Slashdot Mirror

I believe the webcams at MIT's TNS research group may have been first. I seem to remember viewing the TNS people remotely in 94, but you may want to double check on that. The TNS Technology Demonstrations page has been up for many many years.

"// this is the most hacked, evil, bastardized thing I've ever seen. kjb"

Streamripper

No. We will never have a 3D filesystem browser that represents your filesystem in a visually palatable format.

Nope. Never.


kickin' science like no one else can,
my dick is twice as long as my attention span.

If one of your goals is to have the piece of paper that says you're a qualified computer scientist, then clearly you have to go back to school in some form to get that. But if that doesn't matter so much to you, there are plenty of ways outside of school to gain knowledge that's directly relevant to your skills, or that will provide you with an excellent foundation to work from.

If you're good at studying by yourself, on the CS side there are classic textbooks like SICP (link has full text; also see the Slashdot review) and other reference books like Knuth's The Art of Computer Programming, or more focused books like Aho et al on Compilers. Studying material like this on your own can be difficult without any guidance, which is of course one of the reasons people go to college. But starting along this road may also help identify what you're interested in and what you're not, and where your strong and weak points are. That could help you choose your next step.

If you do start self-studying, some social support can help - joining mailing lists related to the topics you're interested in, finding local people who're interested in pursuing something similar (perhaps via clubs), etc.

Aside from the traditional pure CS material, there are plenty of good books out there that relate more directly to the world of work. One book that I've recently found helpful is "Analysis Patterns - Reusable Object Models" by Martin Fowler. This covers patterns that arise often in general business and financial applications, so may not be the kind of thing you're looking for specifically, but I mention it as an example of the kind of stuff that's out there - there's far more than just "Java for Dummies", and if you want to improve your skills and knowledge, you should seek some of these out.

If you do go back to to school, I think in some respects, Math might be a better choice, since (a) you really love it and (b) I think it's a "deeper" subject - compared to many advanced math topics, much of computer science is simple by comparison. But this comes back to what you want out of it: a math degree would open up science and engineering jobs that you could never get without it, but it doesn't directly provide you with CS skills, although a smart employer should recognize that a math major with CS skills is a great catch.

Another important idea is his application of Boolean algebra to switching circuits - as in this paper - "A symbolic analysis of relay and switching circuits".

______________

Hope she doesn't mind - I dug this link up a couple months ago. her site . Think it'd be better to put all that in a backpack.
I was actually considering the cappuccino because its onboard eth it has now but I may more likely go with a sony picture book.

for those interested in other alternatives

Ya ah huh. Benny at MIT is using the first version as a wearable. Shes likes to tote weight around though. Uses sony lion batteries.
Ben Wong site

The screenshot must be a fake. The Windowmaker clock shows 4:07 whereas the Mac clock shows 6:01.

actually, someone removed his phone number from the last line, and invalidated the signature.
Here's the real message...

STMs are so neat. It's one of those ideas you look at and think "no way could that work". It's just several piezoelectric actuators, like those in cheap high-pitched buzzers, glued together at right angles, with a pointed needle on the end. The business end is brought close to a surface until there's some leakage current across the gap, and then it's raster-scanned in 2D while servoing the height to keep the leakage current constant. The height servo value is the output. It's simple, small, and cheap, compared to, say, an electron microscope. A STM could have been built with 1950s technology, but nobody thought to try it. It just didn't seem reasonable that you could sense individual atoms with a pointed needle moved around by a mechanical actuator.

http://lm.lcs.mit.edu/

--

Why not just launch a second plane already full of liquid oxygen, the do an in-flight refueling job once they are both airborne? Seems much easier than carrying around all that extra gear to convert oxygen, and the extra fuel to fly around for 3 hours generating it.

Yup, that's the idea behind Mitchell Burnside Clapp's Black Horse rocket plane. It was published in the 1995 Analog. I guess it made too much sense for NASA to even give it a try.

Rather than use LOX, his original plan called for burning JP-5 and highly concentrated hydrogen peroxide. That was the densest combination of propellants he could find, so would take the smallest amount of tankage. And, because it didn't involve any cryogens, it could use lighter non-insulated tanks. Lighter spacecraft == a chance at single stage to orbit. Here's an excerpt from the Analog article:

Mission Profile

The Black Horse mission profile begins with a takeoff from a conventional runway using the two takeoff rocket engines for thrust. The aircraft is loaded with all the fuel it needs for the climb from the tanker to orbit. It also has fuel and oxidizer aboard sufficient for 15 minutes of atmospheric flight. The total weight of the vehicle at takeoff is about 50,000 pounds, but by the time it achieves tanker rendezvous at 43,000 feet and 0.85 Mach number its weight has dropped to about 38,000 pounds. When the aircraft meets the tanker it takes on about 147,000 pounds of hydrogen peroxide. It then disconnects from the tanker and climbs to space. As it inserts into orbit, its weight has dropped to about 16,500 pounds. After performing its orbital mission, the aircraft reenters and then glides to a normal landing at a runway.

Because off-the-shelf rocket engines that use H2O2 are few and far between, he later changed his plans to use LOX. This would mean more changes in the tanker, but would avoid using unproven engines.

Clapp eventually founded a company to develop the concept, Pioneer Rocketplane, but I haven't heard much from it lately. That's too bad. It was (is) a great concept.
--

Find enlightenment here...

If you're persuaded by the evil-corporation-exploiting.. arguments, it will probably be the most important thing you read today.

Seriously, a former USAF captain proposed a hybrid air-breathing vehicle which would be fueled with LOX once in the air by a modified KC-135 at least 7 years ago.

The guy who came up with the idea has since left the USAF and founded a company solely for the purpose of commercializing the concept.

The primary difference between the Black Horse concept and the one proposed in this article is that it wouldn't take three hours for a Black Horse-type aircraft to collect the LOX necessary to fire its rocket motor(s). They'd take on the LOX from the KC-135 while airborne in presumably less than three hours.

Bad jobs at bad wages are better than no jobs at all.

Bad jobs at bad wages are better than no jobs at all.

You can turn on the Emacs key stuff on windows using some hidden prefs. But yes, C-home does not work to go to beginning of first line. There is a bug on that that I can't find right now because Bugzilla is doing its daily "I'll be down around 5am EST" thing.

The child window thing is linux-only as far as I know and is driving everyone insane. Top minds are working on it -- it's a strange problem with focus not being set properly. If it is not linux-only (you are seeing it on Windows) please mail me at bz@mit.edu and let me know. That would be much appreciated.

And of course, patches are always welcome.

Be worried! Why do so few of the comments take this sort of threat seriously? They can do much more than "limit open-source penetration in government, schools, etc." Since volunteers (with few resources) are often major contributors to open-source/free software, it is very easy for minor changes in the law to have major effects on us.

What if the UCITA makes it impossible for anyone to distribute software without using a shrink-wrap license? What if widespread software patents, stiffer IP laws, and prohibitions against reverse engineering make it impossible for people without deep pockets to write programs that interoperate with popular software? Could users of free software be completely left out when the Next Big Killer App for the internet comes along?

Everyone is full of this confidence that, as the morally and technically superior solution, free software not only *should* triumph, but that it *will* triumph, no matter they say at Microsoft. Don't be so sure; the proprietary software houses have much deeper pockets, and a much broader audience, than we do. If big changes in IP policy go through next month, are legislatures going to know (or care) what we think?

Pay attention. Write your congressperson. Join the EFF. Help the League for Programming Freedom get their act together. Just don't sit there and assume everything will work out fine without you.

--Bruce Fields

For prople primatily interested in Linux, and glibc2, there's a paper for the community, written by David J. Brown and Karl Runge on Library Interface Versioning in Solaris and Linux.

The Objective section of his updated resume seems to sum up his objections with Apple.

MIT alumni have e-mail forwarding for life if they desire http://web.mit.edu/alum, so having your e-mail come from mit.edu is not necessarily a sign of change. (And now you MIT people can remind everybody forever that you're just so cool...)

You'll also need the Linux PPTP driver. Hopefully it works with these USB drivers.

Jacco
---
# cd /var/log

http://www.mit.edu/~jayp/Public/kitten/ has... a log of lots of messages the guy has been sent so far.

A lot more people have been suckered in by the guy than you'd think. http://www.mit.edu/~jayp/Public/kitten/ has a list of several of the pictures the guy has received in an attempt to justify the cuteness of the kittens, and a log of lots of messages the guy has been sent so far.

I suspect it will end up being something more along the line of providing example results, and having the computer then try to mimic them.

This is a Unix FAQ, ksh FAQ, and a Bash FAQ. As a bonus, I found this pertinent discussion in the NetBSD bug database.

This is a Unix FAQ, ksh FAQ, and a Bash FAQ. As a bonus, I found this pertinent discussion in the NetBSD bug database.

It's also been obtainable in book form since 2.6.2 (hell if I know where to find it, but it's out there somewhere). That's how the international PGP versions came about; the book was exported (working into a loophole in U.S. crypto export laws) and later OCR scanned and compiled to create the PGPi releases. Of course it's not necessary anymore since the crypto laws were laxed, so the source can be exported in digital form to the international team; no more need for the book scanning chicanery.

Let me get blunt for a second...do you honestly think that Phil Zimmerman, after enduring that IRS/FBI-molded crucible for five years over releasing PGP to the masses, is going to bend over and let these government gestapo bastards compromise it? There are very few people I respect more than PRZ for staying his course through that flood brought against him. The fact that people even suggest that he would fold is appalling and offensive to me (and certainly to him as well). And believe it or not he *does* still decide what lives and dies with PGP, even since it's been absorbed by NAI. PGP is just as secure as it was back then (although, sadly, not as *stable*...but that's not his fault, blame corporation-demanded feature creep for that...)

The "Texas Site" which was originally found at http://halluc.snakeden.org/railgun/ and was killed ruthlessly by the slashdot effect hs now being mirrored here:

http://web.mit.edu/mouser/www/railgun/halluc/

Unfortunately, I was not able to include the movies of the gun firing as my disk quota is full.

-mouser
railgun.org

Check out MIT Hacks.
------------------------------------------------ -------

One of the MIT hacks appears to have inspired Illiad with an early version of the Dust Puppy

For all you jingoistic Americans fearing an insult to your national hacking pride, rest assured by visiting At http://hacks.mit.edu/

In June 1958, four engineering students at Cambridge University put an Austin Seven van on the roof of the Senate House overnight. There's a writeup of the methods used and the story of that night, complete with diagram, written by one of the conspirators. It's a document worth reading for anyone planning to follow in their hallowed footsteps.

M

For all you jingoistic Americans fearing an insult to your national hacking pride, rest assured by visiting At http://hacks.mit.edu/

---

Next time someone throws one of these "kids today" stories in your face, bring up the following.

Socrates, as Plato's mouth-piece in Phaedrus suggests that books are going to destroy the art of memory. Basically, before there were a lot of books, people spent immense amounts of time memorizing entire works and repeating them. Simonides, for example, used what he called 'loci' to recite entire 20,000 line poems from his head. It's how we have have Homer's works and a lot of other "oral traditions."

In Plato's Phaedrus, Socrates laments that Thoth, the Egyptian god who invented letters, had misjudged the effect of his invention:

"This discovery of yours will create forgetfulness in the learner's souls, because they will not use their memories; they will trust to the external written characters and not remember themselves. The specific which you have discovered is an aid not to memory, but to reminiscence, and you give your disciples not truth, but only the semblance of truth; they will be hearers of many things and will have learned nothing; they will appear to be omniscient and will generally know nothing; they will be tiresome company, having the show of wisdom without reality."

Yeah, so if you believe this PDA piece, then go burn down the local library while you're at it. I'm sure your local doctor would appreciate that (laugh). Memory prosthetics are good as long as you don't use them to stop remembering, but instead to be able remember more than you could possibly otherwise.

My .01

-carson-

http://www.media.mit.edu/~carsonr/

check out http://marinau.www.media.mit.edu/people/marinau/Pe diatricSocietyAbstract.html for an example of how a chat room can help with mental and physical well being and increased comfort for patients.

Even a simple chat room (like http://chatcircles.media.mit.edu) can provide a good space for interaction in an otherwise scary and isolating space like a hospital or clinic.

check out http://marinau.www.media.mit.edu/people/marinau/Pe diatricSocietyAbstract.html for an example of how a chat room can help with mental and physical well being and increased comfort for patients.

Even a simple chat room (like http://chatcircles.media.mit.edu) can provide a good space for interaction in an otherwise scary and isolating space like a hospital or clinic.

• piecework computations, where a large chunk of work can be split into smaller chunks, and
• branch-and-bound computations, like the travelling salesman problem

It's highly fault tolerant (uses eager scheduling) and load balanced (uses work stealing).

• seek companies highly valued because of weak patents
• bet against them in the market
• break their patent
• cash in on bets

JED!!!!

What if someone were to make a compiler that would compile simple computer instructions written in English into C source code or an executable?

It's been done. Omri Schwartz wrote C to English to C perl scripts a/k/a DECSS (Descriptive English for C Statements and Subroutines).

An English version of css-auth.c produced with this program can be downloaded from Dr. David Touretzky's Gallery of CSS Descramblers.

The book "The Turing Option" by Harry Harrison and Marvin Minsky would also make a good movie. It is a book using Minsky's theories and ideas of AI with a great storyline. Mr. Minsky wrote me and said that at one time it was under option to be made but interest was lost (no money). If anyone wants a good read find this book. It is out of print but you should be able to find it used. Mr. Minsky also has extra chapters at his personal
web page.

If there is interest, I am rereading the book and would do write a review for /. in a few weeks.

What's up with that? Why wouldn't RedHat just put in the regular whois? Maybe have do in the latest version (7.0) which I don't yet have.

The Civil Engineering course (1.00) now uses Java in the fall term, but still uses C++ in Spring. The CS course on software eng (6.170) now uses Java, not CLU.

Courses like 6.001 and 6.044J continue to use Scheme and will probably always use it. After all, that language was designed for teaching CS principles.

I'm teaching a non-credit workshop at MIT this Friday on using Scheme for server-side web applications.

Pretty cool stuff! I always wanted to play with something along these lines, but never got round to actually try it (blame slashdot for it ;)

---

This goes by the name of "image-based modeling and rendering," and one of the the pioneers of the field developed the technique that was used for the notorious bullet-time shot. Another group demonstrated their realtime IBMR-from-video process at Siggraph 2000.

wow, an AC with something useful to say. Would this be what you're talking about? Don't worry, the market for vogue computing technology will open wide up when we try to squeeze those last ten years out of silicon.

Also one of the authors of CLR, which is one heck of an algorithms text.

A lot of us have probably seen it or used it in a class. (It's the big white one.)

Yes, he is the same person. His homepage is here. And it's The Rivest-Shamir-Adleman (RSA) algorithm, but you were close.