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Take a look at this:

http://www.ergopro.com/comfort.html

I saw one of these at MIT's Adaptive Technology lab back in the early 90's. The toothed gears on the bottom are used to secure/release gimble mounts on each section, allowing full adjustability, including the (supposedly less than optimal) rectilinear configuration used above.

flat CRT? I have never heard of such a thing. There are other viable flat-screen technologies, but I fail to see how a cathode ray tube could possibly be fit into a PDA form factor.

Here's one way to do it, called a field-emitter array . Electrons are emitted from a microstructured silicon substrate, then strike phosphors and produce light just like in a standard CRT.

Granted you have to have a subscription to get into the website, but The Perl Journal published a really kewl article on converting C to english using a perl script called decss2.pl. More info on converting C code to gramatically correct English is here. The author of the article published the entire deccs program in english in the fall issue.

> khttpd is just a toy for static content. Tux holds the world's record for fastest SPECWEB performance.

I would be interested in seeing SPECWEB results for Cheetah, which runs atop the MIT exokernel. It's amazing what you can do when you run the whole webserver on the bare metal.

God, I love being downrated by all these penguinistas. -2, Not Party Line. Might even be fair if it weren't for the fact that the same abuse directed at Microsoft gets modded up.

--

3 years ago Card read and spoke at MIT. It might be interesting to compare this to what he said then.

http://www-tech.mit.edu/V117/N61/scifi.61n.html

heard of reversible computing? We havn't even scratched the surface of power/heat reduction.

A while ago they started a project at MIT for . They store a whole bunch of little balls in the paper that are half white and half black, and rotated to display the correct color. The electronics to control the balls were printed on the paper itself, and the resolution was pretty high (I think they were shooting for laser quality, and it wasn't too far off). It was static, so required no power once set. They wanted to use it to have books that could function (and in fact be) normal books that you could read, but the pages themselves could be rewritten at the push of a button.

I've always wanted someone to make this idea into a PDA. Imagine a single clipboard with a paper-like front that sits there with a page of text on it. Then you could push a button and a new page of text appears, indistinguishable from a laser printed (or typeset) page. Then you use the stylus to make notes in the corner, where the small PDA chips embedded in the clip part track your movements and create the lines under your pen simulating writing and drawing. Then you push another button and you can write a quick email and send it off.

If you could actually make this sort of appliance, (which shouldn't be hard with MIT's e-paper and a small embeded chip that only consumes power when you're actively doing something) you could have an essentially always on electronic writting / display tablet. With the ability to read and write like a normal piece of paper, but the power of a computer's ability to store and display hundreds of pages of text, you could replace school textbooks, novels, hostpital charts, almost anything you can think of. And with a display and chip that only use power when active (ie. refreshing with a new page or drawing with the stylus), you should be able to go days / weeks on a single battery. It could become the single most useful PDA-like device.

The possibilities are just too much. But I've never heard of anything like it, and I'm curious if anyone's ever had this occur to them too. With news of the new light-interference static display technology, you could have a full color pad too. Think about it a bit, and about how many normal uses it could serve, and it gets more exciting. Anyone else see this?

Just curious, as always. Feedback, please!

James

Marvin Minsky (the "father" of AI) wrote an excellent paper on the topic: Communication with Alien Intelligence. In the references section he mentions a great book (Freudenthal, Hans. LINCOS, North-Holland, 1960) written by a Dutch mathematician which is a message for aliens. Marvin says of the book, "LINCOS drafts a detailed scenario for communicating with aliens. He begins with elementary mathematics and shows how many other ideas, including social ideas, might be based on that foundation. Some of Freudenthal's constructions seem very profound."

-ken kahn

So this conference is being held by the infamous Dr. Dobbs. The Church of the SubGenius strikes again! Beware Bob Dobbs!

Check out some of the research being done at MIT's Lincoln Labs on automated electronic attack countermeasures.

Bottleneck Verification to find novel attacks, a method that can seriously reduce new root-attacks, including un-identified ones.
Dynamic reconfiguration for survivability, a technique for surviving DDoS attacks.
Development of intrusion detection methods, another abstract on techniques for automatic detection/reaction.

Actually, automated IC bears a surprisingly high resemblance to speech-recognition problems, another high-point of Lincoln Labs.

Lincoln Labs, in conjunction with DARPA, is also doing real-world evaluations of actual ICE. This is the sort of thing ISPs need to be paying attention to, as the research being done here is what's going to be protecting their networks, soon.

Check out some of the research being done at MIT's Lincoln Labs on automated electronic attack countermeasures.

Bottleneck Verification to find novel attacks, a method that can seriously reduce new root-attacks, including un-identified ones.
Dynamic reconfiguration for survivability, a technique for surviving DDoS attacks.
Development of intrusion detection methods, another abstract on techniques for automatic detection/reaction.

Actually, automated IC bears a surprisingly high resemblance to speech-recognition problems, another high-point of Lincoln Labs.

Lincoln Labs, in conjunction with DARPA, is also doing real-world evaluations of actual ICE. This is the sort of thing ISPs need to be paying attention to, as the research being done here is what's going to be protecting their networks, soon.

Check out some of the research being done at MIT's Lincoln Labs on automated electronic attack countermeasures.

Bottleneck Verification to find novel attacks, a method that can seriously reduce new root-attacks, including un-identified ones.
Dynamic reconfiguration for survivability, a technique for surviving DDoS attacks.
Development of intrusion detection methods, another abstract on techniques for automatic detection/reaction.

Actually, automated IC bears a surprisingly high resemblance to speech-recognition problems, another high-point of Lincoln Labs.

Lincoln Labs, in conjunction with DARPA, is also doing real-world evaluations of actual ICE. This is the sort of thing ISPs need to be paying attention to, as the research being done here is what's going to be protecting their networks, soon.

Check out some of the research being done at MIT's Lincoln Labs on automated electronic attack countermeasures.

Bottleneck Verification to find novel attacks, a method that can seriously reduce new root-attacks, including un-identified ones.
Dynamic reconfiguration for survivability, a technique for surviving DDoS attacks.
Development of intrusion detection methods, another abstract on techniques for automatic detection/reaction.

Actually, automated IC bears a surprisingly high resemblance to speech-recognition problems, another high-point of Lincoln Labs.

Lincoln Labs, in conjunction with DARPA, is also doing real-world evaluations of actual ICE. This is the sort of thing ISPs need to be paying attention to, as the research being done here is what's going to be protecting their networks, soon.

From the geek in me, that's really cool!

From the logical side in me... If the developers hacking these systems would concentrate their obvious talent into something like perfecting support on standard PC/Mac etc hardware I think it may be more benificial to the community at large.

As the Dreamcast will be totaly revamped in its next iteration (probably), making this port almost useless. If this port only runs in backward compatibility mode, whats the point? And to what end other than a cool hack that gets posted on /. does this have. Are all the pimple faced kids who are playing games on theirs going to rush out and download a port of BSD to run on their systems? If they have a burner to make the CD, don't they already have hardware that's probably pretty cool already?

So the intention of getting cheap hardware that can be usefull is now useless? Who becomes the end user? Some little old lady who's grandkid has all the cool toys and has thrown his Dreamcast asside for the new PS2 he finally got off backorder?

I think if the community of hackers is to survive, focus must be applied. How many projects at source forge are duplicates doing the same code for the same end but independant of each other.

And for the troll... wouldn't it be cool to build a cluster of these...

Before you hack that fish... think about why your doing it.

The GPL says, "You can only use this code if you give up control of your own code to the GPL community." It places a limitation on how that code can be used!

No, the GPL is concerned with forcing open other code. It is concerned with telling me that I can can't use GPL code unless I am willing to GPL my entire application. So I have a choice: release under GPL, or reinvent the wheel. I've done both, myself, but I really don't like the choice, either be forced to release GPL because I have no other option, or take the inefficient route of rewriting code I could have reused.

(This is the viral nature that you deny; you claim it keeps software in the OSS community. What, if MS incorporates BSD code it will suddenly disappear from millions of computers?

Do you think this is right?

Who controls your computer--you, or some corporation that wants only to suck money out of your wallet and will provide the lowest level of quality sufficient to keep the money coming in?

... always puttin' things on top of other things. I tell's ya...

... always puttin' things on top of other things. I tell's ya...

IIRC this was proposed quite some time ago by Rod Brooks and co. at the MIT AI lab. One of the papers was entitled "Fast, Cheap, and out of control - a robotic invasion of the Solar System". (Co-authored I think, by Anita Flynn). Makes for some interesting reading, along with some other papers by Dr Brooks.
Try this (the link seems to be down at the moment)
Rodney Brooks' papers

Also on 'robot collaboration'
Robotic Ants

IIRC this was proposed quite some time ago by Rod Brooks and co. at the MIT AI lab. One of the papers was entitled "Fast, Cheap, and out of control - a robotic invasion of the Solar System". (Co-authored I think, by Anita Flynn). Makes for some interesting reading, along with some other papers by Dr Brooks.
Try this (the link seems to be down at the moment)
Rodney Brooks' papers

Also on 'robot collaboration'
Robotic Ants

As with any business, traditional companies lobby, both in court and in the legislature, for laws to protect their interests. Often the laws these companies advocate hinder open source software development, or are otherwise antithetical to the values of many members of the open source community. Among the legal defeats that the open source ommunity has suffered:

• legal recognition for software patents
• UCITA
• Digital Millenium Copyright Act (DMCA) bans on reverse engineering
• Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act

• future versions of the Communications Decency Act
• Carnivore
• internet gambling statutes

• Recording Industry Association of America
• Federal Bureau of Investigations
• Business Software Alliance
• Software and Information Industry Association
• Disney Corporation
• Microsoft Corporation

Non-profit organizations that help defend our online freedoms, such as the Electronic Frontier Foundation, League for Programming Freedom, the Free Software Foundation, and the ACLU get their funds from companies and individuals who share values with them, e.g. open source companies and programmers. If the individuals and companies sympathetic to these organizations are impoverished or go bankrupt, the non-profits can't effectively fight for the freedoms we want.

You should hire some lawyers. MIT might sue! Ever heard of Project Athena, you lusers?

You should hire some lawyers. MIT might sue! Ever heard of Project Athena, you lusers?

http://web.mit.edu/is/athena/

Virtual community is any place groups of people talk together on the Internet -- in mailing lists, in newsgroups, in chat rooms, or on Web sites. Virtual community can also cover more specialized situations, such as long-distance education or shared project work spaces. And it can describe some communications that aren't discussions, such as posting customer evaluations or answering opinion polls. Whenever people are aware of each other's presence on the Internet, they're likely to consider themselves part of a community.

Here's some more interesting articles:

• Identity and Deception in the Virtual Community
• The Virtual Community by Rheingold

This is where ease of use gets danerous.

While I was in college I studied with Daniel Dennet, an amazing philosopher who has done a bunch of work at MIT helping them with such projects as the ambitious Cog project. One of the more amazing tidbits he passed on to us (the most amazing was the genetically evolving virtual gladiator robots who after a few thousand itterations really learned how to pummel eachother's brain's out) was a prototype of an eye tracking system being developed for security personel: the idea is that you can display only what is one the screen and nothing else so onlookers can't see the information. The principle this relies on is where the daner lies: people looking at the screen and having their eyes tracked thing the scrren is completely full, they don't know that only a small fraction of the information they think they see as a contiguous whole is being displayed at any one time.

Furthermore, if they are looking at a picture, the picture can change and they will not realize it has changed...their minds will actually "rewrite history" and they will be convince that that picture of the mona-lisa they are looking at was always frowning.

using this technology we will get some of the scariest adverisements we have every seen (where that babe changes imperceptible to fit where you're looking, so, somehow, she's always perfect and exactly what you want), and I don't want to think about what the more brilliant and savvy admen/psychologists/brainwashers of the future are going to think up.

But hey, as long as I'm not going to be able to tell, I guess I'll just sit back and enjoy.

I had something of the same experience after learning LISP in university. More recently, though, I picked up a copy of the famous SICP, and finally "got it" in a way that I never did previously. Sure, I could program in LISP and write code to simulate missionaries and cannibals crossing a river, but I had no real understanding of the principles behind the language. SICP teaches you to program by, in effect, teaching you to write programming languages, complete with real working examples. After working through it, you might still hate all the Irritating Single Parentheses, but LISP (or at least Scheme) will probably seem quite a bit more impressive.

If you've already worked through it, start over! ;^)

Not that these folks are necessarily right, but the topic has a long and detailed history with exobiologists, many of whom do consider it possible, if not likely.

Just because your imagination doesn't stretch that far, doesn't mean it's not possible. Maybe college will open your eyes a little, huh? (When you get there.)

---

This is one of the clauses I really like about the Debian Free Software Guidelines. (I prefer to refer to the DFSG, as the Open-Patch^H^H^H^H^HSource Definition is weakened by the OSI's role in interpreting it. Yes, I know you wrote them both.) A good free software license should restrict its domain to the software.

I hate that university research continues to produce software for "non-commercial" use. The GNU GPL has nothing to say about using software, although the waters have been muddied by recent discussions about dynamic linking, plugins, and CORBA-like components. (What, after all, is the difference between dlopen() and system()?) The GNU GPL should stay that way. I'd rather leave the "ASP loophole" in place than muddy the waters even further.

Likewise, free software licenses should say as little as possible about patents. Every once in a while, Slashdot posts an outrageous patent story and someone says, "Hey, let's amend the GPL to punish patent aggressors." Bad idea. Copyleft to subvert copyright. Patent pools (e.g., mutual defense) to subvert patents.

Rod Brooks picked up on this idea, and did some good insect robot work. But then he got hubris, started doing TV interviews, the "Rod Brooks World Tour", T-shirts, and Cog.

When Brooks first gave a talk at Stanford on his plans for Cog, the general idea was to try for human-level AI by building a seated robot body and throwing about 30 MIT PhD theses at the problem. It hasn't worked. I asked Brooks "Why don't you build a robot lizard or mouse?", that being the next step up from the insect work. He said that "he didn't want to go down in history as the guy who built the world's best robot mouse".

This is a classic problem with AI researchers. They get a halfway decent idea, and they start thinking human-level AI is just around the corner. AI goes through one of these enthusiasms every five years or so, some of the main ones having been search, rules, theorem proving, neural nets, and genetic algorithms. All of these are useful, and all have hit a ceiling beyond which further work doesn't produce much improvement.

I tell people we're probably going to have to claw our way up the evolutionary ladder, and the next step is the lizard brain level of intelligence. This is happening, amusingly, in the game world, where opponent control AI has to solve the basic problems of life: not falling down, not bumping into stuff, and back-seat driving the machinery that controls those tasks into getting something done.

Google also started at Stanford? Hmm...1998. Sheesh, that's not so long ago. I can say the same about Yahoo!, and I'm sure plenty of others here can too.

Side topic: you know how most baby boomers remember exactly where they were when they heard JFK was shot? I have that kind of memory for exactly two things: when the Challenger blew up, and when my Yahoo bookmark (in Mosaic) redirected from stanford.edu to yahoo.com. I had already seen the bad side of internet commerce, but Yahoo was when I realized there could also be good witches in the world.

Scroll forward five years. Yahoo is an enourmous "portal" that actually makes a profit. Canter & Siegel have faded away, but their descendants thrive like cockroaches. Where will Google be five years from now?

I think it was Eric Scheirer who said that. Eric is not their representative. He is a Forrester Research analyst.

I guess he is not threating there, it seems like a warning to me. And Eric is probably one of the people to be taken most seriously when he talks about such issues. He is one of the authors of a different MPEG audio standard, MPEG-4 Structured Audio, developed when was in the MIT Media Lab.

This standard (MPEG-4-SA) is probably one of the few parts of MPEG which is patent free. It deals with algoritmic sound generation. Unfortunately there is no way (yet) to encode standard audio into such representation...

The final standard draft is available from their web pages:

http://sound.media.mit.edu/~eds/mpeg4/

In the cnet article, they also quote Eric saying that vorbis is a technology which is competitive with MP3. It seems it is not only Monty who thinks so...

The Tangible Media group at the MIT Media Lab have been working on this sort of thing for quite a while, and deserve a mention. http://tangible.www.media.mit.edu/groups/tangible/ projects.html

--

This reminds of a joke one of my CS graduate profs told about the "endo-kernel" (a pun on MIT's exo-kernel). The exokernel is an extreme microkernel operating system the provides direct hardware access for each application. The endo-kernel, however, runs its OS in micro-kernel userspace processes for protection and runs user apps in the kernel space for performance! ;-)

Here's a cool link to the Tangible Media Lab.

This stuff is really interesting in this age of info overload. Being able to convey more information to the user immediately and effectively will become even more useful.

--

And yet I see many similar testimonies; and we all know that for every story there are dozens of similar tales that we don't know about. Such abuse is rampant and a "normal" teen-age experience for anyone that was a nerd, geek, goth, gay, or anyone else on "the fringe." I've been thinking of Stephen Pinker's take on evolutionary psychology and thought that, since this type of miscreant behavior happens so often, that maybe this is a kind of "culling the herd" behavior that's evolved over time.

The word "schadenfreude" means "happiness from someone else's misfortune." I wonder if, collectively, we go after people that are "too successful" as their progeny may out-compete ours; we are "happy" if these successful people experience "misfortune."

So the "herd" wants to get rid of "the weak," and also wants to insure that some individuals aren't "too successful". I.e., these are folks sitting on the fringe.

Nerds, geeks, or whatever, are unlucky enough to be physically weak are are also generally brilliant. This double wammy may really push that "cull the herd" instinct in those who more comfortably sit on top of the bell curve.

Of course I'm just pulling this out of my ass, but I thought to share it anyway for possible discussion.

And lastly, what if we slap a thin layer of encryption over the packets (currently, the computational cost of encryption/decryption makes this unlikely, but that will soon change) so that they're not recognizable?

• There are a number of VoIP hardware solutions which look just like a normal telephone which do this already.
• There are a number of software-only solutions (like PGPfone) which encrypt. PGPfone uses fairly strong encryption. Unfortunately, the download page for PGPfone has been down for quite some time now, so it's not possible to download.

If a patented invention is actually new, useful, and non-obvious, the patent should be granted. Slashdotters have a beef with the USPTO's inability to see the stupidity in applications for patents on inventions such as XOR cursor, spreadsheet recalculation, one-click shopping, DDR SDRAM (by its biggest competitor), etc. for which the patent owner builds its business around suing its competitors. (Read More...)

Danny Hillis (of Connection Machine fame and author of The Pattern on the Stone : The Simple Ideas That Make Computers Work) gave a keynote address at this year's Game Developer Conference on this topic. He made a strong case for the idea that computer games (in the broad sense) are now the dominant source of culture and narrative. And that this is probably a good thing. Culture was once participatory and social - e.g., story telling around the camp fire but reading novels, watching theater, opera, TV and movies is passive. Computer entertainment is interactive. It engages. And significant learning is involved.

-ken kahn

Some of these older space probes are still producing useful data. Check out Mit's Space Plasma web page. Voyager 2 is alive and well and producing data which is being actively studied. It should be passing the heliopause soon and then really be out beyond the system. Its hard to keep interest and funding up for these old guys, but it is well worth the effort.

• http://swpat.ffii.org
• http://petition.eurolinux.org/

My girlfriend's brother did his phd at the MIT Medialab on this very subject. Check his stuff out at um, this, which is more or less exctly what you're talking about. He was in the "Machine Listening Group".

MIT is already working on it.

Ah, but Bush is from Havahd. Nuff said. The fact that they graduated Bush obviously shows thier inferiority to MIT. And I see a hack in that.

guess you did not actually check out the homepage (http://rehmi.www.media.mit.edu/~rehmi/pengachu/fr ame.htm)

snip
Software Footprint: ...
Processor core containing Motorola Dragonball, 8MB flash, 8MB DRAM, running Linux
/snip
---

Well, Mobile Linux will only be useful if it is done right... so that it is actually stable, usable, and as "idiot-proof"/easy to use as WinCE and PalmOS... Palmtops are a user-driven market, and most of the users are not engineers... While Linux gives access to cheaper, more familiar development environments (Gnu compilers, etc.) for OpenSource engineers, there needs to be more than just that...

Some more Linux Handheld links, including the actual specs of Pengachu, which reveal that 900mhz is the RF band (in case you thought it was the clockspeed), etc...

The Project Pengachu home page (specs, etc.)

MobiliX has various Mobile linux links / resources.

Gmate, the Korean company producing a (somewhat expensive) Linux PDA that looks rather a lot like the one from Samsung

Compaq Itsy

from Pengachu PDA block diagram found at http://rehmi.www. med ia.mit.edu/~rehmi/pengachu/v3_document.htm

it uses a Dragonball CPU, the same used in the Palm handhelds. much less then 900mhz, probablly more like 100 or so.

it also has a 128x64 LXD screen. not to usefull by it self, but does provide moniter hookups

it has 8M Flash RAM, pretty cool. Linux is going to eat up about 1M of that.

The neatest thing is that it can use "winup" power.. I can't imagine running a stable web server off winup power, but if you just lugging it somewhere and want to read your mail, what could be better?

-Jon

The specs for Pengachu are here

--
WolfSkunks for a better Linux Kernel
$Stalag99{"URL"}="http://stalag99.keenspace.com";

At least one person who did a Furby Autopsy was not very impressed with the construction of the system.

Some possibly nicer robot kits are available in a number of places, including the Robot Store, Probotics, and Arrick... Of course, there are also the cool Mindstorms, the relatively expensive Aibo (Some hacking info on it can be dug up from the Aibo Site), and the companies listed in this part of the robotics faq

However, Hacking the Furby does give you a relatively inexpensive talking robot with IR input, etc. and ought to be fun... While not the most well constructed system, it does give you some decent features (detects light & sound levels, tilt/inversion of the furby, Infrared and RS232 comms (when upgraded), and some touch sensors on the back, front, and mouth) - especially nice if you get one used, cheap...

It is nice that the reprogrammability kits are being made available, particularly for parents of autistic children (since children can relate to a Furby better than a "regular" hobbyist-grade robot)...

Also, check out the open-source Rossum Project

jim