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MITs Computer Science 101 (6.001) is based a the
LISP variant called SCHEME. About half of the
MIT students take this course required for all
computer science majors and electrical engineeers.
This course has used LISP for most of its 30 year
history except one term when it tried Java.
It is presumed the most MIT students have programmed
extensively in high school one of the more practical language like C or JAVA.
This purpose of this course is to teach fundamental
program constructs and not how to get a job.

Lisp: Good news Bad news How to win big also known as "Worse is Better"

Lisp on your Palm!

Lisp/Scheme is pretty cool, but depending on the implementation you choose, you usually get little or no support for making GUI applications. So if its going to be used anywhere, I'm guessing CGI scripts and such on the web. Using it with SVG might be a pretty good option.

------
bleh

Having an outsider find and report a bug is usually a much happier situation than having in-house users encounter the same bug while conducting our business.

For more details, see my essay: Free Software: Solving the Buy/Build Dilemma.

cribeiro writes: "The first Infocom games date from the early 70's..."

Mainframe Zork was released in the late 70s, before Infocom existed as a company, and after Adams released "Adventureland".

Infocom, as an entity, did not actually release Zork until 1981.

See a recent MIT student undergaduate paper that carefully examined the history of Infocom:

Down from the Top of Its Game: The Story of Infocom, Inc.

MIT Technology Licensing Office Guide

• MIT is a private institution. Yes it gets money from public grants & programs, almost every accredited institution does. MIT is no more a public or government entity then the trade schools that advertise on late night TV. Furthermore even parts of the US Gov't doing public work can now claim IP on some of their products.
• Yes MIT uses Graduate Students and no they don't generally earn much. On the other hand putting them to work probably does keep their tuition down a bit and heck, if you don't like it you can always go someplace else (courts rarely require X years attending MIT as part of a sentence and the campus is very open, one is free to leave it and not return at any time.) However this has nothing to do with the topic and just gets brought up every time a .edu issue is raised.
• The US HDTV standards happened after the FCC ran a competition in which four finalists emerged. Rather then a winner-take-all situation emerging (which would of taken years with the legal wrangling) a pooling of the "best" of a various technologies was brokered. As the patent & other IP issues around HDTV were spread out amongst several institutions and companies a pool was created held by the companies who now dubbed themselves "The Grand Alliance". Then as any other number of projects have done (DVD, Firewire, etc.) an examiner was brought in to determine exactly what IP was required then a formula was put in place to compensate the IP owners and everything got signed off on.
• MIT earns some large sum of money every year from it's IP material, money which helps fund them. Sony does the same from it's own portfolio. In this case MIT's IP is used through the Grand Alliance agreement, something which Sony seems to have now decided to ignore. Whether or not you agree with all details of all IP in this case it seems rather strightforward and not to fall into any of the areas which so many folks find offensive.
• Yes MIT (a US institution) can sue Sony (a company HQ'd in Japan.) Internationial trade has been going on since we first worked out nations and the laws are rather straightforward in cases like this. Did anyone other then a few sappy posters think that this was a new situation, that one couldn't sue an offshore entity?

Sony should be careful here. While MIT doesn't want a conflict, their Jedi are more than capable of turning the Sony corporate offices into the world's largest VU Meter. And if that doesn't show them the light, how are they going to work without any offices.

Sony should be careful here. While MIT doesn't want a conflict, their Jedi are more than capable of turning the Sony corporate offices into the world's largest VU Meter. And if that doesn't show them the light, how are they going to work without any offices.

As an entering frosh at MIT, I've already seen bathroom and laundry. But it wasn't until I moved to 3rd East that I came upon sodalord.mit.edu. We've got a really old soda machine in the hall, and it's connected to a server. Log in to your account, get your soda, put it on your tab. Check out the hall's habits, or any member thereof, on the web. Fun.

mua-ha-ha. since the laundry server only serves teeny gobs of text, though, it seems like it's resisted the slashdotting.

you can't be from Random though, noone there has 6 girlfriends :)

oh, and while the web page for bathroom.mit.edu still seems to be too slashdotted to view, anyone with finger can finger bathroom@bathroom.mit.edu and get a current status in text.

The Switzerland Coke Machine

Actually, it doesn't seem to be working now. Oh well.

good ol' Random. It's too bad there's no webpage yet about Mjolnir, the homemade big-ass speaker built from a linear induction motor from a dishwasher-sized hard drive, a cone of sheet metal, and a cabinet of medium-density fiberboard.

what a bunch of 31337 H4X0R5

good ol' Random. It's too bad there's no webpage yet about Mjolnir, the homemade big-ass speaker built from a linear induction motor from a dishwasher-sized hard drive, a cone of sheet metal, and a cabinet of medium-density fiberboard.

what a bunch of 31337 H4X0R5

Actually, the boiling point of nitrogen is -196C (about 70 K), well below the temperature required for this superconductivity. Ya gotta love when articles use degrees Fahrenheit as the units in a scientific article. It never fails to confuse somebody.

It's rather interesting watching slashbots make smug comments about "Microsoft worms" and "Outlook viruses" when the two most damaging worms that have occured this year could have appeared on any platform.

Code Red
The Code Red worm is a typical worm that exploits a buffer overflow just like the Morris Internet Worm and the Ramen worm before it. Either of the aformentioned worms could have done what code red did once they had 0wn3d the boxen, they just happened not to.

Heck, I've toyed with writing a proof of concept *nix verison of Code Red using wu-ftp vulnerabilities, rpc.statd vulnerabilities, telnetd vulnerabilities, sendmail vulnerabilities and even BIND vulnerabilities. Of course, I haven't gone much further than deciding what exploits to use and glancing at some source since I'm busy with school at the moment and more importantly I don't want to go to jail.

Sircam
The Sircam worm spread either through social engineering or across unprotected network shares. Neither of these requires Outlook. It didn't grab addresses out of the address book and instead grabbed them from the user's web cache. Sircam also didn't use the client mailer to mail itself out but instead included it's own mail program.
Thus all Sircam needed to spread was clueless users. This only thing Microsoft-y about this worm is that it ran on Windows.

All the above said, it is truly sad that on almost all popular platforms we are stil dealing with a 30 year old security problem whose causes and solutions have been known from probably before a sizable number of the slashdot population was born.

Harold Edgarton, the inventor of the electric flash, is the father of this sort of photography. If you like this post, you'll LOVE this book.

I saw the movie a few months ago at the first screening in New England and it was pretty good! The digital animation is very clean and striking. It's only about 45 minutes long, and I recommend watching it if you get the chance.

My Neighbors the Yamadas is also all-digital, but the way Ghibli (woohoo :) did the artwork, it looks extremely good; it looks like handpainted watercolors. (A great movie, btw.) Pure digital animation has real potential.

You mention targeting a Wearable computer design -- have you spoken with anyone from any of the university Wearable Computing groups, or Professor Steve Mann?

Try Here for Geekcode. I don't know how many more recent versions there are, however.

Clearly, one factor here is careful picking of battles by those creating the AI software. Psychoanalysis can take the form of recycling the statements of the patient into questions, making it easier than other forms of dialogue for a computer to emulate.

It's clearly true that an 18-month-old's language is simpler than that of an adult, but does it also have the attractive predictability of psychoanalysis? If so, this might not be a huge advance. On the other hand, if the simple talk this system can emulate is hard to predict, then it might be a significant feat.

True, they are fast... but I was speaking of Rodney Brooks' solution.

What I would consider to be the first GUI was Sutherland's "Sketchpad" system from the early 60's. The military had similar sorts of things predating Sutherland, but nothing quite flexible enough to really be called a full blown GUI.

Sketchpad was essentially a constraint-based drawing program using a lightpen, and using object-oriented principles for its implementation. However, to call it a GUI is not quite correct. There were e.g. no UI elements represented on the screen (such as buttons, menus, or windows). A graphics app is not the same as a GUI, i.e. a UI that uses graphics.

The thesis can be found online here: (scanned, no pdf in '63 :-) Sketchpad, a man-machine graphical communication system . Evidently, all the graphics in the thesis were generated by the program it described (Sketchpad). According to Alan Kay this is rare for graphics theses.

Anybody with their brains in the right place can tell you that the GUI was not invented by Xerox PARC. They may have done a great deal to push the idea, or perhaps simply been at the right place at the right time, but the basic idea of using graphics as a means to interact with a machine predates PARC by about 20 years.

The group that created Smalltalk (Learning Research Group, LRG) was set up in or about 1971, possibly the year before. 20 years before that would be the early fifties. Sketchpad was from 1963. Engelbart's system is usually dated to '65. But neither of these were GUIs by any reasonable standard. By 1973, LRG had the first Altos and created their first GUIs. I don't know how to get "twenty years earlier" from that.

All this can be read in the classic paper The Early History of Smalltalk by Alan Kay. (A chapter in History of Programming Languages II, 1996. A preprint that may be easier to find in the library is in ACM SIGPLAN Notices, March 1993.) This is probably the most readable and enjoyable scientific paper I've ever come across. And it contains so much good stuff. It is a shame it isn't available online.

Currently, Kay is in the process of donating videos of many of the pioneering systems (NLS, Sketchpad, GRAIL, Smalltalk-72, etc.) to the Computer History Museum (I think), and converting them to digital movies (mpeg, mov?). I hope they will be placed on line.

If you really wanna have some fun, check out Doug Englebart's 1968 presentation that introduced the world to the mouse, chordboard and other interesting stuff.

It should be here (all in streaming video), but I coudn't reach the site now: Doug Engelbart 1968 Demo.

It almost brings tears to my eyes when I watch it. :)

Second that. But is it the demo or the non-progress since then that makes me cry?

that the idea of teaching a "child" system has been used for AI research.

Cog anybody?

Something along the line of Ron Rivest's Chaffing and Winnowing technique? http://theory.lcs.mit.edu/~rivest/chaffing.txt

Who needs hackers if the electronic systems already suck?

Who needs hackers if the electronic systems already suck?

Please understand that this rant is the result of 10 years of watching the Internet come to terms with the lack of a HOSTS.TXT

HOSTS.TXT (yes, all caps) was the file that contained the list of all of the hosts on the Internet. Before DNS (and for a while after), there was HOSTS.TXT. You can probably find copies of it out there (for more info, you can see this old copy which I found via this article from the IETF mailing list).

What the heck ever made you think that I felt it was "needed"? It was, of course, needed in the pre-DNS Internet of the early 80s, but certainly has not been since, and would be a scary thing to try to maintain today ;-)

I was talking about the thrashing that has occured as the Internet has scaled beyond all expectations, and then done so again; repeatedly.

As for your "HUH?", I don't know that I can help you there....

You could always check out the definitive guide to swapfests, linked from that page:

http://web.mit.edu/w1gsl/Public/ne-fleas

-dan

Did you read Huxley's "Brave New World?" The title comes from a statement that John the Savage makes when he enters civilization. He says "O brave new world that has such people in it." John the Savage was quoting Miranda in William Shakespeare's The Tempest.

See the context of that quote. When Miranda said it, she meant it in a good way (as did John the Savage at first.)

(For a more appropriate quote from Aldous Huxley, see my signature.)

I'm amazed this hasn't been mentioned yet...

The HP Omnibook 500 is the best if you're looking for a lightweight, relatively powerful subnotebook. Take a look at HP's page to see the details. My 500 has a 700Mhz PIII, 384 MB RAM, and a 20GB HD - yet it only weighs 3.5 lb! The screen is a bit small at only 1024 x 768, but it is much nicer to travel with than my old all-in-one laptop.

Chris Hanson at MIT has put together a set of Debian packages (distributed via ftp, CD images, or bootdisks) specifically for this laptop. It's just about the most brain dead easy installation you'll find for Linux on a laptop. APM, XFree, sound, built-in NIC - everything except the winmodem works right out of the box.

> Next thing you'll be telling me is that this is all "ironic."
No: I guess one of your guys would call it fascism.
FBI has the same right to monitor Chinese military radio as I (who am not a USA citizen) have the rights to monitor your ???whatever???'s private phone calls. If I can, and they don't catch me, it's OK.

I wonder if Microsoft has been reading up on The Art of War... to paraphrase Dave Winer, they seem to be doing a good job of zagging, when everyone expected that they'd zig.

I wrote a brief piece for our web services newsletter that outlines three reasons why Microsoft would benefit from assisting the Mono project:

• Good will. Let's not underestimate this intangible comfort and buy-in that Microsoft can garner by pointing to an alternative implementation. .NET may be a bet-the-house strategy for the company, but the company is nothing if not pragmatic. What it loses in incremental market share to Mono, it more than makes up in wider acceptance of its basic approach -- and denies companies like IBM and Sun some share of their potential customers that would buy anything but Microsoft.
• Critical mass. Mono may be open source, but it still will provide built-in hooks for Passport and other elements of the Hailstorm strategy. What delicious irony that an alternative on the server side ultimately will drive wider adoption of the services that provide real lock-in on the consumption side!
• Counterweight to J2EE. Although the open source community is far from monolithic, it's not entirely unfair to say that there's a preponderance of support among these developers for approaches backed by Sun and the Java/J2EE licensees over those pushed by Microsoft. If Mono helps keep Linux-centric developers solidly in the middle, then the .NET has denied its opponents a formidable, if unpredictable, group of allies.

Does this make sense?

Bent Sleeper
The Stencil Group

That's patently false. Speech synthesis systems are getting better and better at (or, technically, their creators are getting better at creating systems which) generate speech with very similar intonation to what a human would, based on sentence structure analysis and concatenation of recorded subword units with various intonations (there aren't as many as you might think).

Of course, it would need a corpus of recorded and (possibly automatically) tagged speech from the person they wish to imitate, but that's not that impossible. Every notice how the generated speech on some speech recognizing phone system (such as American Airlines) is getting better and better, with more and more human-like pronunciation and intonation? And these are the production systems -- not the research systems. I'm not saying they're perfect (and, of course, they're dealing with multiple intonations of fully recorded words, not subwords), but the problem is a far cry from "true AI", and the work on it is getting better all the time.

Check out http://www.sls.lcs.mit.edu/sls/publications/1998/m engthesis-jonyi.pdf for som more detailed info on such research. (Other papers and theses at http://www.sls.lcs.mit.edu/sls/publications/index. html may be relevant as well.)

-Puk

p.s. If this gets modded up, I could cap my karma on this. :P

That's patently false. Speech synthesis systems are getting better and better at (or, technically, their creators are getting better at creating systems which) generate speech with very similar intonation to what a human would, based on sentence structure analysis and concatenation of recorded subword units with various intonations (there aren't as many as you might think).

Of course, it would need a corpus of recorded and (possibly automatically) tagged speech from the person they wish to imitate, but that's not that impossible. Every notice how the generated speech on some speech recognizing phone system (such as American Airlines) is getting better and better, with more and more human-like pronunciation and intonation? And these are the production systems -- not the research systems. I'm not saying they're perfect (and, of course, they're dealing with multiple intonations of fully recorded words, not subwords), but the problem is a far cry from "true AI", and the work on it is getting better all the time.

Check out http://www.sls.lcs.mit.edu/sls/publications/1998/m engthesis-jonyi.pdf for som more detailed info on such research. (Other papers and theses at http://www.sls.lcs.mit.edu/sls/publications/index. html may be relevant as well.)

-Puk

p.s. If this gets modded up, I could cap my karma on this. :P

The full text of which can be found online, here:

http://mitpress.mit.edu/sicp/sicp.html

First, congratulations on being at MIT, although in the interest of appealing to a broader audience, I'll assume that when you write "further than us" what you mean is "than the U.S.," (even though this response actually deals with MIT).

From what I have seen, Japanese companies have (generally) focused on industrial scale robots with somewhat traditional methods of movement. They have been much work on large biped and quadriped robots, often with servos or linear hydraulic actuators as their primary methods of motion. The goal of many of these robots, it seems, is to allow humans to apply machine force and precision in industrial settings.

Academic research (both in the US and abroad), on the other hand, is focused (for the most part) more on advanced control control issues for for robots and innovative methods of actuation.

The MIT Leg Lab is one of the best known robotics lab in the U.S., and their work with active feedback, one legged locomotion, and gymnastic robots is still some of the most advanced robotic control system work being done. There is other work being done at MIT exploring polymers that shorten when electrical current is applied to them. Bundles of them could be used to build robotic "muscles" for more animal-like movement, or, in a far-off scenario, bionic replacements for damaged body parts.

There are several reasons it seems like Japanese companies are "ahead." Academic work involves a lot of simulation. Some of the best designed robots only exist in virtual worlds, simply because it's too expensive for academic institutions to construct them, purely for proof-of-concept research. Also, it's unclear that there's a difinitive "goal" for robotics. Industrial robotic design is aimed at factory/workplace automation. The Leg Lab is concerned with understanding legged locomotion in all its forms (both natural and invented). Sony is concerned with making a dog that can push around a little plastic ball. In short, it's tough to say someones "ahead," because everyone's going in different directions.

As an aside, it's dangerous to think of advanced research as an "us vs. them" race. This isn't cold war military work. Many research facilities, MIT included, operate off sponsored research funds from many international sources. Many of the students at U.S. institutions are not from the U.S.. Most importantly, the results of almost all academic research is openly shared. There isn't a nationalistic aspect to this research.

Yes, it seems like the Japanese produce more in the area of industrial, applied robotics than does the U.S., but that's only one aspect to "the robotics area."

I have a suggestion. If I were to suggest totally boycotting movies, I think people would ignore that suggestion. They might consider it too radical. So I would like to make a slightly different suggestion which comes to almost the same thing in the end, and that is, don't go to a movie unless you have some substantial reason to think it's good. Now this will lead in practice to almost the same result as a total boycott of Hollywood movies. In extension, it's almost the same but, in intention, it's very different. Now I've noticed that many people go to movies for reasons that have nothing to do with whether they think the movies are good. So if you change that, if you only go to a movie when you have some substantial reason to think it's good, you'll take away a lot of their money.

Very like RMS to make a simple observation about human nature, and base on it a proposal that seems at once perfectly natural and hopelessly naive. This seems a paradox only until you realize that RMS works on the time scale of a lifetime. He's already demonstrated that on that scale, the hopeless becomes conceivable. When you step back far enough, he begins to look downright pragmatic.

Observe that your suggestion requires one to reevaluate every purchase in terms of an artificial $5, while his merely to reconsider based on a simple criterion (that I ought to have considered in the first place). I'm not actually commenting on which idea is more effective--I really don't know. But his has an appeal to me that yours lacks.

Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs is a must, an excellent and proven introductory book in computer science that contains a lot of gems even for the most experienced programmers. Online version is also available.

Dragon Spice

SICP Spice

GOF Spice

K&R Spice

Knuth Spice

At the end of may I wrote up spacewar for my kisrael.com quote/link blog:

Spacewar! is one of the grand-daddies of modern videogames, and a much deeper deathmatch than Pong. (I was amazed at how developed its deathmatch became when I read this old Rolling Stones article.) Written by MIT Hackers who were inspired by the space opera Fiction of E.E. "Doc" Smith. Someone has an the original game running on a PDP-1 emulator. There's a decent funny introduction at classicgaming.com and a more comprehensive set of Spacewar! links as well. (Possibly the most obvious sequal to Spacewar! was the brilliant Star Control series. The first game added 12 new types of ships, each with 2 unique weapons systems, and the second created a whole universe to support it. Brilliant, brilliant stuff.)
--

At the end of may I wrote up spacewar for my kisrael.com quote/link blog:

Spacewar! is one of the grand-daddies of modern videogames, and a much deeper deathmatch than Pong. (I was amazed at how developed its deathmatch became when I read this old Rolling Stones article.) Written by MIT Hackers who were inspired by the space opera Fiction of E.E. "Doc" Smith. Someone has an the original game running on a PDP-1 emulator. There's a decent funny introduction at classicgaming.com and a more comprehensive set of Spacewar! links as well. (Possibly the most obvious sequal to Spacewar! was the brilliant Star Control series. The first game added 12 new types of ships, each with 2 unique weapons systems, and the second created a whole universe to support it. Brilliant, brilliant stuff.)
--

Gotta love assembly!! Makes you wonder why we ever bothered inventing higher level languages....

Gotta love assembly!! Makes you wonder why we ever bothered inventing higher level languages....

1. PLClub submitted two separate entries using OCaml, either of which would have won the contest.
2. Camls 'R Us took second place.
3. Galois Connections took third with their Haskell entry.
4. The Merry Mercurians took fourth with their Mercury entry.

1. Camls 'R Us mopped up the competition with their 3585-line OCaml entry
2. The 1250-line Haskell Entry that took 2nd place was written in a mere 24 hours.

1. First prize was a Cilk entry. Winning the contest doesn't seem to have made the language take off in popularity.
2. Second prize: an OCaml entry ``beat out 23 C and C++ entries, many of these being highly tuned programs produced by extremely competent programmers skilled in game-playing algorithms.''

1. PLClub submitted two separate entries using OCaml, either of which would have won the contest.
2. Camls 'R Us took second place.
3. Galois Connections took third with their Haskell entry.
4. The Merry Mercurians took fourth with their Mercury entry.

1. Camls 'R Us mopped up the competition with their 3585-line OCaml entry
2. The 1250-line Haskell Entry that took 2nd place was written in a mere 24 hours.

1. First prize was a Cilk entry. Winning the contest doesn't seem to have made the language take off in popularity.
2. Second prize: an OCaml entry ``beat out 23 C and C++ entries, many of these being highly tuned programs produced by extremely competent programmers skilled in game-playing algorithms.''

1. PLClub submitted two separate entries using OCaml, either of which would have won the contest.
2. Camls 'R Us took second place.
3. Galois Connections took third with their Haskell entry.
4. The Merry Mercurians took fourth with their Mercury entry.

1. Camls 'R Us mopped up the competition with their 3585-line OCaml entry
2. The 1250-line Haskell Entry that took 2nd place was written in a mere 24 hours.

1. First prize was a Cilk entry. Winning the contest doesn't seem to have made the language take off in popularity.
2. Second prize: an OCaml entry ``beat out 23 C and C++ entries, many of these being highly tuned programs produced by extremely competent programmers skilled in game-playing algorithms.''

I'm afraid I am not suffinciently advanced in these languages to bet on them, but I reckon they would give the other contenders a run for their money.

XSLT is designed not to have side effects and is instead more of a functional language meaning that you can't assign values to variables dynamically. Considering that this task may require quite a lot of storing of state before deciding which optimization to make I think it is rather unlikely that XSLT is a good language to use to solve this particular problem.

Then again I didn't look too hard at the task but it may be that the judges have designed it in such a way that it is amenable to functional programming considering that it is the being run by the International Conference on Functional Programming. Even then most functional languages do allow you to store state, even Lisp so an XSLT solution would have to be rather clever.

--

Maybe we could get some good insights from Nicholas Negroponte one of these days? He had articles in WiReD too ... :-)

Maybe we could get some good insights from Nicholas Negroponte one of these days? He had articles in WiReD too ... :-)