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Made me crack up.

It's making hacks.mit.edu server disappear...

A proper p2p network needs to scale to millions of nodes, provide consistent and spam-proof search capabilities, and have some notion of locality. That is, no operation should require a global broadcast, and downloads should be automatically directed to the closest available replica. Better yet, downloads should be interleaved from multiple nearby replicas.

Take everything that's good about FastTrack, Napster, CHORD, and CAN. Stir. Maybe then we'd have a p2p system worthy of our praise and our software.

--Patrick

The MIT Orthophoto server has 50cm resolution images. Here is Harvard Square at 50cm resolution. These images have been available for a while, though for Massachusetts only.

I'd rather see better methods of delivering food and medicine to desperate people than have one more other than the current million ways to kill people. I'd rather not use intimidation as a means of protection.

Um hello, the main problem with getting food and medicine to desperate people is making sure the goods get to where they are supposed to go instead of being stolen and sold to the highest bidder. The whole "Blackhawk Down" Somalia bit came about because of exactly that. As a Washington Post article from 1992 explains,

"[Former UN Sec-Gen] Boutros-Ghali...concluded that only 'a country-wide show of force' by outside troops can guarantee deliveries of food and humanitarian aid in the face of attacks by warring militias."

International Organizations including the UN are in a serious cash crunch, in no small part because of the US goverment's inabilities to pay their dues on time. Financial and technical resources are finite. You suggest spending money to develop, say, a revolutionary new delivery system for a vaccine, but you don't agree with the idea that an attempt should be made to ensure that such a device, once produced, actually makes it TO those in need? Without protection for such shipments, such a device would get stolen and sold on the black market to heroin addicts in no time.

Don't get me wrong. I work for the UN, but obviously my opinions are my own. That said, you say I'd rather not use intimidation as a means of protection well of course not, no one would. But you cannot eliminate the capabilities and devices for it and expect to remain protected. The B52 is such a device - it is, as another poster mentioned, a recognized symbol - a deterrent.

You think the DMCA is totalitarian, and that having to live under it means you're not free? Oh please. I'm in a developing (nee third-world) country. Trust me, you have no idea how good you've got it. I suggest you go see some of the world you're talking about.

It says as much in the article (initially developed in the 70s, etc.). It could be worth your time taking a look.

Also, listing the first link in a Google search is not particularly impressive - you should have tried the third link. That looks pretty cool.

If we're going to use an algorithm encumbered by patents, we might as well use MPEG-4.

However if your CODEC is not covered by any patents, then please consider releasing it under a BSD or GPL license.

For information on why software patents are bad for free software, please visit The League for Programming Freedom

Er, interesting review.

I googled and filtered, an intro to Emergence the notion, and an excerpt from Emergence the book. (In which Slashdot is discussed.)

Oh, and here's a less interesting book review of Emergence from the Village Voice.

No, it is not compression-- nowhere do they state that the amount of transmitted data is any smaller than the original amount.

Instead, it's redundancy-- send more than necessary so that it becomes acceptable to lose some data in transit. Check the Tornado paper for details.

Here

There are already at least two programs that can translate between C and English:

• BabelBuster
• c2eng2c

--Bruce

Posted by chrisd
on Tuesday December 11, @08:22PM

from the no-mention-of-peg-legs-and-eye-patches dept.

akiaki007 was among many who wrote in
to say: "Check out this
article
on the New York Times (free reg, blah
blah) site. The CmdrTaco have raided 27 cities in 21 states. Raid sites include
MIT, UCLA,
Purdue, Duke,
UofO, all hot-beds of young tender assholes. Their main target was the group

DrinkOrDie, an asshole appreciation club. 'This is a new frontier for
crime,' Kenneth W. Dam, deputy secretary of the Treasury, said at a news
briefing. 'The costs are enormous to both industry and consumers.' I better hide
my asshole. They might think it's some weird fucking tool."

Posted by chrisd on Tuesday December 11, @08:22PM
from the no-mention-of-peg-legs-and-eye-patches dept.
akiaki007 was among many who wrote in to say: "Check out this article on the New York Times (free reg, blah blah) site. The CmdrTaco have raided 27 cities in 21 states. Raid sites include MIT, UCLA, Purdue, Duke, UofO, all hot-beds of young tender assholes. Their main target was the group DrinkOrDie, an asshole appreciation club. 'This is a new frontier for crime,' Kenneth W. Dam, deputy secretary of the Treasury, said at a news briefing. 'The costs are enormous to both industry and consumers.' I better hide my asshole. They might think it's some weird fucking tool."

Posted by chrisd on Tuesday December 11, @08:22PM
from the no-mention-of-peg-legs-and-eye-patches dept.
akiaki007 was among many who wrote in to say: "Check out this article on the New York Times (free reg, blah blah) site. The CmdrTaco have raided 27 cities in 21 states. Raid sites include MIT, UCLA, Purdue, Duke, UofO, all hot-beds of young tender assholes. Their main target was the group DrinkOrDie, an asshole appreciation club. 'This is a new frontier for crime,' Kenneth W. Dam, deputy secretary of the Treasury, said at a news briefing. 'The costs are enormous to both industry and consumers.' I better hide my asshole. They might think it's some weird fucking tool."

I have a good deal of experience with MIT and their network, and for some reason the administration there thinks that any and all network activites should be allowed and are for some reason granted under free speech (as evidenced by, among other things, fuck-the-skull-of-jesus.mit.edu), including piracy of software, music, and movies. I'm really not sure what's going through their heads or why they consistently look the other way (join MIT, pay to pirate all you want and we'll protect you!), but I've SERIOUSLY seen less piracy in a number of Asian cities selling "questionable" goods on recorded media. What a disgrace.

I've had to take a long hiatus from my project for various reasons, but now that the appeal was lost, I plan to restart it. On my list of things is to change from my style of translation to Jonathan Baccash's, which is better in several ways, while retaining my code's ability to deal with preprocessor directives (which Mr. Baccash's code lacks). If anyone feels like sending me diffs, I'd be much obliged.

I see you beat me to it. I think this is exactly what will happen. Cross-license and continue on as normal. Exactly the crap that shows what's wrong with patents.

Did Thomas H. Lee, the author of this article, die in February?

And do mine eyes deceive me, or is that a picture of Monzy!?!?

Has anyone noted that the MIT presence among the Nobel laureates this year is particularly strong? 8 of 14 had some MIT affiliation.

Found the hidden directory with all the pics... no html though. http://ecg.media.mit.edu/ecg/

They have hot Members... hmm
ChiefArcher

Found the hidden directory with all the pics... no html though. http://ecg.media.mit.edu/ecg/

They have hot Members... hmm
ChiefArcher

I gathered similar projects into a single comment. I know that this is redundant, strictly speaking, but I'll post anyway. It's much more accessible this way. I'm knocking on the karma cap anyway, so no, this isn't whoring, just risking to get modded down for redundancy. Enough blabber, here we go:

Chaos Computer Club Blinkenlights, Berlin, Germany
18 x 8 matrix of white lights
Links:
http://www.blinkenlights.de/

KPN Building, Rotterdam, Netherlands
22 x 44 matrix of green lights
Links:
http://home.wanadoo.nl/makiueda/climbman/index-e.h tml
http://www.blezer2.myweb.nl/rotterdam2000/building s/kpn.html

La Bastille: A Tech House Installation, Providence, Rhode Island, USA
10 x 10 matrix of white lights
Links:
http://bastilleweb.techhouse.org/
http://slashdot.org/articles/00/04/16/2148245.shtm l

Marnix 2001, Brussels, Belgium
52 x 7 matrix of RGB lights
Links:
http://marnix2001.bbl.be/

TU-Delft Electro Technology SMS-Display, Delft, Netherlands
264 lights (unknown configuration), displayed mobile phone short messages
Links:
http://etv.its.tudelft.nl/commissies/lustrum/stunt .php

TU-Delft Electro Technology Tetris, Delft, Netherlands
10 x 15 matrix of white lights
Links:
http://etv.et.tudelft.nl/commissies/lustrum/90/eng lish.html

MIT's Green Building Sound (VU) Meter, Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA
9 x 1 matrix of red lights
Links:
http://hacks.mit.edu/Hacks/by_year/1993/green_bldg _vu_meter/green_bldg_vu_meter.html

Clickscape 98, Linz, Austria
13 x 8 matrix of white lights
Links:
http://www.servus.at/clickscape98/

Poli-uni students dorm, Warsaw, Poland
14 x 16 matrix of white lights
Links:
http://www.astercity.net/~kvas/riviera.jpg

This reminds me of the various hacks done on the Green Building at MIT, my favourite being the VU metre.

This reminds me of the various hacks done on the Green Building at MIT, my favourite being the VU metre.

If you're referring to movies educating people then I don't want to live in a world where such a thing happens. Remember how everyone was suddenly an expert on viruses after a string of crappy movies came out in the mid-'90s? Remember how everyone was screaming about how we needed to set up a terrestrial defense system after a couple of even crappier movies came out a few years ago?

Such movies do nothing but foster a chicken little syndrome in the public at large. Hollywood has never relied on anything like historical accuracy or facts to get in the way of a story. If we expect people to be educated about or become aware of issues because of what they see in a movie then this world is indeed in a very sorry state.

I think the best we can expect to see out of this is the usual two-minute story on the local late-night news: "KILLER ROBOTS TAKING OVER THE WORLD! Can this happen here?" - followed by stock interviews with the guys from the MIT AI Lab.

Welcome to weblogs.

This is a brilliant bit of viral marketing. Never heard of them 3 days ago and now they've been on FCompany and Slashdot. They are number 2 on the blogdex.

BBC latest news on technology issue? Come on Michael....

Slashdotors want technical details!

More or less the same idea shows up in Rod Brooks' research.

The pragmatic level at least - starting with simple autonomy in the real world, then building upon this foundation to create a robot (mobot?) with more complex properties.

I see some difference in the non-pragmatic layer, though. Brooks tries to escape symbolic representation using his subsumption architeture, but still...

There's also the fact that many of the resource which universities provide are scarce physical or human resources, which have a cost. So the barriers you refer to at least in part (and probably in large part) exist for pure economic reasons - regulating access to a relatively scarce resource. As you point out, other extra-economic barriers are imposed, such as requiring good high school grades - but the primary reason for this is an attempt, albeit imperfect, to ensure the most productive use of a university's resources.

As some of the knowledege resources become available electronically, some aspect of this equation will change (e.g. the web-based MIT OpenCourseWare). As always with economics in a reasonably free market, things tend to move towards lower cost as they become cheaper to duplicate and therefore less scarce, and certain aspects of educational knowledge are no different.

But the fact is that barriers to accessing information create wealth.

An arguable point, I believe. The question which Lessig addresses centers around the artificial scarcity which is imposed on intellectual "property" by the law. An interesting question is to what extent imposing such artificial scarcity generates real wealth, as opposed to simply redistributing wealth from the consumers to the creators.

The only reason this is not considered a fundamentally unhealthy redistribution of wealth (of the kind that has occasionally occurred in non-capitalist countries), is that an exchange is considered to take place - exchanging licenses to intellectual property, for some other type of asset. One of the main questions at issue is what kinds of rights such an exchange should grant to the licensee, regardless of an individual creator's wishes.

Fair use doctrine was intended to address this, and did so quite successfully, at least from the consumer's perspective. Now, fair use is being undermined both legally and technologically, and consumers are being, or will be, screwed (technical economic term).

The most obvious battle here has nothing to do with destroying wealth - it has to do with maintaining a sensible balance between creators and consumers, that allows both sides to thrive, and neither side to be at the complete mercy of the other. The DMCA and other recent events have shifted the balance too far in favor of the creators, or rather, their agents. This is certainly beyond a workable compromise position, and if that isn't obvious to most people yet, it will become so soon enough.

MIT's spinoff list is all well and good but if you add up Stanford's it'd eat them alive

Of course, the real difference between Stanford and MIT is that MIT got net 18, and Stanford had to settle for net 36 (and appears to have given it back to IANA since then).

Of course, what would you expect from the university whose spinoff BBN built the ARPANET, built routers before Cisco, and brought us the use of @ for email addresses?

Seriously, though, both Stanford and MIT have had a real impact. One study ranked the total economic value of MIT's spinoffs as the 24th largest economy in the world for 1994 (between Thailand and South Africa).

But I gotta thank Stanford for Google.

While reading their homepage, it struck me that their methodology is somewhat similar to what active networks do. So, does anybody see how active networks can be used for deploying P2P apps?

Pic at bottom. Not quite the same thing, but wonder if that's the sort of thing they're trying to accomplish.

In a related story (sortof) Spamku

forged from fire and the
cuber of the pink delights
SPAM shines in the can

Of course, these are about the meat, rather than the email. :)

Peter L. Hagelstein was the guy at MIT who had MIT's lawyers churning out cold fusion patents like there was no tomorrow at the same time that MIT's official position was that cold fusion was an illusion -- and making official recommendations against its funding.

Actually, I had looked at your pages prior to writing the previous message, to make sure I wasn't missing something. I don't see anything to contradict what I was saying. In fact, there are some great examples of hand-waving on your pages: "doing stuff" qualifies as a perfect one.

All of the real problems that computer languages are designed to solve pretty much fall into the category of "doing stuff". Your nine steps don't seem to be much more than a shell architecture, or taken to their logical conclusion, a design for an operating system that has a more streamlined and integrated user interface model. Plan 9 comes to mind. Good for you.

However, this has nothing to do with solving the problems addressed by even the simplest computer language, except in exactly the sense I mentioned: every program consists of "input stuff", "do stuff", "process stuff". You've identified nine such steps - so what? Many more have been identified in work on these kinds of subjects, but it doesn't do anything to simplify real programs in any significant way, since the real work is what's done within the steps. This sort of analysis amounts to little more than an application framework, and in this case, not a particularly rich one.

I even went so far as to read some of your writings about patents. Grand visions are great and fun to play with, but it helps to have some understanding of the issues you're brainstorming about. I get the distinct impression that your formal background in these fields is limited. You might benefit from reading some of the material which I mention in this article. Some great research has been done on the sort of things you're talking about, and to ignore it would be foolish. You've written about the "failure of computer science", but you clearly don't know much computer science, so don't seem to be qualified to make such a claim.

Related to the material I mention in the above-linked message, you might find SCSH (Scheme shell) relevant to your work on VIC. Scheme's hygenic macro capability and support for developing higher-level languages within Scheme lends itself quite nicely to this sort of work - if you want to be able to create and manipulate abstractions, Scheme provides an excellent language to do that in. Learning Scheme is also a wonderful doorway to advanced directions in current language research.

You've made reference to computer science and related fields being elitist - but given the free availability of so much research and educational writing, the only qualification for entry is the ability to understand. If you don't have that, that doesn't make the field elitist, it just means that you need to seriously consider whether this sort of work is really what you're suited to. If I wanted to be a carpenter yet was incapable of visualizing or dealing with 3D forms, so that the items I built collapsed, what would your advice to me be? Would I be justified in suggesting that carpentry is elitist, that carpenters are imposing arbitrary requirements on the field, and that I ought to be able to build things without knowing any of the boring and petty details of carpentry?

---

"The mark of a truly intelligent person is the ability to introspect realistically."

This isn't the first time that Apple did this. Back in the early days of Hypercard they shipped a "demo" version on all new macs. You could play stacks but not create them. That is, unless you were capable of typing the word "magic" at which point the demo would "magically" transform itself into the full thing.

Apple never took any legal action to my knowledge. This was well before the "look and feel" days so they were still innocent, sweet and too wealthy to care.

Somehow I think that a company which is using solid-fuel rockets (because they're reliable and rugged?) isn't going to spend the money to build a booster using exotic, corrosive mixtures which also present a toxic hazard to both flight and ground crew. The Black Horse people claim a specific impulse of 330 seconds for H2O2/JP-5 (see Black Horse: One Stop to Orbit), which is considerably better than solids too and all but certainly far cheaper to develop than an exotic. The optimum for cheapness might be something as mundane as sub-cooled propane and LOX.

You couldn't be further from the truth. Someone's already mentioned CiteSeer. I've read and downloaded hundreds of papers from there. Google is great for tracking down papers, too.

Another nice resource is library.readscheme.org. It's Scheme-specific, but Scheme is the root of much research about programming languages and the underlying concepts - it pretty much spawned the field of functional programming.

The biggest barrier to entry for this sort of stuff is your own existing knowledge. There's no pill you can take to pick it all up overnight. You have to work hard at it. This is the real reason to go to a real universities - not to learn how to program in the language du jour, but to learn about what some very smart people have already figured out over decades, centuries, millenia, and to learn how to think like those people.

There aren't many shortcuts here. It doesn't help to be told that there's a simple solution to the problem you're working on, if it involves a network of deep concepts you've never heard of and are totally unfamiliar with. To take some examples from functional programming: closures, continuations, continuation passing style, fold operators, polymorphic type inference... If you don't know what all those things mean, and can't use them in your code, you're unnecessarily limiting yourself and denying yourself leverage that can help get big, complicated things done more quickly, with less fuss.

One way to start out is to learn some advanced languages. Scheme is a good starting point because there's so much tutorial literature for it. You can pick up the computer science concepts as you go along. Read Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs (SICP) and How to Design Programs (HTDP). Join the ACM. There's so much stuff out there, go look for it, and apply yourself!

I'm the co-organizer of the LL1 workshop, at
ll1.mit.edu

Actually we did invite ESR, and we actually scheduled the workshop around his constraints. However, there were a few misunderstandings, and four days before the workshop we got mail to the effect that he wasn't coming.

Maybe next time.

Six year old soccer players is what you get when you give the MIT AI Lab folk one day to write a soccer-playing team in Java:

AI Olympics Sockey

(note: this applet was written independently of the Robocup tournament and doesn't share the same rules or physics.)

We use the term "lightweight languages" to describe some of the common features of these new languages. The term "lightweight" refers not to actual functionality, but to the idea that these languages are easy to acquire, learn, and use. Examples that would fall into this category include Perl, Python, Ruby, Scheme (and scsh), and Curl.

The agenda with some presentations is available http://ll1.mit.edu/agenda.html

The Arc presentation (an unfinished dialect of lisp) seemed especially intresting.

The agenda with some presentations is available http://ll1.mit.edu/agenda.html

The Arc presentation (an unfinished dialect of lisp) seemed especially intresting.

There was a bit of a superior attitude from some of the academics, who feel that languages like Perl and Python reinvent the wheel and neglect the body of academic research by coming up with suboptimal solutions to PL problems that have long since been "solved" in the PL literature. Maybe "frustrated" is a better word than "superior." While I can totally appreciate their point of view, I found myself cringing in embarrassment once or twice when a harangue by one of the academics went a little overboard. There has already been one post on the LL1 mailing list that I feel crossed the line.

The discussion came to a bit of head during the (very interesting) "Worse Is Better" panel (based loosely on the writings of Richard Gabriel), which centered on the question of why the most popular languages aren't the "best" ones.

Like I said, though, it was mostly very congenial. Ultimately, I think each camp took something away from the encounter: both new-found implementation techniques, and a greater knowledge of and interest in the other community. There are some practical issues that the Perl/Python guys have to deal with (e.g., interfacing with legacy languages like C) that aren't really addressed by academics, and I think it was great that these issues were brought to light.

The LL1 website, if anyone is interested, is ll1.mit.edu.

Another idea along this line is the joint MIT / US Air Force project called Black Horse. The key idea behind the Black Horse is that it can be aerially `refueled' from a tanker such as the USAF KC-135. This has caused some people to describe it as `stage-and-a-half' rather than a true SSTO vehicle. It will take off and land horizontally from a runway, and will be piloted by human pilots. Two demonstration vehicles were planned as stepping stones to the Black Horse, called the Black Foal and the Black Colt. The Foal would demonstrate aspects of the technology and provide proof of concept. The Colt would fly to half orbital velocity and utilize an off-the-shelf `kick-stage' to put satellites in orbit.

Hee! Good one, limey! You think that one up yourself? Yer mum must be real proud, eh?

Sorry to break it to ya, but you fools simply misspell aluminum. And as for us being "hillbillies" (do you even really know what a hillbilly is?), well, if it weren't for us, all you gap-toothed, mutton-chewing buggers would be speaking German.

Cheerio!

Corrected Link

Not much to see yet.

It seems that I am the only karma whore on the line that still remember about the openracer project:
http://moria.mit.edu:8080/wf/dev/systems/OpenRacer

http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=01/08/02/202621 9&mode=thread