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• Sorry about the slashdotting. Small server configuration error that's been fixed now. Browse away.
• Roboguard and friends were a class project; it wasn't DARPA or NSF funded, it was all for fun and a good grade. :) Our research group does networks and mobile systems research for our day jobs...
• The Cricket Project that was used in the "Mother" robot is part of our real research.
• Much of the robotics research at MIT happens in the AI Lab, so if you're curious about robotics, browse over there and see the things that the Humanoid Robotics Group is doing. Very cool stuff.

CFS and PAST are P2P readonly file systems a la Napster/Gnutella/Freenet. Both had papers in this year's SOSP. Both are based on log(N) P2P overlay routing/lookup substrates.

OceanStore seeks to be a more general (writable) global storage system.

And several P2P conferences have formed and will continue to form.

Some of these projects have been going on for years. So you shouldn't buy the "Academic networking/CS researchers are a bunch of P2P haters" line without a few grains of your favorite seasoning.

CFS and PAST are P2P readonly file systems a la Napster/Gnutella/Freenet. Both had papers in this year's SOSP. Both are based on log(N) P2P overlay routing/lookup substrates.

OceanStore seeks to be a more general (writable) global storage system.

And several P2P conferences have formed and will continue to form.

Some of these projects have been going on for years. So you shouldn't buy the "Academic networking/CS researchers are a bunch of P2P haters" line without a few grains of your favorite seasoning.

So if you guys like Nick, Jaeyon, Godfrey and Magda's robots, you should check out Kickbot, a robot Chris and I made for the same class that was designed to be kicked. (These were for Rodney Brooks' Embodied Intelligence class)

check out this link for details Kickbot Homepage

And if Chris' connection gets slashdotted the final paper with all of the cool pictures can be seen at Paper Mirror PDF (1.4MB)

So if you guys like Nick, Jaeyon, Godfrey and Magda's robots, you should check out Kickbot, a robot Chris and I made for the same class that was designed to be kicked. (These were for Rodney Brooks' Embodied Intelligence class)

check out this link for details Kickbot Homepage

And if Chris' connection gets slashdotted the final paper with all of the cool pictures can be seen at Paper Mirror PDF (1.4MB)

First of all, I started porting SimCity to Unix in back in 1991, and DUX published multi player X11 SimCity for Unix 1993, which is reviewed here. Before that, I released HyperLook SimCity for NeWS in 1992, which was awarded "Product of the year 1992" from Unix World magazine (in the Jan 1993 issue).

Secondly, you have the price wrong -- it wasn't $80. Single Player Node Locked License: $49. Multi Player Node Locked License: $89. Single Player Floating License: $129. Multi Player Floating License: $149. Such prices for Unix workstation software were unheard of at the time, and there were hardly any other commercial games available for Unix. (Despite their bluster, Loki wasn't the first Unix game company.)

For comparison: In May 1991, Curtis Priem's and Bruce Factor's "Aviator" flight simulator for the Sun workstation from Artificial Horisons sold for $150.

The authors worked for Sun designing the GX graphics accelerator board, wrote Aviator in their spare time to demonstrate the hardware, and published one of the first commercially available real time 3D games for the Sun. Good thing they had a day job.

Because right after they published it, some butt-head Sun employee posted a crack to defeat the licensing scheme to the tstech alias at Sun. They had to send around a message begging people to please delete the crack and pay for it.

I haven't made a penny off of Unix SimCity for years, because you can't buy it any more. Loki didn't exist for years after I saw my last penny from porting SimCity to Unix.

I don't know where you got your unattributed misinformation that the networking in Multi Player SimCity Classic didn't work. I first demonstrated it at the Interactive Experience of the 1993 InterCHI conference in Amsterdam. It worked just fine then, and even better now that computers and networks are faster.

Just recently in May 2001 I showed it to the MIT Media Lab sponsors and researchers, at the Digital Life confence. I demonstrated the colaborative multi player game user interface and voting dialogs, running over the network between two linux laptops, and it worked just fine. It's just not available as a product any more, and hasn't been for a long time.

I am not "repeating the market speak of native ports being bad". I am making a point, based on my own experience as well as talking with other people who I trust, like Will Wright and John Gilmore.

My point is that Wine solves many more problems than it causes, and that native ports to Linux aren't worth it, unless you put a lot of time, energy and creativity into improving the game so it substantially takes advantage of the platform.

Even then, there's no guarantee that it'll be worthwhile. There are many more important economic issues that totally override trivial technical implementation details like porting versus emulation.

On the other hand, I think that any effort put into improving Wine is well spent, that will truly benefit many people over the long term. If it can run games, then it can do a lot more. Double duh.

It's much more productive to practically solve real problems right now, than to argue over how you would solve imaginary political problems in the ideal world, if only the Supreme Court appointed you Dictator and Congress burned the Constitution in your honor. That job's already taken.

-Don

Nicholas Negroponte is fairly bright, but I think some of the things he talks about (e.g. giving UN membership to Nation1, a "virtual nation" composed of the world's internet-enabled children) are a bit too loony to be taken seriously

...is fairly bright, but I think some of the things he talks about (e.g. giving UN membership to
Nation1, a "virtual nation" composed of the world's internet-enabled children) are a bit too loony to be taken seriously

(You may, if you'd like, verify that I exist. http://nms.lcs.mit.edu/~dga, not that it's a particularly exciting page) -Dave

No listing of any "Dunkirk" in the Alumni directory, no Athena locker for him:

~%add hdunkirk
hdunkirk: Locker unknown.

and nada on the finger @lcs either. Oh, and nothing about either "Dunkirk" or "Cesium" at The Tech. Seems like vaporware with a vaporcreator to me.

I'm a grad student in the PDOS group; I certainly haven't heard of this project, nor have my colleagues with whom I've checked. This story could use a bit more background checking; I strongly suspect that it's completely bogus. If you want to see the real research going on in operating systems at MIT, check out the PDOS web page, the Networks and Mobile Systems page, and the Advanced Network Architectures sites.

I'm a grad student in the PDOS group; I certainly haven't heard of this project, nor have my colleagues with whom I've checked. This story could use a bit more background checking; I strongly suspect that it's completely bogus. If you want to see the real research going on in operating systems at MIT, check out the PDOS web page, the Networks and Mobile Systems page, and the Advanced Network Architectures sites.

I'm a grad student in the PDOS group; I certainly haven't heard of this project, nor have my colleagues with whom I've checked. This story could use a bit more background checking; I strongly suspect that it's completely bogus. If you want to see the real research going on in operating systems at MIT, check out the PDOS web page, the Networks and Mobile Systems page, and the Advanced Network Architectures sites.

I'm a grad student in the PDOS group; I certainly haven't heard of this project, nor have my colleagues with whom I've checked. This story could use a bit more background checking; I strongly suspect that it's completely bogus. If you want to see the real research going on in operating systems at MIT, check out the PDOS web page, the Networks and Mobile Systems page, and the Advanced Network Architectures sites.

Here's why.

I also don't understand what the purpose of keeping an OS project secret would be in an academic enviroment. Remember publish or perish?

... which is fishy, because I'm sitting here in my office on the sixth floor of the Laboratory for Computer Science, and the operating systems dudes are on the fifth floor. There is also no mention of Cesium on the projects page.

I couldn't actually read the original page, slant-six being slashdotted and all, but it sure doesn't sound like an LCS initiative. In fact I don't see any mention of any such operating system on the web.

... which is fishy, because I'm sitting here in my office on the sixth floor of the Laboratory for Computer Science, and the operating systems dudes are on the fifth floor. There is also no mention of Cesium on the projects page.

I couldn't actually read the original page, slant-six being slashdotted and all, but it sure doesn't sound like an LCS initiative. In fact I don't see any mention of any such operating system on the web.

There's a good article here called "Why Not MySQL?" by Ben Adida [mailto], part of the OpenACS Project [openacs.org], on why MySQL wasn't the right choice for OpenACS (at the time). It's quite out of date (and is recognised as such by the author), but still worth a read, and there many interesting submitted comments. Take a look at some decent free RDBMS alternatives such as Firebird (open-source free Interbase) or PostgreSQL while you're at it. Oh, and there's plenty more dicussion on MySQL in a previous Slashdot article here.

Stef

You've got to be a troll. Anyone who's been around *NIX for 2 months or longer knows the difference between cURL and Curl. The fact that the context is either using "curl" or "wget" makes this incredibly clear.

"You don't have to distrust the government to want to use cryptography. Your business can be wiretapped by business rivals, organized crime, or foreign governments. Several foreign governments, for example, admit to using their signals intelligence against companies from other countries to give their own corporations a competitive edge. Ironically, the United States government's restrictions on cryptography in the 1990's have weakened U.S. corporate defenses against foreign intelligence and organized crime."
2. for those of you who have good capabilities/reputation, start spreading the word. Not only among your friends (no matter how commputer-illiterate they are, public opinion is independent from tech skills, unfortunately), but also at work.
3. the main goal is to make the idea of 'banning crypto can make more damage to your business than give benefits to the country' reach the higher levels. letters to newspapers will perhaps lighten a few minds, but enlighten a CEO of a multinational or a big company will help things better. It may seem unreal, but if you think that anyone in the world is just seven hops away, why don't try it? Never underestimate the power of coffee-break gossiping.
4. all the 'geeks' and technician all over the world have a great power over "regular user". When a techie or a sysadmin talks, everybody is listening. Make good use of it. Be responsible, and be clear. Make people think. 5. talk to newspaper writers, friends working for the media, whoever you think can spread the world.
6. wait
7. repeat
8. listen to other ideas and possibly invite your "opponent" to post it somewhere, to publish it, basically don't treat who does not agree with you as a stupid.

that's what I'm doing with my friends, parents, et cetera. I'm posting opinions on public forums in newspapers, and although I cannot see an immediate feedback, I'm positive about it.

Just my .2Euros :)

He didn't just make that term up, if that's what you're thinking. A "metacircular" language is a language which is implemented in itself. The most common example of this is Lisp - in fact, the very first computer language interpreter ever was a Lisp interpreter, written in a Lisp-like language as something of a mathematical exercise, by John McCarthy around 1958. This approach has proved very powerful, and some good language implementations have been written this way.

The term is probably most famously used in SICP, in a section entitled The Metacircular Evaluator.

Of course, none of this implies that REBOL is any good, but the fact that Sassenrath is aware of such things is probably a good sign. If you read the rest of the paragraph after the term "meta-circular", you'll see that he is actually referring to a relevant aspect of REBOL, namely that the GUI system is implemented in a dialect of REBOL. So it isn't quite as bad as if he'd said that the language runs on free tachyon energy...

He didn't just make that term up, if that's what you're thinking. A "metacircular" language is a language which is implemented in itself. The most common example of this is Lisp - in fact, the very first computer language interpreter ever was a Lisp interpreter, written in a Lisp-like language as something of a mathematical exercise, by John McCarthy around 1958. This approach has proved very powerful, and some good language implementations have been written this way.

The term is probably most famously used in SICP, in a section entitled The Metacircular Evaluator.

Of course, none of this implies that REBOL is any good, but the fact that Sassenrath is aware of such things is probably a good sign. If you read the rest of the paragraph after the term "meta-circular", you'll see that he is actually referring to a relevant aspect of REBOL, namely that the GUI system is implemented in a dialect of REBOL. So it isn't quite as bad as if he'd said that the language runs on free tachyon energy...

As other readers have pointed out, this is nothing new. John Holland originated the genetic algorithm idea in around 1970's (his book, "Adaptation in Natural and Artificial Systems", was first published in 1975). Then John Koza extends this idea to genetic programming (the first volume of his "Genetic Programming" series came out in 1992). It's still under a lot of research. But there are quite a number of people, most notably Marvin Minsky, that argue that this approach won't be the cure-all and solve-all for the problem of achieving artificial human-level intelligence within a reasonable timeframe (around 50 years from now), which the movie AI exhibits. The argument draws from the evolution of life itself. How long did it take from the first lifeforms to the first human species? In the order of million, if not billion, of years certainly. The point is, it's going to take a heck lot of time for this kind of programs to truly achieve our (human's) level of intelligence, if it's possible at all. Not to say that the technique is not useful--it has been applied in a number of applications. But if we're looking for human-level intelligence, it alone would barely solve the problem.

"...it takes *a lot* of random attempts to do better than a human doing it analytically."

Which is why efforts at AI programming will continue to require human interaction for the foreseeable future. MIT has been at it over 40 years. Experience indicates that our programming interfaces haven't nearly evolved to the state of efficiency that we can interact with the machines in a natural enough way to make any significant progress. Many good programmers can't type. Some interface producers are giving us pseudo-intellegent controls that "learn" our preferences and traits (ex.: things that don't show up on menus if you haven't used them in 4 weeks, unless you expressly expand the list). The interfaces appear to be dummying down the human intelligence, which strikes me as antithetical to the task. Machine code is time-consuming. C/C++ also, but less so.

The interface needed has to be more LISP in nature, and a Voice interface is probably going to be needed before enough programming effort can be applied.

I'd certainly love to see the voice interaction tools start to evolve to a point of usefulness.

Noam Chomsky pointed out in a very interesting lecture at MIT a few days ago, the codename "Enduring Freedom" is a bit funny if you look at it the right way. See, the word 'enduring' has two meanings in the english language...

However, there are some areas I think the model works less well in. For instance, game development is hard under an open source model. Sure, there are some great games for Linux, but they tend to be simpler and shorter. Modern mainstream games are huge and involve a lot of effort by non-programmers. It's like the difference between small independant films and big studio productions.

Its very interesting that you mention games as that's one of the areas which I'm currently working on in the OS community. Getting good media for a project has always been the major sticking point for OS (and lone wolf) game developers. This is exactly why Worldforge is trying to put together a Free Media Repository. It's a place where artists can place their work and it can be used by game designers. Most of the content is under the GFDL and the GPL (although we do allow for 'less free' licenses). Worldforge has always had _tons_ of developers but artists are harder to come by. We have been lucky in having some really good artists in WorldForge so hopefully we can help some other projects bootstrap up with our artwork. :-)

In a commercial environment, if you want to avoid that, you pretty much have to move up the ladder, which is ultimately going to mean team lead, project lead, architect, mentor, consultant, or something along those lines. If, however, you program for fun, none of this really applies.

I feel that at 28 my skills are better than they've ever been

Assuming you don't let yourself stagnate, you'll feel the same way at 38, and probably even at 48, as long as you don't suffer from any degenerative brain diseases. But observing some of my colleagues and even myself, stagnation is all too easy as time goes by. It's tempting to think that you know everything you need to know.

You have to challenge yourself. Don't just read the magazines and books you find in bookstores (you know, Dr. Dobbs and Teach Yourself Java in 21 Days), get hold of and work through some of the books that are famous in academic circles (e.g. SICP, to name just one obvious one), subscribe to some ACM journals, learn new languages, take some advanced courses. Take on projects that challenge you, that you don't understand how to do. Learn what you need to learn to do them. (Don't necessarily do this for projects that your career depends on, though!)

Not only will this be personally satisfying, but it'll make you more marketable, too.

How bout a Motorola M68HC12/11 microcontroller EVB? You can do lots of cool stuff with it, reference manuals for it are pretty cheap and usually of very good quality, and you can even buy pre-built boards for a decent price, and start hacking away on it right away. You can have your very own fighting robot (or whatever turns your crank) in no time.

called "Why Not MySQL?" by Ben Adida, part of the OpenACS Project, on why MySQL wasn't the right choice for OpenACS. It's quite out of date (and is recognised as such by the author), but still worth a read, and there many interesting submitted comments.

Get it here

Not that anyone tends to read/moderate Slashdot posts after they're a day old, so few will see this...

MIT has been doing some really interesting work on a wireless routing protocol called Grid.

The good folks at the MIT Media Lab (especially under the Things That Think research program) have been researching such things for years.
The July/August issue of IEEE Micro contains several articles on their work, including one on parasitic power.

The good folks at the MIT Media Lab (especially under the Things That Think research program) have been researching such things for years.
The July/August issue of IEEE Micro contains several articles on their work, including one on parasitic power.

However, I think Lisp will never be more than a niche language, for reasons Richard P. Gabriel has made all too obvious.

My question, for what it's worth, is "Why bother?"

The USA killed ~7000 innocent Somalian civilians in -93 while failing to kill one single warlord.

Stop showing your ignorance. You may not have liked the Somalian mission, but lets be honest about what the mission was. Killing Somalian warlords was *not* the mission.

Originally the mission was humanitarian, under Bush the elder- "open supply routes, get food moving, prepare the way for a UN peacekeeping force."
Under Clinton, in part due to the deliberate killing of 24 UN peacekeepers, the mission changed somewhat to capturing (that's right, *capturing*, not killing) one warlord, Gen. Mohamed Farrah Aidid, as well as commanders under him. If you find the deaths of 7,000 civilians deeply troubling, as I do, you might try reading BlackHawk Down to get some perspective on how such things occur.

You might pause to consider how (and if, of course) the USA should use its power when attempting to prevent a million starving people from dying due to the fact that food supplies can't get into a country during yet another civil war. Keep in perspective that while the US did sacrifice 34 of its own lives (and a billion or so in cash) and 7000 Somalis died, we were trying to prevent the starvation deaths which had already killed 300,000 Somalis, with the International Red Cross warning at the time of a potential 1.5 million deaths without greater food distribution. (I don't hear you trying to hold any warlords responsible for those 300,000 deaths now, do I? Why didn't the person who handed you that one-liner set of facts bother to mention them?)

Being concerned about the safety of food distribution (having watched rival Somali clans attempt to use food as a weapon by stealing, hoarding, and denying it to particular people), the UN first sent 50 unarmed monitors, then 500 security guards, then 5000, then ultimately 25000 US troops to insure that food aid could get through without being intercepted by warring local warlords. Yeah, USA- those bastards!

After it was clear to the US that its presence wasn't being effective (and the conflict was getting personal), it left, arranged for 25,000 UN troops from scattered countries to replace it, and after 8 more years, the UN has finally helped install Somalia's first government in a decade, the Transitional National Government (interview here). Meanwhile US food aid continues to stream into the country. Man, the USA really sucks, doesn't it!

--LP

Well, they got everything else online. Why not course material too?

http://bathroom.mit.edu
http://spleen.mit.edu/laundry
http://neurosis.mit.edu/foo

Well, they got everything else online. Why not course material too?

http://bathroom.mit.edu
http://spleen.mit.edu/laundry
http://neurosis.mit.edu/foo

Well, they got everything else online. Why not course material too?

http://bathroom.mit.edu
http://spleen.mit.edu/laundry
http://neurosis.mit.edu/foo

The effort has been endowed - with 11 million dollars. Find out more at http://web.mit.edu/ocw/.

I just finished interfacing my old Nintendo Powerglove to an HC11 based miniboard, so I can use it to control a Holonomic Killough Platform, loosely based on the Palm Pilot Robot Kit

I like the powerglove over a conventional joystick, because it's pretty easy to interface, and it supplies a large amount of data - X,Y, and Z coordinates, roll data, finger positions, and the 16 keys on the keypad (which usefully send data as if they were a hex keypad, even though they aren't laid out that way).

I have most of the parts I need, including the wheels, and I just finished modifying some cheap servos for continuous motion. Unfortunately, the wheels I bought weren't really designed to be driven, so I'm going to have to find a way to attach the motors. The Palm Pilot Robot kit just uses glue, but since the servos weren't really designed to take the lateral stresses that will be imposed by gluing them to the wheels and making them act as as a suspension system, I'm hoping to work out something a bit more robust.

The only problem I forsee is having to be tethered to the robot in order to control it (it'll eventually be autonomous and won't require a tether, though I plan to still be able to control it with a tether.) I think I'm leaning towards a cheap RF solution, so I can sit at the computer, and control the robot wirelessly.

Just another geek hobby (and ALL of the technology I'm using so far, with the possible exception of the wheels, is from the '80s).

OH - and there's no sacrifice necessary - I haven't had to modify the glove at all, and am not really planning to.

His habits are nocturnal, he does his best work in the dark.

perfect for slashdotters everywhere!

more useless MIT trivia.

So shall we find a bridge over the Charles River, and measure it in CmdrTacos?

There's a section where you're supposed to be able to see questions asked by students along with the answers, but it's empty.

All this seems great if you're a student at MIT, but it's not useful for others.

Insert some clever joke about MIT's OpenCourseWare
and the MIT Bathroom Server here.

The Mellon and Hewitt foundations directly. MS gave a big chunk to improve computing infrastructure.

Dang, I was hoping they'd make the textbooks available online. There are a lot of texts I'd love to browse through, but don't really want to spend the $50-$100 each for the privilege. (How did I ever afford it when I was in college, anyway!?)

The FAQ mentions that things available "could include material such as lecture notes, course outlines, reading lists, and assignments for each course". That's nice and all, but it sounds like you'll still need to get hold of the textbooks if you really want to take advantage of the course materials.

BTW, I suspect that part of that $100M figure may be from lack of revenue selling these materials in the campus bookstore. Just a guess.

MIT doesn't think so.

I like it... I can't wait for the Linguistics curriculum to go up.

--brian

MIT OpenCourseWare. I love to learn and if this pans out it could be a real boon to self educated people around the world!

Enough LEGO bashing. The proliferation of special peices is annoying, but that is limited mostly to the basic sets.

LEGO Technic beats the crap out of anything else, fisher-technik, erector, or capsela (can't believe this is even in the running). Technic has more and better pieces that are easier to put together, and won't cut up your hands and tire you out.

And of course Technic isused for the semi-famous MIT Autonomous Robot Design Competition.