Slashdot Mirror

There is a well written paper The Computer Clubhouse: Technological Fluency in the Inner City that I just found by doing a web search. It includes a list of principles to keep in mind when teaching kids.

You might want to also check out Geeks into the Streets - "Geeks Into The Streets (GITS) is an opportunity for people who love computers to bring them to people who might otherwise not have access to them." Their primary project is House Agape.

• Lisp
• Forth, and this other Forth one and this one. mmm forth, every good programmer should learn this beauty.
• x86 Assembly pretty boring stuff
• Pascal, well not my favorite either
• Cobol (this list while compile in cobol).
• Fortan. They say it still outcranks C in some areas if you can believe it. (I don't)

maybe you should've gone to MIT? Their standards seem MUCH more relaxed:
http://fuck-the-skull-of-jesus.mit.edu/
"The home of iconoclasm on the MIT web."

The famous end to end argument is simply that every application has different needs. For example, even if you have connection-level encryption, how are you going to verify the authenticity of the message? For that, you will need something like GPG anyway.

Go read it. It's good.

Whahahaha!!! Right. Ask PRZ about freedom in the US. But sure, you have a point, there aren't too many countries in the world that allow you to have murder weapons in your house so that you can shoot your neighbor if you want to. Or to let your children shoot themselves for that matter.

Come on, get a life! Try to look a little further than your own borders. Most civilised countries don't even have the death penalty anymore, but the US gives their judges the freedom to kill.

Well I just created my 1st Slashdot user account, because I hope this post will get read and moderated up.

Phil Zimmermann has left Network Associates, citing "philosophical differences", and NAI PGP has just become closed source software. PGP without source is not PGP. Slashdot readers know why. Please avoid Network Associates PGP version 7.x.x, and spread the word.

Cyber Knights Templar PGP 6.5.8 is open source PGP for Windows users, and includes a security patch for a very nasty remote exploit against "official" NAI PGP 6.5.8., the ascii armor parsing bug.

GPG is the wave of the future, but in the present, user friendly Windows support for strong crypto is still important. This support is provided by the Cyber Knights Templar builds, which also include the AES cipher (Rijndael 256) and large key support.

Please publicise this address, where Win32 binaries and full source code are posted for download:

http://www.ipgpp.com/

There is no charge for CKT PGP, and BTW, I am not afilliated in any way with the CKT folks.

99 buckets of bits on the wall...

Huh, I would agree with your point, it needs to be integrated in the clients people use. And I really don't know about this, but I did a search, and it says here that pgp freeware exists as plugins for a few of those....?

Every time a company says "the smallest computer around", I guess /. runs a story on it. If v r really looking at the evolution of small computers, probably v should be looking at wearable computers themselves. Not at a groups of chips put together, and called as a cool device. There is more to miniaturisation than minimising the board size. Look at what people are doing on expressive footwear for instance.

Michael Dertouzos from the Lab for Computer Science wrote a book last year called The Unfinished Revolution that discussed this same sort of thing. However, this concept is trivial compared to the other concepts he presents. Good read--pick it up.

Groovy applet, though.

Never mind that source almost never gets run

Perl, JavaScript, PHP, they're source and they get run. And yes, qrpff is an implementation of decss in Perl.

Man, the progress is really disappointing. We are planning for 9000, now we only get to HAL 2001?!

We'd better contract the core part to Microsoft - they made Office 2000 out of Office 97 in a year! With their help we could see final HAL 9000 before we die!

I have heard that the QWERTY keyboard layout was also designed so that salesmen, not terribly familiar with the typing machines they were selling, could quickly find the letters to the word "typewriter". Try typing it. You'll notice that all the letters are in the top row! Anyone else find that a bit frightening?

I switched to Dvorak for a couple of weeks once. I was really starting to catch up to my old typing speed, and I think I could have passed it eventually. Unfortunately, every time I went to use another person's computer I was unable to type. Since my job is pretty team oriented, I found it more useful in the long run to switch back to QWERTY. I'd still recommend Dvorak to other people, especially if you feel you have wrist problems. It's easily a more comfortable keyboard layout. You can learn how several places online.

• PostScript hits the market ~1982
• Project Athena announced 1983
• Project Athena starts 1984
• X (X1) released June 19, 1984
• NeWS is released ~1985
• X11R1 released September 15, 1987
• Be evaluates NeWS as the windowing system for their intended OS in 1991

(Yes, XEmacs is an OS/Desktop!)

> Thank you :)

You're welcome :)

> All these things I had been pondering before, but it's very hard to do a web search on "color depth" or "frame rates" and get useful results

Aye, you won't find the answers unless you knew what you were looking for, but if you knew what you were looking for, you wouldn't need to look. Or something like that ;-)

You can see an example of "Mach Banding" here

http://graphics.lcs.mit.edu/classes/6.837/F00/Lect ure04/Slide22.html

This page shows how our eye percieves Mach Banding
http://www.loria.fr/~holzschu/cours/HTML/ICG/Resou rces/Shading/21.html

And this applet lets you try it out:
http://www.cs.umb.edu/~ram/ArtAndVision/MachBandin gApplet.htm

Cheers

Back at school we thought it would be cool to set up a webcam in a lounge at our dorm. It's still there, at webcam.mit.edu. But it became instantly less cool when the parents found out about it and used it to keep an eye on their kids away at school. "Damn, hide those bottles -- my parents might be watching"

All your big-mouth billy bass are belong to us.

To be fair, MS does have the bulk of the market at this time, but that is rapidly changing, with MacOS gaining fairly steadily on WIN, and *nux making leaps and bounds.

What does an article from 1997 have to do with anything in today's computer market? It's hard to find anything that talks about Macintosh's market share today (except the educational market share, where they're apparently doing quite well). The article you quote here is the #1 article on Google, and all the other articles are similar in content, but also similar in date. I mean come on, this thing is talking about the Macintosh clones - isn't that what nearly killed Apple?

Anyway, I found buried in Google this article which talks about Macintosh's dwindling market share. It's a little over 1 year after the other article.

Certianly things have gotten better for Apple since then - and it'd be nice to see some recent figures on the subject (anyone have links?).

They are listening.

In the interest of completeness (and Six Degrees Of GLS)....I feel compelled to mention that the above-named Guy Steele Jr. is one of the two creators of the Scheme programming language, which is a stripped-down, not to mention nifty and useful, Lisp variant.

To clarify, Lisp is the second oldest language still in use. I refer you to these comments:

Fateman, 1998
McCarthy, 1996
Walker, 1997
Reference to McCarthy and Lisp

One politician who deserves to be recognized is Russ Feingold, the idiosyncratic senator from Wisconsin. Best known for the McCain-Feingold campaign finance reform bill (and one of the few politicians to refuse PAC money in a campaign for national office), Feingold has also long been one of the few tech-savvy people in a notoriously over-age, anti-tech government body. His finest hour in this regard was the Leahy-Feingold bill to overturn the Communications Decency Act, which was left to the courts to litigate; but he's often spoken out on issues near and dear to the EFF, with support for encryption freedoms and online privacy.

The only Senator who really outstrips him in this area is Patrick Leahy, D-VT, who takes the lead on more tech issues (Feingold often being a co-sponsor), especially since Feingold has put so much effort into the campaign finance issue.

But especially in those early days around 1995, when hardly anyone really knew what the internet was, Feingold said on the Senate floor,

Guaranteeing the Internet is free of speech restrictions, other than the statutory restrictions on obscenity and pornography which already exist, should be of concern to all Americans who want to be able to freely discuss issues of importance to them regardless of whether others might view those statements as offensive or distasteful. Shifting political views about what types of speech are unsuitable should not be allowed to determine what is or is not an appropriate use of electronic communications. While the current target of our political climate is indecent speech (the so-called "seven dirty words"), a weakening of First Amendment protections could lead to the censorship of other crucial types of speech, including religious expression and political dissent. I believe the censorship of the Internet is a perilous road for the Congress to walk down. It sets a dangerous precedent for First Amendment protections and it is unclear where that road will end.

Very impressive. Remember, this was nineteen-ninety-five, TIME magazine was running cover stories suggesting the internet was some sinister force creeping into our homes, and most people still had to have the word explained to them. In those days, it was difficult to find anyone who would stand up for the rights of internet users, who were seen as a fringe group of suspicious characters, hackers, pornographers, terrorists and worse -- rather than today's view that the internet is a basic utility to be enjoyed by all citizens. Fortunately, shortly after this I attended a Rotary Club meeting where he spoke (we are from the same home town), and in the Q&A time I stood up and let him know that a lot of people online considered him a hero.
----
lake effect weblog

Everyone always stares at me when I profess the beauty of Lisp, as well as its possibilities. While being the second oldest language still in use (after Fortran), it's still modern with respect to the new applications people are finding for the language. For the curious, here's some other cool Lisp/Scheme projects:

A Common LISP Hypermedia Server

UTexas's archive of classic Lisp AI code (SHRDLU, Eliza, etc.)

SPIKE - Planning/Scheduling software for the Hubble Space Telescope

Babylon - an environment for developing expert systems

Lisp-Stat - statistics package


Also, here's a great directory on more info and resources on Lisp:
Association of Lisp Users

http://media-in-transition.mit.edu/forums/copyrigh t/index_transcript.html

Anyone who really prefers the self-serving whining that the doubtless noisome slashdottie wrote... well, I pity y'all, okay? Now run along and go ferment in the street like good trailer park trash.

How they can imagine that they'll ever grow up to be good coders with such sloppy habits of thought...

Therefore the sage manages affairs without doing anything, and conveys his instructions without the use of speech.

A Zen machine.

Of course the FSF disapproves of what you call closed source software. After all, 'FSF' stands for 'Free Software Foundation' and not for 'Free and Non-Free Software Foundation'.

* In the sense of the FSF dissapproving of Open Source interoperating with closed source...

Does it? I believe the FSF has always promoted open standards. Or did you ever read about the FSF disapproving of TCP/IP?

* In the sense of many of its followers who generally misuse the term `commercial' to mean non free / Open Source (hah!)...

Commercial does not mean non-Free. RedHat is a commercial software company, but it produces and sells Free Software. The word 'proprietary' means non-Free. Note that software can even be proprietary and not-commercial, like binary-only freeware.

And what exactly has FSF's followers shortcomings to do with the official position of the FSF?

* In the sense of many FSF supporters and members constantly insistenting that `corporate interests (ie, business in general) and Open Soruce are mutually exclusive...

I am pretty sure that the FSF itself does not insist on that. Actually, you might be surprised to hear that the FSF seldomly mentions Open Source at all (other than to state that it does not support the Open Source but the Free Software movement).

It is always interesting (and sad) that people make claims about the FSF (or RMS) without ever caring to inform themselves about what the FSF really stands for.

bye
schani

In order to migrate processes across platforms, you'd need something like porch. It makes portable checkpoints.

Check this license out.

Victor Yodaiken chose to license a patent for use in software released under version 2 of the GNU GPL. The net effect is less freedom than mutual defense or simply publishing the "invention" to serve as prior art.

MIT's Oxygen Project describes a handheld device that has a lot in common with the one described in this article:

Person-centered devices provide universal personal appliances that are inexpensive and can be carried and used anywhere. They are equipped with perceptual transducers such as a microphone, speaker, video camera, and display. In response to speech commands, they can reconfigure themselves through software into many useful appliances such as a two-way radios, cell phones, geographical positioning systems, and personal digital assistants, thereby replacing the many dedicated devices we usually carry with us, reducing overall weight, and conserving power.

One important difference is that the design of this devise uses a standard small display instead of the proposed eyepiece. IIRC, the original design for MIT's handheld did yous an viewport-type display, but they must have ditched that idea for some reason. However, we can expect thgat small displays will reach much higher resolutions (wile remaining low power) in the near future, so this may be ok.

Also, the Oxygen project proposes that "environmental" cumputers complement these handhelds by providing wall displays for public use (think the Start Trek Enterprise hallways) and allowing handhelds to offload computing power to the larger, in-wall computers.

MIT's Oxygen Project describes a handheld device that has a lot in common with the one described in this article:

Person-centered devices provide universal personal appliances that are inexpensive and can be carried and used anywhere. They are equipped with perceptual transducers such as a microphone, speaker, video camera, and display. In response to speech commands, they can reconfigure themselves through software into many useful appliances such as a two-way radios, cell phones, geographical positioning systems, and personal digital assistants, thereby replacing the many dedicated devices we usually carry with us, reducing overall weight, and conserving power.

One important difference is that the design of this devise uses a standard small display instead of the proposed eyepiece. IIRC, the original design for MIT's handheld did yous an viewport-type display, but they must have ditched that idea for some reason. However, we can expect thgat small displays will reach much higher resolutions (wile remaining low power) in the near future, so this may be ok.

Also, the Oxygen project proposes that "environmental" cumputers complement these handhelds by providing wall displays for public use (think the Start Trek Enterprise hallways) and allowing handhelds to offload computing power to the larger, in-wall computers.

Well, Lisp isn't really based of anything, at least, not off of any other programming langauges. It is based on the concept of the Lambda Calculus, which is something of a way to describe programs in a mathematical way. Or, something like that. <g> Honestly, I've never gotten a great definition of lambda calculus, but I'm content that Lisp is cool. ;-)

Now, as to why you haven't heard of it before, my guess is because you are either not a University Computer Science graduate, or you haven't branched into functional programming. Most universities will cover it at least very briefly in some sort of programming languages class, though rarely do they do it justice.

As for functional programming, it's a programming paradigm, like imperative or object oriented programming. It tends to be very powerful, often makes use of constructs which are terse (fewer lines of code to do the the same thing than required in other langauges) and generally makes extensive use of recursion.

Lisp is very interesting, however. Even though it is usually thought of as a functional language, it actually provides excellent support for functional, imperative, and object oriented programming. In fact, many people think the Common Lisp Object System (CLOS) is one of the best Object Oriented Programming implementations available. It was also the first object oriented langauge that was standardized (by ANSI or ISO, I don't remember for sure which one).

It's also been around for a while. In fact, Lisp is one of the oldest programming langauges still in somewhat common use today. (The only older language being Fortran, which predates it by about 5 years, as I recall.)

If you've never had any experience with functional programming, I strongly encourage you to investigate and study[1] it a little, even if you never really use it, because you will learn a great deal about programming in general for your time invested.

Now, as for what applications have been written in it, the canonical example is GNU Emacs. At it's core, Emacs is basically a lisp interpreter, and most of the editor is then written in Lisp.

While applications that are written entirely in Lisp are perhaps not as well known, one of the most common places to find Lisp is as an extension language for other programs. Here are a handfull that make impressive use of Lisp:

The GIMP uses Scheme, a dialect of Lisp for it's Script-Fu, which can be used to programatically execute anything that can be done by hand.

Autodesk, the makers of the industry leading CAD software AutoCAD use their own dialect of Lisp, called AutoLISP, for programming and customising the AutoCAD software.

Siag Office is a free small, Open Source, and very impressive, Office Suite making extensive use of Scheme. (SIAG == Scheme In A Grid). It includes a very cool Spreadsheet program, as well as others, and is highly customisable.

GnuCash makes use of the Guile library to provide Scheme as an extension and scripting language for the application.

Speaking of Guile, Guile is the official extension language library of the GNU project. Using Guile to provide Scheme scripting, you can add support for scripting and extensibility to any application. Guile is used in many applications including GnuCash (mentioned above), the SCWM Window Manager, the TeXmacs editor (integrating Tex support into an Emacs like editor), and many others.

One last example is the Sawfish Window Manager, which seems to be among the most popular Window Managers around these days. It makes use of an Emacs-ish philosophy, having a very small core program, including a lisp interpreter, and implementing most of its feature set on top of that with lisp.

This is, of course, not an exhaustive list of applications written in, or making use of, Lisp, however I think everyone here will prolly recognise a few names there. ;-)

[1] If you're interested in learning more about Lisp, I strong suggest you take a look the book Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs. The full text is available online at the link here, and it is one of the best books ever written about Computer Science. It's also used as an early CS text book at MIT.

Well, Lisp isn't really based of anything, at least, not off of any other programming langauges. It is based on the concept of the Lambda Calculus, which is something of a way to describe programs in a mathematical way. Or, something like that. <g> Honestly, I've never gotten a great definition of lambda calculus, but I'm content that Lisp is cool. ;-)

Now, as to why you haven't heard of it before, my guess is because you are either not a University Computer Science graduate, or you haven't branched into functional programming. Most universities will cover it at least very briefly in some sort of programming languages class, though rarely do they do it justice.

As for functional programming, it's a programming paradigm, like imperative or object oriented programming. It tends to be very powerful, often makes use of constructs which are terse (fewer lines of code to do the the same thing than required in other langauges) and generally makes extensive use of recursion.

Lisp is very interesting, however. Even though it is usually thought of as a functional language, it actually provides excellent support for functional, imperative, and object oriented programming. In fact, many people think the Common Lisp Object System (CLOS) is one of the best Object Oriented Programming implementations available. It was also the first object oriented langauge that was standardized (by ANSI or ISO, I don't remember for sure which one).

It's also been around for a while. In fact, Lisp is one of the oldest programming langauges still in somewhat common use today. (The only older language being Fortran, which predates it by about 5 years, as I recall.)

If you've never had any experience with functional programming, I strongly encourage you to investigate and study[1] it a little, even if you never really use it, because you will learn a great deal about programming in general for your time invested.

Now, as for what applications have been written in it, the canonical example is GNU Emacs. At it's core, Emacs is basically a lisp interpreter, and most of the editor is then written in Lisp.

While applications that are written entirely in Lisp are perhaps not as well known, one of the most common places to find Lisp is as an extension language for other programs. Here are a handfull that make impressive use of Lisp:

The GIMP uses Scheme, a dialect of Lisp for it's Script-Fu, which can be used to programatically execute anything that can be done by hand.

Autodesk, the makers of the industry leading CAD software AutoCAD use their own dialect of Lisp, called AutoLISP, for programming and customising the AutoCAD software.

Siag Office is a free small, Open Source, and very impressive, Office Suite making extensive use of Scheme. (SIAG == Scheme In A Grid). It includes a very cool Spreadsheet program, as well as others, and is highly customisable.

GnuCash makes use of the Guile library to provide Scheme as an extension and scripting language for the application.

Speaking of Guile, Guile is the official extension language library of the GNU project. Using Guile to provide Scheme scripting, you can add support for scripting and extensibility to any application. Guile is used in many applications including GnuCash (mentioned above), the SCWM Window Manager, the TeXmacs editor (integrating Tex support into an Emacs like editor), and many others.

One last example is the Sawfish Window Manager, which seems to be among the most popular Window Managers around these days. It makes use of an Emacs-ish philosophy, having a very small core program, including a lisp interpreter, and implementing most of its feature set on top of that with lisp.

This is, of course, not an exhaustive list of applications written in, or making use of, Lisp, however I think everyone here will prolly recognise a few names there. ;-)

[1] If you're interested in learning more about Lisp, I strong suggest you take a look the book Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs. The full text is available online at the link here, and it is one of the best books ever written about Computer Science. It's also used as an early CS text book at MIT.

Well, Lisp isn't really based of anything, at least, not off of any other programming langauges. It is based on the concept of the Lambda Calculus, which is something of a way to describe programs in a mathematical way. Or, something like that. <g> Honestly, I've never gotten a great definition of lambda calculus, but I'm content that Lisp is cool. ;-)

Now, as to why you haven't heard of it before, my guess is because you are either not a University Computer Science graduate, or you haven't branched into functional programming. Most universities will cover it at least very briefly in some sort of programming languages class, though rarely do they do it justice.

As for functional programming, it's a programming paradigm, like imperative or object oriented programming. It tends to be very powerful, often makes use of constructs which are terse (fewer lines of code to do the the same thing than required in other langauges) and generally makes extensive use of recursion.

Lisp is very interesting, however. Even though it is usually thought of as a functional language, it actually provides excellent support for functional, imperative, and object oriented programming. In fact, many people think the Common Lisp Object System (CLOS) is one of the best Object Oriented Programming implementations available. It was also the first object oriented langauge that was standardized (by ANSI or ISO, I don't remember for sure which one).

It's also been around for a while. In fact, Lisp is one of the oldest programming langauges still in somewhat common use today. (The only older language being Fortran, which predates it by about 5 years, as I recall.)

If you've never had any experience with functional programming, I strongly encourage you to investigate and study[1] it a little, even if you never really use it, because you will learn a great deal about programming in general for your time invested.

Now, as for what applications have been written in it, the canonical example is GNU Emacs. At it's core, Emacs is basically a lisp interpreter, and most of the editor is then written in Lisp.

While applications that are written entirely in Lisp are perhaps not as well known, one of the most common places to find Lisp is as an extension language for other programs. Here are a handfull that make impressive use of Lisp:

The GIMP uses Scheme, a dialect of Lisp for it's Script-Fu, which can be used to programatically execute anything that can be done by hand.

Autodesk, the makers of the industry leading CAD software AutoCAD use their own dialect of Lisp, called AutoLISP, for programming and customising the AutoCAD software.

Siag Office is a free small, Open Source, and very impressive, Office Suite making extensive use of Scheme. (SIAG == Scheme In A Grid). It includes a very cool Spreadsheet program, as well as others, and is highly customisable.

GnuCash makes use of the Guile library to provide Scheme as an extension and scripting language for the application.

Speaking of Guile, Guile is the official extension language library of the GNU project. Using Guile to provide Scheme scripting, you can add support for scripting and extensibility to any application. Guile is used in many applications including GnuCash (mentioned above), the SCWM Window Manager, the TeXmacs editor (integrating Tex support into an Emacs like editor), and many others.

One last example is the Sawfish Window Manager, which seems to be among the most popular Window Managers around these days. It makes use of an Emacs-ish philosophy, having a very small core program, including a lisp interpreter, and implementing most of its feature set on top of that with lisp.

This is, of course, not an exhaustive list of applications written in, or making use of, Lisp, however I think everyone here will prolly recognise a few names there. ;-)

[1] If you're interested in learning more about Lisp, I strong suggest you take a look the book Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs. The full text is available online at the link here, and it is one of the best books ever written about Computer Science. It's also used as an early CS text book at MIT.

who can post a few links to good Lisp reference sites?

• Association of LISP users : Best place to start browsing
• CMU Common LISP : Best LISP implementation available on Linux
• Common LISP the Language : The language reference for the most commonly used LISP variant
• The Common LISP Hypermedia Server : a big LISP open-source application which is a great thing to download, examine, and learn from

Sigh. Young'uns.

Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs>

by Abelson and Sussman

Doubtful. Robert Morris Sr. had a long career with the NSA and is now rather old to be working on a start-up company. His son, Robert Tappan Morris, has stayed in academia AFAIK. Last I heard he was an Assistant Professor at MIT.

(Although if the latter was involved, perhaps it just goes to show that the original Internet worm was caused by mis-matched parens?)

"it seems like the obvious next step for the the entertainment factories to lobby for would be a ban on all encrypted traffic for which no key is in escrow for easy policing."

Hang on: The NSA, FBI, CIA, DEA etc etc have lobbied congress for over a decade or so to try and get un-escrowed crypto banned and have failed miserably in all attempts. I'd recommend the excellent book Privacy on the Line by Diffie and Landau for a complete review of the history of escrow in America.

They also lobbied ANSI to get Clipper escrowed technology implemented in banking systems in place of triple-DES but failed miserably.

If the very influencial LEA and Intel agencies failed to convince the US legislature / ANSI using the Four Horsemen argument (e.g. that nuclear terrorists, child pornographers, money launderers, and drug dealers, would flourish if crypto remained freely available) then what makes you think RIAA / MPAA can succeed by persuading congress with the argument that the latest movies are being copied illegaly?

Suddenly my permanent .sig is on-topic ;)

And if you were to investigate the options, you'd stop using a QWERTY keyboard immediately, because the RSI is caused by non-home-row stretching.

I'm actually surprised that a lawyer hasn't won a large class-action using OSHA laws - since the DVORAK keyboard has been proven to be a safer keyboard to use over the long term.

It is not particularly scary. Software systems don't benefit from redudancy in the same way that hardware systems do. Most software bugs are systemic (ie, an uncommon code path that just doesn't work). So redudant software systems (even ones that are multiple seperate "clean room" implementations) frequently go down at the same time when in the same operating environment. For more information check out the work of Nancy Levison and the other people in her group.

MIT just announced free course materials over the web (http://web.mit.edu/ocw/). You could say that attending class was like answering support questions on the material.

Turns out the Supreme Court disagrees with you. See this.

And, of course, those rights don't come from any constitutional amendments. We were all born with them; they are only acknowledged in the Constitution.

Nor really... The AI in games is minimal at best when compared to the capabilities of AI in a theoretical sense. The problem is that AI is difficult to design and takes alot of time, and developers are out to make money, so they invest in technologies that will immerse the player in the game to get them addicted to it.

Its a new type of addiction for me, because I'm not playing to see how far I get, or see how big my avatar will get, its to see what he does next when he's off my leash. Was he watching when I was throwing the rocks, and start throwing villagers? Was he watching me pickup and move villagers to do the same?

So, it may be a long time before some really sophisticated AI gets into games, if ever. Think about it, if a chess computer can beat the world champion, don't you think there are strategies in many of these games that would be similarly difficult to beat?

If you want cutting-edge AI, don't look at games, look at OSCAR at the U of Arizona, or at the MIT Media Lab , or at the stuff going on at CMU or RPI. That's where the real progress and research is being done. Not in some programming sweatshop at EA.

Plus his keyboard SUCKS.

It'd be great if Lionhead released their source, including the gesture recognition. But why wait, then there's...

LibStroke - a stroke translation library
Implemented in C, and with a transliterated Java version included as well.

strokes-mode.el - a strokes recognition minor-mode for emacs
Go easier on your wrists, take a break from C-M-A-|, and make vague mouse wavings at emacs to make it do your bidding.

IMHO, the algorithm used in strokes-mode seems much nicer than that in Black & White, or even libstroke. It could be just a matter of parameters, since for all I know B&W and libstroke could use pretty much the same algorithm as strokes-mode.el.

I'm already looking at tweaking the Java libstroke class to play around with it in a few Java apps I'm poking at.

It'd be great if Lionhead released their source, including the gesture recognition. But why wait, then there's...

LibStroke - a stroke translation library
Implemented in C, and with a transliterated Java version included as well.

strokes-mode.el - a strokes recognition minor-mode for emacs
Go easier on your wrists, take a break from C-M-A-|, and make vague mouse wavings at emacs to make it do your bidding.

IMHO, the algorithm used in strokes-mode seems much nicer than that in Black & White, or even libstroke. It could be just a matter of parameters, since for all I know B&W and libstroke could use pretty much the same algorithm as strokes-mode.el.

I'm already looking at tweaking the Java libstroke class to play around with it in a few Java apps I'm poking at.

I suppose I can see how one might get that impression. But that's not really what the theory is about. It's a spare theory in case we break the current better theory. Sure, you can't drive the The Big Bump faster than 35 mph, or more than 100 miles; but it is better than having to walk to the nearest accredited cosmological institution. Oddly enough, the theory is specific enough in its assumptions, that it should produce quite different predictions that are testable not only through future observations, but even through projects like COBE.

The COBE homepage

Pictures of the ashes of the fires of creation

Woo early web based learning from MIT (umm Harvard).
Acctual instruction is left as an exercise for the reader.

Early results seem to support inflation IIRC, but I'm not a cosmotologist either. While I know you're not one, I was curious as to what you think the future of nail polish for men is? And I'm not talking about just Carson Daley BTW. I kid cause we're good like that.

On the contrary, the early adopters are saying "We got ours, the rest of you can fuck off."

(tongue planted firmly in cheek)

Robert Morris has a group working on overlay networks as an alternative to basic Internet path selection --- RON. They are concentrating on overlays as a means of allowing intelligent or policy-based routing decisions on a small scale effect decisions on the large-scale Internet.

Of course, multicast is only going to happen via overlay networks. There are many groups building scaleable overlay networks for content and data delivery today. I'd go so far as to say that multicast semantics are going to drive adoption for routed overlay technology, which will then be used to bridge NAT domains later on.

A valid question to ask in response to this article, though, is "what address exhaustion"? Does anyone have real, valid numbers + methodology for address depletion on the post-NAT Internet?

Stanford recently did the right thing, and gave back an entire Class A netblock, renumbering into the remaining Class B blocks they retained (36.0.0.0/8 was the block they returned to ARIN, in case you're wondering).

Other parties mentioned in that NWFusion article seem to think they have a God-given right to hoard address space they will never use.

According to the NWFusion article, it is estimated that only 69 million IP addresses are actually in use, out of the 160 million to 1 billion that are practicably useable given the limitations of IPv4 routing protocols.