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that was because it was some dumbed down version of IIS that limited the connections to 10, and no one around here cares enough about windows to figure out the right registry settings (me neither).

so instead of fixing it i downloaded apache and configged it in about 5 minutes. maybe less.

since then it appears that web browsing has been a bit smoother. i checked the web log, which is normally about 200k on any given day, but by 4pm today is had grown to 17 MEGABYTES. ha! at it's peak we were serving around 10 megabytes per minute in pdfs, jpegs, etc. we have served 1.7 gigs so far today. whew.

so now that it's fixed, come on in and check it out. go to ketterle, then research, and especially check out rubidium. :)

and while i'm here, let me just say that wolfgang ketterle is one of the nicest people i have ever worked for. he, and everyone else here at MIT just kicks ass. wolfgang had gone to bed at 2:30am last night, and was awoken at 5:30am by some strange swedish dude...

later,
muerte

The new open journal, JMLR that replaced the old one is a great solution to the problem. However, I'm dismayed to find that they publish using proprietary formats. Namely PDF and Postscript. Wouldn't it, thus, cost money to save to those formats? I think they should use open standards *only*. Why not use LaTex or just plain old HTML 4? This would better allow scientists from developing countries to publish their work rather than wasting precious money buying licenses of Adobe Acrobat. It seems they are fighting closed proprietary standards in the first place and should not be supporting them.

Furthermore, I could actually read the articles much easier than saving to a file and launching a bloated Adobe application or, gasp, use that annoying PDF plug-in that usually crashes my browser.

Press Release on the Journal of Machine Learning Research site gives a partial answer to the question how they will finance this. In addition of getting money from printed version and paid electronic edition (with additional features) on the CatchWord, SPARC helps them. SPARC is an alliance of universities and research libraries that supports increased competition in scientific journal
publishing.

There are projects going on that mean to make interfaces possible using the things you mention. For example there is the mit intelligent room (The project is described well here)

There are no gloves needed or anything, because a camera can keep track of the movement of your hand. I guess goggles would be pretty essential to get a truly immersive environment. But then there is also some work being done to make that less of a hassle.

There are projects going on that mean to make interfaces possible using the things you mention. For example there is the mit intelligent room (The project is described well here)

There are no gloves needed or anything, because a camera can keep track of the movement of your hand. I guess goggles would be pretty essential to get a truly immersive environment. But then there is also some work being done to make that less of a hassle.

Here's a log file!

Okay, forget the puns, just read the very long log. Amusing.

At work, we've been worried that our boss is tracking our bathroom time to make sure we're "productive" enough on company time. And these guys are posting their bathrom usage on the Net? How ironic.

Natural Language Processing has my vote. Some of these folks are working on it already. Wouldn't it be nice to say "move this thing over here", or some other combination of speech and gesturing, rather than all these inane menus and clicks? Someone still needs to develop the pipe infrastructure, tho. Just *don't* make it so narrow as to become worthless.

The Nanowalker project

The MINIMAN project

The "traditional" wearable computer input device seems to be the Twiddler - a one-handed chording keyboard. That's what the MIT Wearables crew all seem to use.

Unfortunately the way they do augmented memory is by typing in the things they see to see if there are notes against them already - the newer things use GPS and spatial detectors to try and avoid that for static objects, and IR-beacons to avoid it for moving (but known) things.

Ummm...would you like the moon with that too?

Respectfully, this is WAY beyond what the state of the art can support right now, or in the foreseeable future.

It's a chicken-and-egg problem...the masses won't be interested in wearables until they are more or less equivalent to desktops. But until the masses are interested, the major players won't devote major funding to getting wearables up to desktop level. Which means that only hobbyists and small businesses will do it. Which means that progress will be very slow.

On the other hand, I think you may be overestimating what you really need. Instead of thinking "What do I need from a wearable in order to do the things that I do on my desktop?" try thinking "What can I do on my wearable that I can't do on my desktop?"

Here are some suggestions:

* have a combined MP3 player/watch/note taker/scheduler/data bank/voice-over-IP cell phone/email/pager, all in one go-anywhere device

* have a personal electronic assistant that helps you remember things based on your current surroundings and other cues (check out the Remembrance Agents Page for more details)

* broadcast video of what you're seeing back to your home basestation. If you get mugged, you have a video of the guy's face. If you see a beautiful sunset, you can watch it (admittedly on a small screen) with your sweetie later.

* mapping software that updates in realtime, showing you where you are and providing you detailed instructions on how to get to your destination.

* ...use your imagination

Dave Storrs

RP and many other diseases of the retina are very good reasons to keep an eye (no pun intended) on this and similar projects. Here are a few good resources for other types of low-vision coping technology:

autofocus eyewear [lowvision.org]
the Jordy [enhancedvision.com] (yes, trek-inspired!)
wire a camera to your brain [artificialvision.com]
artificial retina [mit.edu]

What the article describes is the old military concept of "mobile mesh network". Highly survivable solutions are a must in a combat environment, but their their characteristics make them completely unmarketable. In our specific example, the reasons are as follow : Full-mesh wireless networks like JTIDS are inherently inefficient because one cannot make range (timing) and Doppler corrections at the transmitters, and because there is no frequency reuse. With a repeater-based architecture, all transmitters can adjust timing and frequency to correct for their range from the repeater and for relative velocity. In a full-mesh network, all of the other nodes are potential receivers, but one can make range and Doppler corrections for only one of them. With multiple repeaters (base stations), two repeaters that are not close to one another can use the same frequencies without interference; such frequency reuse enables large increases in system capacity over full-mesh and single-repeater architectures. Decreasing cell size in order to increase frequency reuse reduces the survivability of the network. A closely related concept is that of the self-organizing hierarchical network. These networks are similar to the homogeneous mobile mesh networks, except that nodes organize themselves into clusters and by some means "elect" a cluster head (see, for example, Alwan et. al, 1996). The cluster head is responsible for keeping track of the membership of the cluster and the locations of nearby cluster heads, and for performing routing, switching, and trunking functions. However, since any node must be able to function as the cluster head, cost and battery life are likely to be problematic. Remember that mobile devices are highly contrained. The problem with military stuff is that it is grossly overengineered from a civilian point of view. We all would like to carry cutting edge radio hardware with us and be ready for all kinds of emergencies, but there is a price to pay and the civilian market won't bear it, preferring to take long term risks and to get more features and more performance in the short term. If survivability was foremost, everyone would be backing up their data. Field experience shows that it is not he case. Sources : http://www.google.com/search?q=cache:3fDYY36opQQ:w ww.rand.org/publications/MR/MR960/MR960.chap3.pdf+ tactical+network+relay+node++survivability http://dss.ll.mit.edu/dss.web/98F-SIW-143.html

The only real use of ABCD is in military phone systems, such as AUTOVON and it's successors, where they are used to prioritize calls, and if necessary drop the lowest priority calls in times of network stress. The instructions for AUTOVON are Online.

If you think the RIAA is losing by making it clear how impossible it is to stop or monitor file sharing under the current model of the internet,...

There actually are several models under attack here, not just that of the Internet. They include:

Intellectual property/copyright; and

Music distribution

I would suggest that the RIAA is generating a lot of legal heat in order to support an outmoded distribution model. When they point out that there is no difference between a collection of MP3s and a CD, no one seems to ask the salient question: whose fault is that? Why isn't there an expectation that the record companies should work to innovate - to develop something deliverable on CD that *isn't* the same as a bunch of MP3s?

And there is a rising tide of discussion that perhaps there's something wrong with the current construction of copyright. The recently released Copyrights and Copywrongs points out the key issue that was also raised by Litman: somewhere along the way, the rationale for copyright has changed from promoting the intellectual commons to maximizing the economic incentives for innovation. And given that copyright has *always* (since the Statute of Anne in 1710) been about maximizing the likelihood that ideas get effective distribution (there's that word again!), it may be time to rethink the current mis-mosh of laws altogether.

I made a meager effort to get some of these ideas across in a class I'm teaching - the materials are online here

I think your numbers are high, given that MIT's faculty+students number under 11,000. However, I do think there are many more linux machines than the hundred or so in MIT's interdepartmental clusters.

I think your numbers are high, given that MIT's faculty+students number under 11,000. However, I do think there are many more linux machines than the hundred or so in MIT's interdepartmental clusters.

This is all discussed in all the geekish detail you could ever want in the Telecom Digest, a eighteen (18!) year archive of discussion about telecom technology.

TELECOM Digest was founded in August, 1981, by Jon Solomon. It has been published continuously since that time. The location has changed over the years. It has been published at MIT, at Boston University, at Rutgers, and for about six years (since 1989) at Northwestern University, Evanston, IL. We are back at MIT as of November, 1995.

TELECOM Digest is distributed on several networks: In addition to the mailing list, the Digest appears on Usenet as the 'comp.dcom.telecom' (moderated) news group.

I guess if we assume a skin temperature of 34 celsius (307 K), and an ambient temperature of 20 C (293 K), then our efficiency is bounded by about 4.5%. Given that we dissipate on average 64W/m^2 at idle, and a "fingernail" sized device (1.5 cm^2), we should have about 0.001 W available to us, or 0.4 mW assuming 100% of Carnot cycle efficiency. At 1.5V, this gives a maximum current output of 0.27 mA. Since they are getting about 10 microA, then we can assume they see an efficiency of about 4% themselves. So, it seems like there's room to grow!

Maybe they'll be able to power those PDA's after all!

There's a quick discussion here with regards to human-body-power available for wearable computing.

Also, there's another company that builds thermo-ionic power generating chips (cleverly named PowerChips) called Borealis. They see them being used as a second-stage on typical gas turbine/etc.. generators. They claim to see 20% efficiency wrt the Carnot cycle limit, a few orders of magnitude better than most thermo-electric (Peltier based) generators.

BTW: All these calculations are very "back of the envelope"!

Neil Gershenfeld of the MIT Media Lab. I've seen him speak and read his book, "When Things Start to Think". The Media Lab has come up with a whole assortment of amazing devices.

Neil Gershenfeld of the MIT Media Lab. I've seen him speak and read his book, "When Things Start to Think". The Media Lab has come up with a whole assortment of amazing devices.

Bob

Bob

I've always used Jed .
It can emulate most features of emacs, but it's a lot smaller a faster. Functions are programmed in Slang, a very simple language. Slang looks like interpreted C language with a lot of handy hooks for strings manipulation and text display.
Also, Jed works on a lot of platforms, including all variants of Unix, VMS and Windows.

As a former joe fan, I must suggest you check out Jed.

Unlike joe, it is being actively developed and supported, has readable source (while I like joe, have you ever looked at the source? The medication is helping, but I still twitch occasionally...), runs on Windows (yeah, sometimes I have to work on a Windows box and it's really nice to be able to have my editor of choice), and has both console and X/Win32 GUI versions.

Unlike emacs, it's relatively small & fast (though admittedly bigger & slower than joe); unlike vi, it's useful.

If you like joe, you should check out jed.

somewhat off topic, but this sort of idea has been around for a long time, have a read of rodney brook's paper "Fast, Cheap and Out of Control: A Robot Invasion of the Solar System" [www.ai.mit.edu] (Journal of the British Interplanetary Society, October 1989).
similar ideas, but with robots. v

"You may be thinking "This is only a couple of header files, what's the big deal?". As Søren says "The problem here is that the structures in the headers is the whole story. That info tells how you read the proprietary struct off the disks, and was reverse engineered and documented by me after a lot of effort." Søren's intellectual property is tied up in those files."

If someone would create a header file from the same information, it would probably look extremly similar. This is a good indication that the header file is not a "work of authorship".

On the other hand, if the author used something - be it code or only information - from Søren, it would at least be fair to give proper credit.

1. What are the uses of cryptography as a "Human Rights Tool"?

Perhaps you can also check this link of letters to zimmerman from human rights groups

If you follow that link from above, you can actually download all corresponding mp3 and WAV files of the original not-legally-available-anymore "plunderphonics" album. It's still one of the best examples of making "original" music using a sampler ever recorded.

Stand out tracks include Oswald's Metallica remix "Net" and Beatles remix "Birth". Also don't miss the James Brown remix "Brown". ~jeff

If you follow that link from above, you can actually download all corresponding mp3 and WAV files of the original not-legally-available-anymore "plunderphonics" album. It's still one of the best examples of making "original" music using a sampler ever recorded.

Stand out tracks include Oswald's Metallica remix "Net" and Beatles remix "Birth". Also don't miss the James Brown remix "Brown". ~jeff

If you follow that link from above, you can actually download all corresponding mp3 and WAV files of the original not-legally-available-anymore "plunderphonics" album. It's still one of the best examples of making "original" music using a sampler ever recorded.

Stand out tracks include Oswald's Metallica remix "Net" and Beatles remix "Birth". Also don't miss the James Brown remix "Brown". ~jeff

But it is not perfect. What about exact pharse searches? Try this search on google. "to be or not to be, that is the question" Google first hit is something about horticulture, huh?!? "To spray or not to spray?" And the rest of the hits have nothing to do with Shakespeare.

Notice the message that Google gave you along with that query:
The word "or" was ignored in your query -- for search results including one term or another, use capitalized "OR" between words.
The following words are very common and were not included in your search: to be to be that is.

If you read The Basics of Google Search, you'll see that to force searching for common words, you need to use a plus sign. Hence, the correct query is "+to +be +or not +to +be, +that +is the question". Plug that in, hit "I'm feeling lucky", and bing! You're at Hamlet, Act 3, Scene 1.

There are method of hiding data in plain sight. Just read "Chaffing and Winnowing: Confidentiality without Encryption" at http://theory.lcs.mit.edu/~rivest/chaffing.txt


Also, said Terrorist could use multiple techniques together:

- write message
- apply method of Chaffing and Winnowing (above) or method of hiding messages in spam.
- hide that message in favorite media with outguess.
- encrypt that with PGP or GnuPG.
- encrypt that with the mandated, key-esrowed, back-doored technique
Now there are several barriers to break down, but only the easy one is known about until an investigation is already under way.

Or:
- said terrorist could avoid electronic communications, and meet face to face in a public park or on a public bus or in a crowd

Ask a gardener how they deal with weeds. Do you just remove what you can see, or do you go after the roots? Ask a doctor how he/she deals with a disease. Does he/she treat the symptoms and hope for the best over time, or does he/she treat the source of the disease?

Yes, cutting off one of their means of communication would be an incovenience for people who have evil plans. But is there a better we that we can deal with their evil plans in the first place?

I don't know the answers, I just ask the questions.

There is no easy answer to this question. It certainly depends on the alogorithms used. It depends on who implemented it, tamperfree devices, and much more. Here are a couple of links that might give the interested reader some points to start:

Peter Gutmann's excellent crypto tutorial
Some information on Blind Signatures
A very nice link page for privacy and encryption
Ron Rivest's (the R in RSA) homepage with an excellent link section
And a link to buy Applied Cryptography, even if the stories lack accuracy it is a good read

Happy reading!

I look at the things the ACLU has written, and although I do not disagree with a single thing they say, it seems a little light on facts. I feel I am in the "know" about computer security issues and how they impact my rights, however this stuff just seems to be written on a very low level. This has made me wonder, usually when I talk to someone about why the actions of the US government are creepy right now I get into details - I explain the whole clipper chip fiasco, and I get them to ponder the real reason the feds case was dropped (google cache) so quickly against Phil Zimmerman. Anyway, this means almost always gets others to be more in the "know." But is this approach not appropriate in dealing with my representatives? I realize that for many in congress the little people's letters are just read by someone else and tallied and maybe a few are handed over with the stats... But should I send a cookie-cutter boxing-gloves-on letter, or a diatribe explaining not just things are bad - but WHY?

A picture of the Fujitsu Robot> Anyone got any better links than the one paragraph ones?? I did notice that Rodney Brooks is a Fujitsu Professor of Computer Science and Engineering at MIT. I wonder how much of COG is in the new robot??

Check out this link for more info. This one is from MIT (quite a bit old, but it's still interesting read). And then of course there is the Humanoid Project.

If you've really only been programming in Lisp for a week or so then you really haven't had time enough to appreciate what its strengths and weaknesses are. It sounds to me as though you have acquired a disease that is all too common amongst programmers - the desire to want to specialise in one language too early on.

I simply cannot emphasise enough how valuable it is to learn as many programming languages as possible. Even if you don't really like it at first, a language can grow on you in ways you would have never imagined. No language is perfect, so knowing a selection of different languages will give you the opportunity to choose a tool that is appropriate to the job in hand. If the only tool you have is a hammer, then every problem you come across starts to look like a nail.

By keeping your horizons broad, most especially by learning languages that might seem strange, counter-intuitive or even downright annoying at first, I can assure you othat you will become a much, much better programmer in the long run. The ways in which languages differ can often give you an insight into the ways that different programmers might solve the same problem.

FWIW, the presence of closures and eval are not the only things that make Lisp distinctive from other languages. The one truly unique (not to mention incredibly powerful) feature of Lisp is macros. You will not be able to find these in Perl. Also, in Perl the standard way to solve problems is with an iterative, procedural style, where Lisp more often employs recursion and an applicative programming style, both of which are techniques well worth the effort to learn about.

Whether Lisp is better than Perl for AI is debatable. I'd argue in favour of Lisp for the following reasons: one is the fact that Lisp is extremely good at knowledge representation (and the subsequent manipulation of that knowledge), but more important is Lisp's ability to generate code with macros, effectively meaning that you can write programs to write other programs. It's also probably worth noting that Lisp is quite a lot faster than Perl, given a decent enough compiler. See The Programming Language Shootout if you don't believe me. Lisp is also a very mature language, with an ANSI standard, so unlike Perl you can be certain that it won't be pulling any carpets out from underneath your feet any time soon.

If I haven't done a enough good job of convincing you that learning Lisp is worthwhile (and I probably haven't) then try checking out Paul Graham's Beating the Averages. Also, be sure to check out Richard Gabriel's Good News, Bad News and How to Win Big. And have a read of Paradigms of Artificial Intelligence Programming by Peter Norvig for some more specific examples of Lisp as an AI programming language. Particularly relevant might be the section in the preface entitled Why Lisp?.

And when you're done with Lisp, I'd recommend a look at Ocaml, SML, Ruby and Smalltalk (particularly the delightful Squeak)!

Of course I understand why you're insulting ME. But you've also managed to insult everybody who's disagreed with you in your call for assassination, the president, and everybody in this country who supports their president. You've also managed to misread a hell of a lot of what people said (most of us in this thread DO NOT support nuclear force) and even committed what would be a crime in this country. You've mocked our country for having no freedom of speech (because we prevent coercive statements of intended violence against our president) while posting from a country which doesn't seem to have freedom of speech itself.

You and all of your spiritual brothers (everyone else who thinks I should be locked up for not liking Bush) were asses

Not LIKING him? Hell, I don't like him. You threatened his life, which is totally a different level. (And your weasily "It was conditional" doesn't make it ok, it makes you weasily.)

Btw, great way to dodge the issue. You asked when assasination was acceptable, I provided an answer.

Your answer spoke for itself.

Rodney Brooks published a similar idea: Fast Cheap, and Out of control in 1989. (This is different than the movie.)

I particularly like a related, albeit less useful, plan of sending two robots to the moon, each covered in logos of various large companies. The plan was to finance the trip by selling the pictures the robots would take of each other.

Back in 1998 Rivest wrote Chaffing and Winnowing: Confidentiality without Encryption.

How to set up a network at home: MIT guide with Linux focus.

World of Windows Networking: If Windows networking is screwing up (as it often does), go here.

homePCnetwork forum: Configuration questions answered, mostly by guy who runs the forum.

Technocopia: Overview articles on home networking.

Grant's Closet: Home LAN wiring.

Steve DeRose's guide: CAT5 wiring.

Telecom wiring: links to HOWTO and info articles on wiring.

I found the Web page of project "Cheese" at MIT. They don't seem to be using their own mouse tracking technique yet. The publication that the researchers have produced doesn't provide much more information than the BBC article.

I found the Web page of project "Cheese" at MIT. They don't seem to be using their own mouse tracking technique yet. The publication that the researchers have produced doesn't provide much more information than the BBC article.

Content providers have a vested interest in the results of mouse movement data analysis. Our system provides the means to find out exactly how users mavigate their page and thus affords an extensive user model.

Content providers have a vested interest in the results of mouse movement data analysis. Our system provides the means to find out exactly how users mavigate their page and thus affords an extensive user model.

• Free Windows version
  Sokoban (also this page has a lot of
  links to other versions and resources).
  
  
• A X11 version
  Xsokoban
  
  
• For KDE:
  ksokoban
  
  
• A generic version: xsok (GPL'ed) with .rpm and .deb packages available.
  
• Mac, Java, etc. versions...
  

I wrote a similar challenge for the 1999 MIT AI Olympics: RoboSockey

It's a non-violent physically realistic (mostly) soccer game played in a 2D hockey rink, and
should run fine in your Java 1.1 browser. Beware Linux folks! Most Linux Java implementations translate Thread.sleep() into a no-op, which slows this program down tremendously -- there are 14 threads running here!

Most of the teams were written in less than a day, so the ones that work tend to chase the ball like a bunch of 6th graders.
</plug>

Anyway, all the games listed here really help students get into programming. It's important to learn algorithms, and all that... but nothing beats watching your code interact with a real or simulated world. Anything you can use to get folks interested and keep them long enough to get them involved helps!

The Master said, "The mechanic, who wishes to do his work well, must first sharpen his tools. When you are living in any state, take service with the most worthy among its great officers, and make friends of the most virtuous among its scholars."