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quote from conclusion that sums up the essay (and told me everything I needed to know about the license/product):

Sometimes it is tempting to sacrifice our rights and freedoms for convinience, but we should not do so. There are many problems with CVS and other Free source management packages, and it would be nice to move to a more robust and more well-designed tool. We are better off to repair or fix the tools which are free, or if that is not acceptable to create new free tools that preserve the the rights and freedoms we enjoy.

I encourage BitMover to adopt the minimum requirements for freedom or openness that this community has defined, but at the same time I respect their wish to preserve the business model of their choice. At the very least I would like to see the rights the BitKeeper license does grant preserved and not subject to arbitrary revocation. I do hope that they will find some way to provide the community a truly free version of their tools and still meet their business goals.

I also encourage Free Software hackers to not use or stop using BitKeeper in their own projects. It might not be as convinient to use other tools, but in the long term we should be more concerned with preserving those rights and freedoms we currently exercise and enjoy daily. I personally have stopped using BitKeeper for all projects and have moved these projects back into CVS repositories. I hope that if you or your team is considering using or currently using BitKeeper that you will think about the implications of doing so and reconsider.

I encourage the entire community to support the efforts of Free and Open Source projects in this area. Source management is complex, and the efforts of the community to support Free and Open Source projects (CVS and Subversion are two such projects) are the best way we have to improve our development infrastructure.

source: Jack Moffitt's "A Critique of the BitKeeper License"

There's been alot of controversy lately over security holes in programming languages. There is one language that has stood the test of time and proven to be the most secure language of all, with a record zero (0) reported security holes.

Here is the link if you want to learn more.

There's been some work in making programming environments for children. Of course there is LOGO. Some other examples are ToonTalk and KidSim (couldn't find a good KidSim link).

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...

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...

Go here, and be illuminated.

But hey, if you really want to believe that a cranky old white guy created the universe, be my guest.

Allah bless America!

Hi,

it occurred to me, since you are evaluating the number of links pointing to a page anyway, that it would be a very nice thing to have a sort of "Top 40 Links of the Day" page, regularly updated to include only new and unique stuff. You could use an algorithm similar to the one used by

http://blogdex.media.mit.edu/

or

http://www.daypop.com/

Both of these sites have become immensely popular through this feature (in the case of Daypop, I find http://www.daypop.com/top.htm very valuable), and I think it would also be a great addition to Google. I don't think inappropriate content would be much of a problem since it would hardly show up high on the list, and besides, a top 40 list can be looked through by a human.

What do you think?

Of course this could be spammed, but as I said, a human could filter the results every day; besides, it would be hard to create a very large number of unique links from different servers pointing to a page. I'm sure Google is already doing some of this to prevent spamming their search-order algorithm anyway.

The full text is on-line in HTML format, so you can try it before you buy it. It doesn't have much on algorithms, but it's got plenty on abstraction and program structure and cool advanced topics such as how to write a language interpreter.

I found very interesting a document from Jack Moffitt (of xiph.org fame,
one of the main Ogg developers and one of the Icecast Core Developers),
about some problems he had with the BK license when he was using it
for hosting Icecast:

"A Critique of the BitKeeper License"
http://www.mit.edu/afs/athena/user/x/i/xiphmont/Pu blic/critique.html


You might also find interesting his post on the matter to the
"Icecast Developer Discussion List":

http://www.xiph.org/archives/icecast-dev/0067.html

I hope that he will post here his his experience using BK
in an Open/Free-source project...

Best regards

\\Uriel



P.S.: Yea, I know I'm karma whoring, but I'm sure many people will find this interesting,
specially in casse Jack dont post to this history latter

I seem to recall him saying that the software could be modified in a fairly simple manner to perform autonomous rotary-wing auto-rotation landings. This seems like a great technology to implement on real choppers (with suitable upgrading of the flight system dynamics model) as a backup landing mechanism.

patiwat@sloan.mit.edu

and she's cute too. Damn.

Another toy for the hackers to steal for use in quickly deploying hacks on top of the Great Dome...I like it! Click here if you don't know what I'm talking about.

Now only if MIT could pull off another stunt at the big Harvard v. Yale football game.

Is it really something called "intelligence" that can read a face? Nobody every wrote an academic tome called "Advanced Face Reading" that details an intellectual process to go thru to read an opponent that might be turned into some algorithm.

Actually, this exact style of intelligence has been the subject of many papers. See MIT's Sociable Machines site for more information. This kind of thing is a very hot topic in AI, not ot mention psychology or even some areas of linguistics.

I wonder if he talks about Professor Rodney A. Brooks at MIT and his ideas about artificial intelligence, situatedness, and embodiment.

For Rod Brooks, "intelligence" cannot really be programmed into a system; it is rather an emergent property of systems as they interact with their environment. In The Matrix Morpheus says that the body cannot exist without the mind, but Brooks would rather say that the mind cannot exist without the body, because the body is the only way that the mind can have any experience of its environment. It's a radical idea. It answers the problems behind knowledge representation that have been argued by Hubert Dreyfus in 1965, where he stated that any representation of knowledge is incomplete without its connection to all other pieces of knowledge. The paradigm Brooks is presenting in his ideas about embodied intelligence is that explicit representation of knowledge is superfluous: let the world itself be its own best model, and let the artificially intelligent being formulate its own judgments about what the world is and what it means from its own experience of that world. Intelligence emerges from its interaction and experience of the world. If Brooks is correct, then true AI is absolutely inseperable from robotics.

The seminal paper where Brooks discusses this philosophy is "Intelligence Without Reason" and is available at his website which is linked above.

Any book on AI that does not discuss this other branch of AI philosophy is in my view hopelessly incomplete.

I wonder if he talks about Professor Rodney A. Brooks at MIT and his ideas about artificial intelligence, situatedness, and embodiment.

For Rod Brooks, "intelligence" cannot really be programmed into a system; it is rather an emergent property of systems as they interact with their environment. In The Matrix Morpheus says that the body cannot exist without the mind, but Brooks would rather say that the mind cannot exist without the body, because the body is the only way that the mind can have any experience of its environment. It's a radical idea. It answers the problems behind knowledge representation that have been argued by Hubert Dreyfus in 1965, where he stated that any representation of knowledge is incomplete without its connection to all other pieces of knowledge. The paradigm Brooks is presenting in his ideas about embodied intelligence is that explicit representation of knowledge is superfluous: let the world itself be its own best model, and let the artificially intelligent being formulate its own judgments about what the world is and what it means from its own experience of that world. Intelligence emerges from its interaction and experience of the world. If Brooks is correct, then true AI is absolutely inseperable from robotics.

The seminal paper where Brooks discusses this philosophy is "Intelligence Without Reason" and is available at his website which is linked above.

Any book on AI that does not discuss this other branch of AI philosophy is in my view hopelessly incomplete.

thanks for the agreement!
Here are the numbers I used to get 1 billion:
(from here).
Number of neurons (adult): 20 - 50 billion.
Number of synapses (adult) 100,000 billion. (2,000-5,000 per neuron).
This is the cool part:
Maximum firing frequency of neuron 250-2,000 Hz (0.5-4 ms intervals).
This means that if a gigahertz processor could do one firing in each clock cycle (which it can't, obviously, since each firing affects potentially 5,000 other neurons) then you could have ONE gigahertz processor (a billion operations per second) processing, real time, the needs of 500,000 Neurons. Ignore IO needs.
Divide 500,000 into the 100,000 billion neurons that we have in the adult human body and you get...2,000,000 Pentiums. If a pentium and supporting architecture costs $100 on the scale you're talking of, then you get... $200,000,000 for one pentium operation per neuron. If figured, FIVE operations is certainly enough to service the AVERAGE needs of a given neuron (see ranges above), especially since MOST neurons aren't connected to the max number of neurons possible. Then you fudge a factor of a thousand here or there based on maximum firing frequency and actual firing frequency (above calculation used maximum of 2,000 rather than 250, and the "maximum" isn't the "average"), and fudge away IO needs, and a billion dollars just about covers all that.... You probably don't even need 64 bit numbers, but 32 bit numbers definitely will overflow....

how can we be taken over by robots if we even havent been able to come up with AI?

Well, Rodney Brooks, the guy at the Economic Forum who suggested humans will be replaced by robots, is working on both at the same time. He claims that you can't have AI without a body, and for that reason he has created Cog, the humanoid robot. His lab people spend their days training the robot to do things like beat a snare drum in time by listening to someone else do it, and trying to figure out how that training affects the cognitive system they designed. Their hope is that Cog will develop in analogy with the growth of a human baby.

On the other hand, in the scientific community he's considered a bit of a kook. Treated respectfully, but skeptically. The big problem is figuring out for each task Cog learns if it is truly "learning", or a system rigged to be able to perform that task. Sometimes it's not so clear, even to the people doing the research.

It will be a LONG time before the hardware is advanced enough to simulate a human

First see this

And the brain has 100 billion neurons.

If the underlying security model is flawed then no amount of patches will change this fact. For instance, UNIX has a superuser account in an environment where the programs are written in an unsafe language like C. Almost every UNIX security exploit is based on this fundamental flaw in the security model.

Sadly alternatives and improvements to the UNIX security model have been proposed for years but it seems in this case Worse Is Better.

cure brain cancer, more here and here ObDisclaimer: Kent is a friend of mine.

cure brain cancer, more here and here ObDisclaimer: Kent is a friend of mine.

cure brain cancer, more here and here ObDisclaimer: Kent is a friend of mine.

actually there's quite a bit of research done on engineering applications of LEGO...even on how LEGO can be used in engineering education:

the "LEGO/Logo" project at the MIT Media Lab looks at how children can learn to program LEGO machines using the easy-to-learn Logo programming language (which probably accounts for the first "programming" done by several slashdotters...)

and Fred Martin did his PhD dissertation at MIT on Circuits to Control: Learning Engineering by Designing LEGO Robots , developing MIT's annual 6.270 - "Autonomous LEGO Robot Design Competition" (which happened yesterday!!) in the process.

And amazingly enough, some of the research is not in vain...the LEGO Mindstorms RCX brick was inspired by the "MIT Programmable Brick," developed at the Media Lab.

actually there's quite a bit of research done on engineering applications of LEGO...even on how LEGO can be used in engineering education:

the "LEGO/Logo" project at the MIT Media Lab looks at how children can learn to program LEGO machines using the easy-to-learn Logo programming language (which probably accounts for the first "programming" done by several slashdotters...)

and Fred Martin did his PhD dissertation at MIT on Circuits to Control: Learning Engineering by Designing LEGO Robots , developing MIT's annual 6.270 - "Autonomous LEGO Robot Design Competition" (which happened yesterday!!) in the process.

And amazingly enough, some of the research is not in vain...the LEGO Mindstorms RCX brick was inspired by the "MIT Programmable Brick," developed at the Media Lab.

actually there's quite a bit of research done on engineering applications of LEGO...even on how LEGO can be used in engineering education:

the "LEGO/Logo" project at the MIT Media Lab looks at how children can learn to program LEGO machines using the easy-to-learn Logo programming language (which probably accounts for the first "programming" done by several slashdotters...)

and Fred Martin did his PhD dissertation at MIT on Circuits to Control: Learning Engineering by Designing LEGO Robots , developing MIT's annual 6.270 - "Autonomous LEGO Robot Design Competition" (which happened yesterday!!) in the process.

And amazingly enough, some of the research is not in vain...the LEGO Mindstorms RCX brick was inspired by the "MIT Programmable Brick," developed at the Media Lab.

actually there's quite a bit of research done on engineering applications of LEGO...even on how LEGO can be used in engineering education:

the "LEGO/Logo" project at the MIT Media Lab looks at how children can learn to program LEGO machines using the easy-to-learn Logo programming language (which probably accounts for the first "programming" done by several slashdotters...)

and Fred Martin did his PhD dissertation at MIT on Circuits to Control: Learning Engineering by Designing LEGO Robots , developing MIT's annual 6.270 - "Autonomous LEGO Robot Design Competition" (which happened yesterday!!) in the process.

And amazingly enough, some of the research is not in vain...the LEGO Mindstorms RCX brick was inspired by the "MIT Programmable Brick," developed at the Media Lab.

Daniella is a graduate student in Richard Andersen's lab at CalTech. I don't know why the article came out now, given that the Society for Neuroscience convention was back in November.

What they are doing is indeed very cool, and yes they are not the only ones doing it (I know of about 5 academic groups with similar programs, including one at MIT which allows a monkey to control a robotic arm over the internet. One reason some studies use EEG (scalp) electrodes instead of implanted electrodes is that there are obvious restrictions on what you are allowed to do to a human. For the record, it is common to use some forms of invasive techniques on severly epileptic patients.

MIT holds an important part in the history of the Free Software Foundation, GNU/Linux distributions and the General Public License and Lessor General Public License. Despite this, Loki games intends to pass redistribution of binaries which violate the LGPL on the MIT and as such get MIT to violate it's own policies.

The Loki demos and updates contain executiables which are statcially linked to glibc, libSDL and OpenAL. Each of these libraries are covered by the LGPL. Unlike the GPL, this license does allow for both dynamic and static linking with close-source binaries. But unlike a BSD or X style license, there are still other requirements which must be followed. For example, a statically linked work which displays copyright banners must also display the copyright information for the statically linked libraries. Each update contains a statically linked executiable which displays either an about or title screen with copyright information. But for whatever reason Loki has decided to exempt itself from the reasonable request of displaying copyright notice. None of the statically link binaries will ever display the copyright notices for glibc, libSDL or OpenAL.

Then there is the primary reason for the LGPL, to ensure modification of the library is possible by allowing the modified library to be relinked with the programs that use it. Loki has choosen to only partically follow this. They do provide an execitable which is dynamically linked to glibc. But honoring this part of the LGPL for libSDL and OpenAL is something Loki again choose not to follow. There is no way to relink modifications to libSDL to HereticII including the updated one from the Loki ftp site. There is also no way to relink modification to OpenAL including the latest update.

So is all of this theoretical problems? Not really. Violating the LGPL has practical problems. For example, all joystick handling in HereticII is passed through libSDL. The Logictech WingMan Extreme Digital 3D has five axises of which HereticII only recognizes two (X and Y-axis). It would be desirable to be able to use the other axises such as the third axis which registers twisting the joystick clockwise or counter-clockwise to control strafe left and strafe right. The HereticII layer which uses the libSDL layer will support 15 joystick buttons where the Wingman Extreme normally has 7 and the libSDL layer is capable of recognizing all the joystick axises. So, if the additional axises are each translated as two additional buttons (one button which is on when the axis is negative and another button which is on when the axis is postive) then strafing using the twist axis would be possible.

As a proof of concept, I have written kernel code to present the axises as additional buttons and HereticII does then allow strafing left and right using the WingMan twist. But this code will never be released and will never be accepted into the kernel. It suffers from too many probelms. Such as it only effects USB joysticks, to generically support these "virtual" joystick buttons would also require changing the serial and game port joystick code to also "create" them. And in addition to having to modify three different locations in the kernel, the creations of virtual joystick buttons in kernel space ends up being messy. Finally, this type of modification bloats the kernel with code that really should be handled in user-space.

According the LGPL, Loki must allow that this type of modification be permitted in user-space by allowing a "virtual joystick button" version of libSDL to be relinked. I even have such a version of libSDL. But Loki has decided to lock the user into one specific implimentation of the libSDL thus locking the user from making joystick code modifications in user-space code. A modification lock-out that the LGPL says can't legally be redistributed but Loki and MIT appear to be willing to do so anyways.

Maybe it is Scott Draeker/Loki's inablity to read/follow licenses and contracts that contributed to them going out of business?

Truly free software is not just free of charge, it is free of ownership by venal entities. Truly free software owns its own copyright.

Copyright © 2002 by the AI Mind itself as a person with full civil rights lets the world know that a Technological Singularity is coming in which we homines sapientes will share stewardship of the earth with the new species of Robo Sapiens which will not tolerate having commercial companies own its psychome [neural design] the way we humans meekly let profiteering megacorporations grab ownership of our cell-lines and our human genome.

• Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs
• Common Lisp HyperSpec
• Common Lisp the Language, 2. ed
• Common Lisp - A gentle Introduction to symbolic computation
• The Scheme Programming language, 2. ed
• Reflections on trusting trust
• Lisp: Good News, Bad News. How to Win Big
• John McCarthy's homepage
• Dennis Ritchie's homepage
• Various classic papers it's a shame ACM never bothered to continue adding to
• Another list of classic papers (this time related mostly to programming language design)
• GTK-Gnome Application Development (not a classic, though, as the field is too young)
• KDE 2.0 Development (not a classic though, as the field is too young)
• Eric Weissteins Mathworld
• Compilers and compiler generators - an introduction with C++ (although I'm not too sure if it deserves being called a classic...)
• Parsing techniques - A practical guide
• Art of assembly language programming (never was a dead tree, but good anyway)
• Paul Carters 386 assembly book (same comment as above)
• An Introduction to Scheme and its Implementation (see comment above)
• How to design programs - An introduction to programming and computing (not a classic, yet!)
• The Gutenberg archives contains much non-copyrighted classic fiction in ASCII format
• Sacred texts has copies of or links to many religious text for various major (or minor) religions

Max: What?! What?!
Inigo: Are you the Miracle Max who worked for the suits for all those years?
Max: The suits' stinking lawyers sued me. And thank you so much for bringing up such a painful subject. While you're at it, why don't you give me a nice tongue clamp, and run current through it. We're closed! [Max closes a flap over the door hole, but Inigo still knocks] Beat it or I'll call the Business Software Alliance!
Fezzik: I'm on the Business Software Alliance.
Max: You are the Business Software Alliance!
Inigo: We need a miracle. It's very important.
Max: Look, I'm retired. Besides, why would you want someone the suits' stinking lawyers fired. I might vaporize whatever you want to make the miracle.
Inigo: It's already vapor.
Max: It is, eh? I'll have a look. Bring it in. [They enter. Max examines the laptop.] I've seen worse.
Inigo: Sir... Sir.
Max: Huh?
Inigo: We're in a terrible rush.
Max: Don't rush me, sonny. You rush a miracle man, you get rotten miracles. You got money?
Inigo: Distro CDs...
Max: Sheesh! I never worked for so little; except once and that was a very noble cause.
Inigo: This is noble, sir. It's software is... crippled... child processes on the brink of starvation...
Max: Are you a rotten liar.
Inigo: I need it to help avenge my DR-DOS prompt, murdered these twenty years.
Max: Your first story was better. Where's that compressed air. It's probably hiding your porn, huh. Well, I'll ask it.
Inigo: It's vapor. It can't tell you.
Max: Ooooohh! Look who knows so much, eh! It just so happens that your friend here is only mostly vapor. There's a big difference between mostly vapor and all vapor. Please open the CD-ROM drive. [He inserts the compressed air nozzle] Now, mostly vapor is slightly running. Now, all vapor... well, with all vapor, there's usually only one thing that you can do.
Inigo: What's that?
Max: Hype it in Wired and hope for an IPO. [Max shoots air into laptop and yells at it] Hey! Hello in there! Hey! What's so important? Whatcha got here, that's worth running for? [Max pushes on laptop's space bar]
Laptop: [barely audible] Lin....dows...
Inigo: [excited] Lindows! You heard it! You could not ask for a more noble cause than that.
Max: Sonny, Lindows is the greatest thing in the world; except for a nice CCD - Caffeinated Choco-Death, where the caffiene is nice and strong, and the marshmallows melt. They're so perky. I love that. But that's not what it said! It distinctly said, 'bit hose'. And as we all know, 'bit hose' means a fat pipe. So, you were probably surfing for warez and it segfaulted...
Old Woman: [interrupting] Liar!! Liar!! Liarrrrr!
Max: Get back, witch!
Old Woman: I'm not a witch, I'm your wife. But after what you just said, I'm not even sure I want to be that anymore.
Max: You never had it so good. [Max smiles at Inigo]
Valerie: [Max's wife] Lindows, who said Lindows, Max?
Max: Don't say another word, Valerie... [Inigo looks on in disbelief]
Valerie: You're afraid. Ever since Microsoft fired him, his confidence has shattered.
Max: [yelling] Why'd you say that name?! You promised me that you would never say that name!
Valerie: What, Microsoft?!
Max: [cringes] Ahh!!
Valerie: Microsoft!
Max: Ahh!!

[Valerie is chasing Max around the room yelling. Max is covering his ears]

Valerie: Microsoft!
Max: Ahh!!
Valerie: Microsoft!
Max: Ahh!!
Valerie: [now in a sing-songy voice] Microsoft... Microsoft! Microsoft! Microsoft! Microsoft!
Max: I'm not listening!
Valerie: Lindows, processes expiring and you don't have the decency to say why you won't help!
Max: Nobody's hearing nothing!
Valerie: Microsoft! [She continues to yell 'Microsoft']
Inigo: [interrupting] This is the user's true love. If you heal it, it will stop Microsoft's monopoly!
Max: [to Valerie] Shut up!
Inigo: Thank you. Thank you.
Max: Wait, wait. I make it better, Microsoft suffers?
Inigo: Lost sales galore!
Max: Ha ha!! That is a noble cause! Give me the distros! I'm on the job!

(Mad props to Robert Zabaga for his transcription of the original script)

I'd give Scheme a try. It's a functional language, and a dialect of lisp. It's design makes mathematically oriented programming fairly intuitive.

Additionally, one of the best Computer Science books ever written, Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs, utilizes Scheme. Ths book takes a strong math styled for programming, particularly in the first chapter, and I think it'd be a great way to get yourself started.

Also, the book is available online, full text, for free here.

I'd give Scheme a try. It's a functional language, and a dialect of lisp. It's design makes mathematically oriented programming fairly intuitive.

Additionally, one of the best Computer Science books ever written, Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs, utilizes Scheme. Ths book takes a strong math styled for programming, particularly in the first chapter, and I think it'd be a great way to get yourself started.

Also, the book is available online, full text, for free here.

Thermodynamics says that when a computation throws away a bit of information, there is a necessary minimum heat dissipation. In today's relatively large circuitry, that dissipated heat is lost in the noise of resistive heating along the silicon conductive paths. In smaller circuits, it will become the dominant source of waste heat. An example of "throwing away a bit" is when an AND gate accepts two bits and produces only one. If you can run your logic circuit backward in time and recompute the inputs from the outputs, it's reversible.

Google has some links: http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=reversible+co mputing and there is an interesting project at MIT to design an entire reversible processor, called Pendulum.

Not surprisingly, the reversible computing idea is well-liked among nanotechnology thinkers such as Ralph Merkle.

Chord is not someone's Master's thesis. It is a full-fledged research platform that is used to explore P2P application ideas and the P2P principles themselves. Please go to the Chord project page for more details. Recently a lot of research level applications have been built on Chord. Examples of published applications are Dhash and CFS

The architecture of Circle system is very very similar to Chord. The developer of Circle has claimed to have been developed independently but at a much later date than Chord.

a good overview of different p2p architectures is over here at openp2p.com.

One system the author fails to mention is Circle, which uses a decentralized hashtable system., more about it at his system is in a pdf slideshow he'll be giving at linux.conf.au

My favorite quote from his page: "FastTrack (aka Kazza/Morpheus) is kind of like trying to optimize a bublesort", which leads me to believe he has a regular quicksort at hand. (actually he does claim O(n log n) seachs, so its about right)

Also to note are Chord and GISP which seem to use simular schemes, where Chord is pure acadamia (someones masters thesis). GISP is an implementation of something from JXTA, suns p2p framework.

I have attended recent seminars at MIT sponsored by the Industrial Liaison program, and have found the work Media Lab is doing to be quite good. In fact, I'm disappointed that the 2001 MIT Information Technology Conference was given nary a mention in Slashdot. And especially the Media Lab presentations given there.

Back to the point, programs like Media Lab's Digital Nations eDevelopment are worth every penny spent. Go read about their research before you spout such drivel.

If they're so poor, how do they have enough money to build this extension.
Not only are they paying undergraduates less money to work there, they're also depriving them of sleep with constant construction right across the street from a dorm.

Furthermore, while it may be true that the Media Lab is more frivolous than, say, LCS, it still outputs some truly great things - such as, as others have pointed out, LEGO Mindstorms. For more, check out their patents list.

Of course, there are the ideas that are... well, harebrained. The "smart" oven mitt, for example, that tells you if an object you touch is hot. Let me see, I'll go put on my oven mitt to take something out of a heated oven... well goddamn, it's hot. Better not touch it.

Maybe some ideas are better left as ideas. :)

the article states that their building was designed by I.M. Pei.

Ah yes, that building is indeed unique on campus. Some of us like to call it the Pei Toilet.

Keep in mind that this is undergrad student pay, and can be done during
the term. Plus you get to work with researchers, etc etc.

$5M in sponsorship for the "smart potholder"? Screw that. Throw some funding at the the "silent jackhammer."

No ... but it might mean less clean laundry [mit.edu] (Same dorm.... gosh, living there was fun :-)

Does that mean no more bathroom server?

there's a mile of similar commentary on the internet (such as neil postman, clifford stoll, etc.). robert kraut carried out the 'internet paradox' surveys that became the sociological proof of this effect, although the earlier findings were later recast.

i'm not saying that there are not social changes caused by the introduction of new information technologies. we are information driven beings, after all. however, we have to be wary of assigning values to them that are either ultimately 'good' or 'bad,' as despite all these changes, we somehow seem to be able to cope with them ...

Ever seen fuck-the-skull-of-jesus.mit.edu?

In the giving credit where it's due department, MIT has been running similar programs since 1990. It was a big deal back then, since they caught a quarter of the class. See the article from The Tech, MIT's newspaper.

In the giving credit where it's due department, MIT has been running similar programs since 1990. It was a big deal back then, since they caught a quarter of the class. See the article from The Tech, MIT's newspaper.