe someone who writes a textbook on Operating System should understand the difference between an Operating System and a desktop environment?

If you check Stuart Madnick's homepage, he's not a CS professor. He's a professor of management. Need I say more?

I thought this was wierd, so I did some checking on this guy. I looked for him on MIT Electrical Engineering and Computer Science faculty list, but couldn't find him. So I looked him up in the people directory and found this:

name: Madnick, Stuart E email: smadnick@MIT.EDU phone: (617) 253-6671 address: E53-321 department: School Of Mgmt title: J N Maguire Prof Of Info Tech url: http://mit.edu/smadnick/www/home.html

His department is not EECS, it is the School of Management! His research is in areas such as Total Data Quality Management and Productivity From Information Technology. Here is a bio description from his web page:

http://mit.edu/smadnick/www/home.html Madnick finds ways to integrate information systems, giving organizations a more global view of their operations. He is leading a project that develops new technologies for gathering and analyzing information from many different sources, including conventional databases and the World Wide Web. He is also testing these new technologies in industries such as financial services, manufacturing, logistics, and transportation.

Microsoft basically found anyone from MIT they could because it is MIT. I'm surprised they didn't find a janitor from MIT to testify.

Isn't it a little harsh how they're going after this guy as incompetant? Read his answers- you'll see that he's doing his best to tell the truth and give factual information, as opposed to blurt out opinions.

Look the guy up. Read his Bio. Look at his list of papers. The dude was a bigshot on IBM's VM/370, has BS/MS in EE, Masters in Management, and a Ph.D. in CS (from MIT).

My point is that its easy to slam someone because "he so smart, but don't he ain't know nothin' about KDE". This article (ahd /.) makes him out to be an idiot, which I'll bet he's not..

You can find out all kinds of interesting stuff about him on his Home Page

John Norris Maguire Professor of Information Technology and Leaders for Manufacturing Professor of Management Science Sloan School of Management / Massachusetts Institute of Technology

This guy is clearly out of his depth. Here's his homepage at M.I.T. He seems to be more of a management expert than anything else (kinda like a graduate-level PHB).

However, he is the auther of the classic textbook "Operating Systems". So classic that it was written in 1974, and has been long out of print. What the hell was MS thinking? This guy wouldn't know a GUI if it bit him!

He is affiliated with the Sloan School of Management (Course 15), and not the EECS department (Course 6). Hence, the lack of knowledge about the OS itself. He's probably trying to get some more funding from Microsoft for the i-Campus initiative Here's his personal home page, FYI.

He is affiliated with the Sloan School of Management (Course 15), and not the EECS department (Course 6). Hence, the lack of knowledge about the OS itself. He's probably trying to get some more funding from Microsoft for the i-Campus initiative Here's his personal home page, FYI.

Since I actually do research in this area and there is some confusion here, let me give a very brief introduction to photonic crystals (which can be studied using free software).

Photonic crystals are periodically-structured optical media that, with the right structure, completely forbid the propagation of light in a certain range of wavelengths (analogous to electronic band gaps). They form a sort of "optical insulator" that you can use to trap, guide, and control light. The work at essentially any wavelength (in contrast to metallic waveguides) provided that you can fabricate a periodic structure with periodicity on the order of half a wavelength, and have a number of potential applications, including:

• Integrated optics: optimally miniaturized networks of optical devices to offload some analog signal-processing or telecommunications tasks, circumventing e.g. bandwidth limitations of electronic circuits. (Few these days are predicting all-optical computers.)
• Optical fibers (from 2d or 1d patterns) that circumvent fundamental loss/nonlinearity/PMD limits of silica fiber, and for other novel applications (e.g. high-power or highly-nonlinear fiber devices).
• More-efficient LEDs and lasers, both by enhancing the optical density of states and by making the light go where you want it to go.
• Slow-light devices for time-delays, nonlinear interactions...
• Super-lenses (that can focus beyond the diffraction limit via negative effective indices of refraction).
• Super-prisms (very wavelength-sensitive refraction, e.g. for wavelength demultiplexing).
• ...

1d photonic crystals (multilayer films) have been known since Rayleigh in 1887 (although there are new twists) but 2d and 3d crystals weren't conceived until 1987, via a marriage of solid-state physics and electromagnetism.

The paper Slashdot linked to is considering photonic-crystals made by self-assembly of microspheres into close-packed lattices. A perfect crystal has limited use; you need to make defects to carve devices out of it, and that is what they are doing here. (There are many problems of precision, etcetera, that still need to be overcome for practical integrated devices, I think.)

Note that one can also make photonic crystals with traditional lithography, but that poses its own set of challenges (especially for full 3d-periodic crystals).

Since I actually do research in this area and there is some confusion here, let me give a very brief introduction to photonic crystals (which can be studied using free software).

Photonic crystals are periodically-structured optical media that, with the right structure, completely forbid the propagation of light in a certain range of wavelengths (analogous to electronic band gaps). They form a sort of "optical insulator" that you can use to trap, guide, and control light. The work at essentially any wavelength (in contrast to metallic waveguides) provided that you can fabricate a periodic structure with periodicity on the order of half a wavelength, and have a number of potential applications, including:

• Integrated optics: optimally miniaturized networks of optical devices to offload some analog signal-processing or telecommunications tasks, circumventing e.g. bandwidth limitations of electronic circuits. (Few these days are predicting all-optical computers.)
• Optical fibers (from 2d or 1d patterns) that circumvent fundamental loss/nonlinearity/PMD limits of silica fiber, and for other novel applications (e.g. high-power or highly-nonlinear fiber devices).
• More-efficient LEDs and lasers, both by enhancing the optical density of states and by making the light go where you want it to go.
• Slow-light devices for time-delays, nonlinear interactions...
• Super-lenses (that can focus beyond the diffraction limit via negative effective indices of refraction).
• Super-prisms (very wavelength-sensitive refraction, e.g. for wavelength demultiplexing).
• ...

1d photonic crystals (multilayer films) have been known since Rayleigh in 1887 (although there are new twists) but 2d and 3d crystals weren't conceived until 1987, via a marriage of solid-state physics and electromagnetism.

The paper Slashdot linked to is considering photonic-crystals made by self-assembly of microspheres into close-packed lattices. A perfect crystal has limited use; you need to make defects to carve devices out of it, and that is what they are doing here. (There are many problems of precision, etcetera, that still need to be overcome for practical integrated devices, I think.)

Note that one can also make photonic crystals with traditional lithography, but that poses its own set of challenges (especially for full 3d-periodic crystals).

Since I actually do research in this area and there is some confusion here, let me give a very brief introduction to photonic crystals (which can be studied using free software).

Photonic crystals are periodically-structured optical media that, with the right structure, completely forbid the propagation of light in a certain range of wavelengths (analogous to electronic band gaps). They form a sort of "optical insulator" that you can use to trap, guide, and control light. The work at essentially any wavelength (in contrast to metallic waveguides) provided that you can fabricate a periodic structure with periodicity on the order of half a wavelength, and have a number of potential applications, including:

• Integrated optics: optimally miniaturized networks of optical devices to offload some analog signal-processing or telecommunications tasks, circumventing e.g. bandwidth limitations of electronic circuits. (Few these days are predicting all-optical computers.)
• Optical fibers (from 2d or 1d patterns) that circumvent fundamental loss/nonlinearity/PMD limits of silica fiber, and for other novel applications (e.g. high-power or highly-nonlinear fiber devices).
• More-efficient LEDs and lasers, both by enhancing the optical density of states and by making the light go where you want it to go.
• Slow-light devices for time-delays, nonlinear interactions...
• Super-lenses (that can focus beyond the diffraction limit via negative effective indices of refraction).
• Super-prisms (very wavelength-sensitive refraction, e.g. for wavelength demultiplexing).
• ...

1d photonic crystals (multilayer films) have been known since Rayleigh in 1887 (although there are new twists) but 2d and 3d crystals weren't conceived until 1987, via a marriage of solid-state physics and electromagnetism.

The paper Slashdot linked to is considering photonic-crystals made by self-assembly of microspheres into close-packed lattices. A perfect crystal has limited use; you need to make defects to carve devices out of it, and that is what they are doing here. (There are many problems of precision, etcetera, that still need to be overcome for practical integrated devices, I think.)

Note that one can also make photonic crystals with traditional lithography, but that poses its own set of challenges (especially for full 3d-periodic crystals).

Since I actually do research in this area and there is some confusion here, let me give a very brief introduction to photonic crystals (which can be studied using free software).

Photonic crystals are periodically-structured optical media that, with the right structure, completely forbid the propagation of light in a certain range of wavelengths (analogous to electronic band gaps). They form a sort of "optical insulator" that you can use to trap, guide, and control light. The work at essentially any wavelength (in contrast to metallic waveguides) provided that you can fabricate a periodic structure with periodicity on the order of half a wavelength, and have a number of potential applications, including:

• Integrated optics: optimally miniaturized networks of optical devices to offload some analog signal-processing or telecommunications tasks, circumventing e.g. bandwidth limitations of electronic circuits. (Few these days are predicting all-optical computers.)
• Optical fibers (from 2d or 1d patterns) that circumvent fundamental loss/nonlinearity/PMD limits of silica fiber, and for other novel applications (e.g. high-power or highly-nonlinear fiber devices).
• More-efficient LEDs and lasers, both by enhancing the optical density of states and by making the light go where you want it to go.
• Slow-light devices for time-delays, nonlinear interactions...
• Super-lenses (that can focus beyond the diffraction limit via negative effective indices of refraction).
• Super-prisms (very wavelength-sensitive refraction, e.g. for wavelength demultiplexing).
• ...

1d photonic crystals (multilayer films) have been known since Rayleigh in 1887 (although there are new twists) but 2d and 3d crystals weren't conceived until 1987, via a marriage of solid-state physics and electromagnetism.

The paper Slashdot linked to is considering photonic-crystals made by self-assembly of microspheres into close-packed lattices. A perfect crystal has limited use; you need to make defects to carve devices out of it, and that is what they are doing here. (There are many problems of precision, etcetera, that still need to be overcome for practical integrated devices, I think.)

Note that one can also make photonic crystals with traditional lithography, but that poses its own set of challenges (especially for full 3d-periodic crystals).

What about MIT?

I can see it now...the BSA auditor shows up, sees a Dell box, and walks up to it to start his Win32 auditing tools.

Then he says "what's this freaking owl doing on the login screen?"

I graduated from MIT in EECS without seeing ONE wintel box

When did you graduate? I graduated in '95 without seeing seeing Windows boxen, but things have changed there in the last couple of years. The Tech had an article a little while ago about students demanding more WinNT machines. *sigh*

So the short answer to your question is : no, XSL is not the right choice to do procedural logic.

Functional programming requires a completely different mode of thinking than procedural programming. Anybody who understands the definition of "procedure" in ordinary English understands the procedural programming paradigm, even if they don't know the technical details. But the functional programming paradigm is a lot less commonplace, and takes some getting used to. Before tackling XSLT, it might make sense to try to pick up some fundamental FP concepts. One way to do this would be to work through the leading functional programming textbook. (It says a lot about MIT that they've gone and made the entire book available online!)

It is kind of irritating that XSLT's creators decreed that a syntactically correct XSLT program had to be a well-formed XML document -- and thus rather verbose. But that sort of thing rather goes with the FP mindset -- FP source is supposed to be easily transformable using the same language it's written in. That's why there are Lots of Insipid Silly Parentheses -- and so few syntax rules -- in languages like Scheme.

It's worth mentioning that Perl, though basically a procedural language, has some of the same design philosophy as the FP languages. It's easier to code a simple loop in Perl than in an FP language -- but Perl has as many ways to avoid coding a loop as any FP language!

Also worth mentioning that XSLT and XSL are not quite the same thing. XSLT is the transformation language for XSL. It's a relatively recent invention. As originally conceived by Microsoft (yep, the evil empire was the biggest partner in drawing up the original XSL spec), transformation languages were a mix-and-match affair. A lot of early examples had XSL stylesheets with embedded Visual Basic code!

Come to think of it, it wouldn't be hard to do a stylesheet language based on Perl, or to evolve a convention for embedding Perl instead of XSLT in XSL stylesheets. Now, why do you suppose nobody is working on that. Uh, that's a rhetorical/socratic question!

It's more general than e-mail, but in the wearable computing community, there's a little application called Remembrance Agent, written by Bradley Rhodes that many folks use. In terms of stand-alone UI, it's still quite primitive, but that's because it was built around dynamic hooks into Emacs.

I've been playing around with some Java-based wrapper code, to wrap the ra-retrieve executable in a Server and allow clients to access the data via sockets. I have a Java-based client coded up that hooks into the System clipboard, but it's still in alpha-mode. All GPL'd of course, but needs a little time to mature. It's a proof-of-concept, work in progress. :-)

Check out Brad's site for more insight into the work he did and is doing.

And I sold several hundred old macs for $1 to $5 apeice at the MIT Flea Market last year.

here's a good start

http://www.ai.mit.edu/~vona/bass/bass.html

you sir, are a whore

Hmm. I got a 3-year next-business-day warranty on my Inspiron 8000 and have so far replaced a DVD-ROM drive and aa touchpad with no flak apart from some monkey telling me to uninstall GNU/Linux and run their DOS-based diagnostics from factory installed Windows ME. I don't need a piece of software to tell me I'm having an intermittent problem with their touchpad. And I certainly don't need someone telling me to uninstall my OS to solve a hardware defect.

With Dell, call to get fast results.

Comparative Distro Reviews for the I-8000:

1. RedHat
2. Debian (good for post-install tweaks)
3. SuSE

Wearable Rememberance Agent may be the "killer app".

http://agents.www.media.mit.edu/groups/el/projects / pacewar

According to the readme it's based on a print out of the original Spacewar! code. It uses an PDP-1 emulator written in Java. Source code is available.

This article is much more in-depth and does a better job of representing the technology. The article posted to Slashdot implies that Cromatica can predict a mugging. Cromatica identifies congestion and predicts suicide attempts. And it does this with pretty simple algorithms.

Briefly: Cromatica views crowds as changing colors against a background. When the colors stop, this is congestion. Likewise, suicide attempts are indicated by lingering for 10 minutes or more. It's pretty easy to identify a single person against an empty backdrop.

Of course, people are working on predicting muggings, and the article goes into that as well.

The article also has links to the research itself.

And for those of us who know how to write links in /. - just click here for the picture.

Observers were a bit flummoxed by the timing of CertCo's suit. It would seem that the company could get substantially more cash out of PayPal once PayPal had substanially more cash -- that is, after the company's IPO. But the suit has definitely put the kibosh on PayPal's stock offering, at least for the moment.

As senior vice president e-commerce at Chase Manhattan Bank, June headed up wholesale e-commerce initiatives for one of Chase's largest business sectors and led investment activities on a number of strategic e-commerce investments. June played an instrumental role in creating Spectrum, a for-profit joint venture between Wells Fargo, First Union and Chase focused on electronic bill payment and presentment (EBPP).

PayPal began depositing customer balances into FDIC-insured bank accounts. The company had asked for an opinion from the FDIC on whether it could pass the insurance protection on to its customers. In its advisory letter, the FDIC said the insurance protections--up to $100,000 per customer per bank--would extend to PayPal customers, even when PayPal deposited the funds for them, PayPal said.