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According to MIT's Graduate Admissions Page, "an applicant must have received a Bachelor's degree or its equivalent from a college, university, or technical school of acceptable standing." Another place to contact is MIT's Internation Student Office. If English is not your primary language will almost certainly need to take the TOEFL (Test of English as a Foriegn Language). If you are asking about undergraduate admission you should be aware that financial aid for ugrad foreign students is almost unheard of in the US. I would say that any international (non-american) student would have a better-than-average chance of getting accepted to a US school since "diversity" has now become quantizable statistic used to rank US schools.

As Richard Stallman says, patent reform is not enough.

Also take a look at the League for Programming Freedom and freepatents.org.

If you aren't sure that you want to get a Ph.D. get some experience first. I knew that I wanted to get a Master's but wasn't sure if I would get in to, or wanted to deal with the hassles of applying to a "top-tier" school. So, I looked for employment at a place that already had a close relationship with one of those schools (MIT Lincoln Lab). Now they pay my tutition and my regular salary with only a one year "stay with us" clause. It turned out to be a great job anyway.

"3. that within 7 days of providing this undertaking you will provide email addresses of all those persons who you are aware of who have downloaded the panorama Tools from Your Site;"

Geeze, I never realized that I should avoid sending "thank you" and "great job" emails to free software developers whose software I use. I'd be risking legal action if that developer becomes target of a patent and has, for some reason, kept my email.

Secondly, according to this wired article, one of the companies IPIX went up against had overwhelming prior-art. Here's a snipit:

A jury reviewed all the prior art, listened to the testimony of the IPIX scientists who developed the patented techniques, and decided to uphold the IPIX patent in its patent infringement suit against competitor Infinite Pictures. This despite a parade of Infinite Pictures witnesses and lawyers who argued the "prior art" defense to the point of absurdity, he said. "They went over and over it. The jury laughed," said Phillips [IPIX CEO].

So basically, prior-art doesn't matter, as long as you put on a good show for a jury. You know, I dont think I'd mind them having a patent on this type of technology, but from the look at the above two articles, this is a company who knows that others have had the idea, there is overwhelming prior-art, but they have managed to slip though legal holes and only care about cashing in ($25 per use!?).

As another poster said, you will want to go to a school that has a group that is doing interesting work in an area that you're excited about. This is true, but there are a lot of other factors.

It is important to not only be excited about the reserach, but also to get along with the professor(s) who run the group. Many professors are not good managers - it's important to realize this early on. A big department can be an advantage since there's a better chance that there are other profs doing research that you're interested in if you decide that you can't work with the advisor with whom you originally wanted to work.

If you have two years of undergrad study left, there is a lot you can do to help figure out what you want to do in grad school, and to increase your chances of getting in. First of all, try to take a couple of graduate level CS classes in areas that you're interested in. See if you like them, and if you're comfortable with the workload. Second, you should definitely try to work for a professor in your current department. There are two ways that undergrads can be compensated for their work: money and credit hours. You will end up doing grunt work for a research group, but it's a great way to get to know the professors and grad students, and to start to understand how research works.

Read _A PhD is Not Enough_ by Peter Feibelman.

The cost of applying to a grad school is the application fee plus the time it takes to fill out the forms, have GREs and transcripts sent, get letters of recommendation, etc. Apply to as many schools as possible, given these costs. I know a little bit about how admission committees work, and there is a fair amount of randomness - hedge your bets.

Think about why you want to go to grad school. Remember that after a few years of grad school, your stock option loaded ex-undergrad-classmates will be laughing at you.

This is a good time to be applying to grad school in CS. The job market is great, so grad schools are competing for students. Will this still be true in two years? Probably so, but keep an eye out.

After you get accepted at a number of schools, talk to your professors about the schools, and talk on the phone or email professors at the other schools. Visit the ones whose offers you are seriously considering accepting. Go out to lunch with some grad students there, and learn some dirt about the department. It would be a mistake to enter a department without visiting first.

Be sure to read Olin Shivers's advice to graduate students. Also check out my reading list for computer scientists.

Wait a sec, the impression that I got from this story was that IPIX (the company that has that patent on generating panoramics) sued (or threatened to sue) a german free software developer because the infringing software he made was available from England, where IPIX had the patent. It didn't matter that he was in germany, it only mattered that by posting his software on the net where it could be accessed by people in countries where IPIX had the patent, he was still in violation. Did I make the wrong assumption about this? Is it really as simple as posting your software on a finnish ftp site?

A few thing are needed:

The Patent and Trademark Office (PTO) needs to be better funded from the Federal Treasury. One big reason why patent searches are so expensive is the PTO is dependant on user fees for operating expenses. This benefits the big companies, hurts the small companies, and locks out the Free Software developer entirely. They also need to improve their library of unpatented prior art, which will cost them money. Whether or not you think software patents should be abolished, this is necessary, to protect against things such as software patents masquerading as hardware patents. The best way to encourage improved PTO funding is by contacting your Congressmen and Senators.

The PTO needs to know that it is not enforcing its own rules properly, and it needs to clean up its act. Congress can't really help here, this is a matter of the executive branch. Write to the Commissioner of the PTO (Q. Todd Dickenson), his boss, the Secretary of Commerce (William M. Daley), or his boss the President of the United States (some guy from Arkansas). Apparently the PTO has been making some changes since the Compton's Multimedia Patent embarrassment, but some encouragement from the people would be helpful. Again, even if you feel software patents should be abolished, that won't take the PTO out of the picture, and they still need to follow their procedures better.

Lastly, if you do want software patents abolished, make sure to do the above, and join and support the League for Programming Freedom. Collective effort is critical for any headway to be made here, and the LPF is the best focus for such effort out there.

----

50 bucks for a 386? Yikes, that's high! I got a 486 with 16 megs of ram for 30 bucks at the MIT Flea Market. If you're in the Boston area, it's a great place to pick up obsolete computers and parts. The Miter's Page about the MIT Flea Market
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Archive the video streams of a zillion public webcams, keyed by eigenfaces so you can track people's movements (may take more than one card)

Build very large fast data warehouses with lots of precalculated aggregates

Set up webcams all over the house and archive every little thing Junior does without having to grab the camcorder all the time

Record all your romantic phone calls so you can relive the whole sorry mess when she dumps you

Download the complete text of every online news site for full-text indexing (no more "This story is archived, pay up to see it")

Download some innocuous content to mask your subversive secrets. Add lots of random bits. Attach a digital signature to every bit on your drive--one signature for innocuous content, another for secrets, and wrong signature for random bit. When goons ask for encryption key, give them innocuous one. (see ron rivest, chaffing and winnowing)

It's long been felt that the first reasonable nanotech creations would be chains of molecules assembled in a biochem process. It looks like these guys have taken it to the step of differentiating the pieces to be able to create them. There's still the macroworld interconnect problem. Do a search on gray goo on any of the nanotech news servers.

If you're interested in this kind of stuff, check out the work done by Tom Knight at MIT also. I was at Symbolics with Tom in the mid-80s. He's an amazing person.

I respectfully disagree with your conclusion.

From what I've seen of the brief desktop history, changes in the computer isn't the only thing that has an effect on computer sales/uses/etc. The people buying the computers change too.

Instead of just using computers to store recipes, use spreadsheets for finances, and print a paper (as PC were origionally marketed), people are using them for communication. The BBS's that were reserved for us young geeks are now online and frequented by old farts.

Linux, in its present form, probably won't be used by anyone who is scared of scandisk. But there is a whole world of new applications for microprcessors (and computers in general) in the counter intelligence research at MIT (for example).

Don't give up on the penguin yet.

A bit more info about the quasi-famous MIT Swapfest:
MITERS page an article in the school newspaper More thorough info, from the MIT Ham pages

A bit more info about the quasi-famous MIT Swapfest:
MITERS page an article in the school newspaper More thorough info, from the MIT Ham pages

A bit more info about the quasi-famous MIT Swapfest:
MITERS page an article in the school newspaper More thorough info, from the MIT Ham pages

Quick! Run, don't walk, and find yourself a copy of Applied Cryptography!!!

Read read read read it! Right before bed every night, and right when you wake up in the morning. Peruse the web in search of information (searches for terms like PGP, RSA, Diffie, Public Key, Key Server, Cryptography, Cryptanalysis, security, privacy and other related terms will probably yield some more helpful info...

Counterpane is probably one of the best places to start. Read the white papers there. Subscribe to the newsletter. Check out the links. You might want to check out RSA as well. They've got a bunch of FAQ's on their website, most of which will answer your questions. You may also want to check out PGP (that link's only if you're not a business... The PDF manual has a lot of info as to how the product works. Verisign will probably have some more information... I haven't been there recently, but i'm sure you can unearth something...

Anyone else want to pile on some more resources for this guy (or girl)?

(That was still a lot less typing than answering all those questions, and will probably supply better information that I could type in an hour...)

I'm not alone here: I answered RINGO's questions, and once or twice, it actually came up with an artist that was a) new to me, and b) good. I read about Patti Maes and the culture of Firefly in WIRED. And slowly but surely, the "cool site of 96" became a ubiquitous technology.

But now that collaborative filtering and its cousins have become ubiquitous, Firefly is simply obsolete. For sure, I don't like the idea of that kind of community-based (or rather, community-built) enterprise coming with a price-tag, but the people behind its innovation took the money and ran years ago.

In the meantime, have a look at this project: the Remembrance Agent. It's a smarter data-mine; it locks into Emacs; it's open-source; and it's part of a cool project for wearable computers. I like it lots.

That said, if it was really nice and easy to make a program parallel, it would be done by now. The closest thing I've ever seen is some nifty magic done by the SGI power-compilers to take advantage of SMP machines... but thats only for one machine. That doesn't even touch inter-machine problems.

I say, that's rather defeatist logic, isn't it? It hasn't been done, ergo it can't be, and the first law of Computer Science is the Law of No Progress? ^_^ Anyways, while it doesn't make a program parallelize automatically, as I gather "TSIA" says it can do, the Cilk language being developed and refined at MIT makes it as easy to parallelize as I think it's ever going to get.

Cilk is a superset of the C language; just a handful of keywords provide the capacity for parallelization. The "spawn" keyword attached to the invocation of a procedure tells the computer that it's safe to execute that procedure in parallel with everything else that's currently executing; the "sync" keyword tells the computer to wait until all procedures spawned from this one have completed before resuming execution. A local procedure labeled with the "inlet" keyword can be used to process partial information as it gets returned from spawned procedures. And when the results of a spawned procedure obviate the work being done by other spawned procedures, the "abort" keyword terminates all outstanding procedures.

Sure, it would be neat to have a compiler automagically parallelize your program by itself, but the Cilk compiler, IMHO, is a pretty close Next Best Thing.

After authenticating a user logging in, it inserts a placeholder line in /etc/passwd (with the password field as *); this /etc/passwd gets reset when the machine restarts.

Not necessarily. Last year an entry written in "J" (a derivative from APL) won the judge prize. Look at the source code of their entry, you'll find the reason.

Ouch. I'm getting buzzword sickness. Anyone remember the first descriptions of Java? I think this beats it for buzzword density.

This, as far as I can tell, is a generalized description of things like RPC and CRL. Distributed computing is a cool idea, but (there's always a but) you still need to write your programs to be distributed. This thing seems to be basically about a distributable threading model ("tasks" == threads?). I'm pretty sure the day will never come when we can transparently run applications that are not designed to be distributed on many machines at once, but it'd be nifty if someone came up with a system that allows coders to not worry too much about distibuting their program, and still have it work well.
----------------------
"This moon-cheese will make me very rich! Very rich indeed!

I'd recommend you turn your efforts to an established charity at first.. There are a few reasons for this: 1) They've done the hard legal work, which sounds like one of your concerns. You won't be responsible, you'll just be volunteering. 2) An established charity or organization has a much larger chance of impacting an area -- these people spend every day thinking about how to reach and serve people in a certain community, as opposed to you and I who have day jobs, and will just be starting out with our best guesses as to what will work and what won't.

Also, it's easy to volunteer time to a local charitable organization...Really easy. Most inner city charities and public projects are desparately short staffed, especially when it comes to qualified technical individuals. It's just a matter of finding one. If you have a religious affiliation (that likes children), you might want to start there. Just calling your local YMCA in an urban setting should provide you with some solid leads..

I work with a Christian organization in Cambridge, Mass, for example. It's a collaboration between a Cambridge church (CVCF), full of Ivy League grads with money, or time, (not many have both), and Dorchester Temple, an inner city church with plenty of people, young and old, who would not otherwise have access to computer training, or exposure. The Ivy Leaguers do training at various levels, and are implementing a mentorship program for the kids. Some of the kids want to become entrepeneurs, artists, etc. Totally exciting stuff! It's easy, too..anyone on slashdot could make an impact -- the inner city is still largely at a mid-80s level of computer education.

I'll stop my exuberant cheering, here. But, in short, a couple of phone calls should book as much of your time as you'd like to fill helping charitable organizations, and they'll probably be able to help you fulfill your dreams of helping out much sooner than you could do on your own.

(e-mail Andrew Sears for more information.)

Port 88 is kerberos.

This means you can authenticate to IIS!

(Unfortunately they've limited the administrator page to console connect only...

...what last year's problem was?

You can read about the solutions to last year's problem here:
http://www.ai.mit.edu/extra/icfp-contest/

Now here's a good news/bad news situation. I already used my five moderator points today on another thread, which meant that I couldn't moderate up any of the JWZ posts on this topic. On the other hand, that means I can add my own amplifications on the topic of how much X sucks.

Another sucky thing about X is...is...

Oh, what's the point. I've been an X user for almost fifteen years now. And I'm one of the lucky ones: I've never had to program for it. Fifteen freaking years and I have finally almost got a desktop I actually like. And that's only because the GTk+ people did an end-run around X and I've got a desktop machine that would stomp any supercomputer from the 1985-ish era of the X design. So I have to say that X is quite lovely if you have the luxury of running it on hardware 32,000 times more powerful than it was designed for.

But then Zawinski writes:

But none of that matters. Why? Because it doesn't matter how much X sucks, because X is entrenched. It works badly, but it works well enough. It is the de-facto sub-standard. It cannot be replaced, or even fixed, without rewriting every single graphical application you have ever seen, and that's just not practical.

I feel your pain, but I'm not sure even I am as darkly pessimistic as this. I guess the claim is that replacing X would be too much work, but I think we have plenty of evidence that there are people out there for whom time and duplicated effort have very little meaning. As I write this, there are hundreds of programmers slaving away at the Wine Project in order that we might one day be able to run Microsoft Word in bug-for-bug compatibility mode. Zawinski has already pointed out the amount of wheel-spinning that has gone into the eleventy-seven different toolkits that you can run under X. Emacs now can have a built-in web browser (disclaimer: yes, I sometimes use it) and I personally know the guy who wrote its spreadsheet mode.

No, I think there's enough random energy around to write a completely new GUI for Unix and hack/slay/port all of the most useful applications to it. There are already two or three groups of people who are working on the next X itself.

I'm not sure all of this is the wisest use of one's time, of course, but there you go. Worse may usually be be better, but this cuts both ways. I remember when Linux was still in the .95 days and there was a serious question about how long Linux thing could go on before the *BSD people saved us all. It didn't happen that way for a variety of reasons, and *BSD was a far more likely candidate for world dominance in 1991 than X is in 1999.

King Babar

Actually, Gates is doing just that. check out the Stata Center (which may house the FSF)

Maybe he's a professor in the MIT Technology and Policy Program? Sounds like Open Source Liscensing would be right up their alley. See http://web.mit.edu/tpp/www/. Also, there is a directory structure built for the tlp (technology in/and law program?), but nothing substantial has been built out.

--Alex

Been there, done something like that. Although we used it to fire water balloons rather than water, our cannon had a 5 foot piece of PVC as the pressure tank, and another as the barrel. Worked pretty well once we figured out some details.

Regarding the original piece, super soakers are okay. Backpack-mounted fire extinguishers are better. Of course, you can't pump them on the fly, which is a drawback, but put an air compressor near your water filling station, and you're all set for battle.

I'm the author of the Salon article, and (as might be obvious from reading the article) I read slashdot. I also read email, for that matter. Or you could read my homepage. All the same to me. Just try to leave me enough free time today to hack some on my compiler and write some on my thesis, K?

speaking as a biocomputing geek, the NCBI website is a great starting point...

• National Center for Biotechnology Information, http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov
• Genome Resources Guide, http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/genome/guide/
• Human Genome Sequencing Progress
• Links to all the Genome sequencing centers
• The Sanger Center (UK), http://www.sanger.ac.uk/HGP/
• The Whitehead Institute (MIT), http://www.genome.wi.mit.edu/

All the messaging programs at the moment suck really badly. ICQ and AIM are both pretty woeful.

Not a permanent solution... but try https://lesser-magoo.lcs.mit.edu/s/

Did anyone beside me notice that the text of the article was printed in Scientific American?

SA isn't noted as a journal for computer scientists and Electrical Engineers. Of course the article sounds fishy - it glosses over the all of the engineering problems and calls them wires!

I was halfway done writing a typical slashdot post lambasting the article before I decided to look at the web site for the Oxygen project. A cursory glance shows that they've got a very interesting project. I'm not going to spend any time on their data - I don't know if they're conclusions hold water or not, but it's definitely not a joke.

If you've got the background for it, or the sheer persistence, look at this or
that (basically the same stuff, but with prettier pictures).

It looks to me like they've got a great idea for quickly banging out custom ASIC blocks for signal processing problems. I wonder how well it would work with a general purpose computer.

It seems to me that the greatest general-purpose computing gains are when the FPGA recongures itself on the granularity level of a kernel context-switch or, even a finer level. Right now, FPGAs are REALLY slow to reprogram. If someone could come up with some kind of quickly reconfiguring device, they might be on to something.

Did anyone beside me notice that the text of the article was printed in Scientific American?

SA isn't noted as a journal for computer scientists and Electrical Engineers. Of course the article sounds fishy - it glosses over the all of the engineering problems and calls them wires!

I was halfway done writing a typical slashdot post lambasting the article before I decided to look at the web site for the Oxygen project. A cursory glance shows that they've got a very interesting project. I'm not going to spend any time on their data - I don't know if they're conclusions hold water or not, but it's definitely not a joke.

If you've got the background for it, or the sheer persistence, look at this or
that (basically the same stuff, but with prettier pictures).

It looks to me like they've got a great idea for quickly banging out custom ASIC blocks for signal processing problems. I wonder how well it would work with a general purpose computer.

It seems to me that the greatest general-purpose computing gains are when the FPGA recongures itself on the granularity level of a kernel context-switch or, even a finer level. Right now, FPGAs are REALLY slow to reprogram. If someone could come up with some kind of quickly reconfiguring device, they might be on to something.

Of course a lot of the early RFCs fit the bill, but here's my nomination for one of the really significant documents that was not an RFC: the paper End-to-End Arguments in System Design. This paper laid out the basic principles that drove the design of most of the Internet protocols. One of the authors, Dave Clark, was the "Internet Architect" during the 80s when the basic protocols were designed and put in place.

If you can't read PDF, you can find the paper in several other formats at http://web.mit.edu/Saltzer/ww w/publications/pubs.html

Of course a lot of the early RFCs fit the bill, but here's my nomination for one of the really significant documents that was not an RFC: the paper End-to-End Arguments in System Design. This paper laid out the basic principles that drove the design of most of the Internet protocols. One of the authors, Dave Clark, was the "Internet Architect" during the 80s when the basic protocols were designed and put in place.

If you can't read PDF, you can find the paper in several other formats at http://web.mit.edu/Saltzer/ww w/publications/pubs.html

The MIT project you are thinking of is probably the RAW project. The web site is a bit sparse - not much more than a list of all of the groups research papers. You can get a bit more info about the project in the latest Scientific American in the section about MIT's Oxygen project (hey the article is actually online too - go read it here. Note that it is aimed at the general public, so it's on the simplistic side).

We do not care about closed systems or corporate games. And we certainly don't care about screwed up protocols that weren't even designed by designers. We should simply use and disseminate Zephyr . If the script kiddies and Prisoners of Bill care to join us, fine. But we shouldn't try to go to them. Something that is open, scriptable, tested, and scalable will beat these spamvert games every time. We don't want to be held captured by mandatory advertising, either -- or stupid systems for peeceeweecees.

You're thinking on the same track they are, except they want skin to make it act, not just look, more human. Dr. Anne Foerst is a post-doc at the lab working on skin. If you fish around the MIT AI site, you may find a bit about the work. Cog, Kismet's "older brother," has some fake skin on his stomach. Judging from what I've read, developing skin for the robots has proved very difficult.

I saw Dr. Foerst speak, and she is amazing. She has a joint appointment with MIT AI and Harvard Divinity. Her work on skin has a theological basis from Genesis informed by modern studies of human development. Her exegesis of Genesis, based on the work of a 14th century rabbi, was something totally new to me. She is both a theologian and a computer scientist with formal education in both fields. This article includes a brief background.

You're thinking on the same track they are, except they want skin to make it act, not just look, more human. Dr. Anne Foerst is a post-doc at the lab working on skin. If you fish around the MIT AI site, you may find a bit about the work. Cog, Kismet's "older brother," has some fake skin on his stomach. Judging from what I've read, developing skin for the robots has proved very difficult.

I saw Dr. Foerst speak, and she is amazing. She has a joint appointment with MIT AI and Harvard Divinity. Her work on skin has a theological basis from Genesis informed by modern studies of human development. Her exegesis of Genesis, based on the work of a 14th century rabbi, was something totally new to me. She is both a theologian and a computer scientist with formal education in both fields. This article includes a brief background.

There will be another Linux-based multimedia wearable demoed at
SIGGRAPH this year. It will do location-based context awareness,
real-time video processing, and hardware-accelerated 3D graphics. Cooler still,
it fits into a nicely tailored vest/jacket combo, and will use an
embroidered fabric keypad (conductive thread/capacitive coupling)
for input.

Unlike the wearable in this story, it isn't currently set up to
broadcast video back to a base station. Instead, the video input is
used in conjunction with a small head-mounted camera to do object
recognition for annotation (assuming we get the vision code ported in
time). Since the demo will run in-doors, we are using IR beacons
rather than GPS for the location data, since the chance of getting a
clean GPS signal inside the LA convention center is zero.

As the user wanders around the exhibition floor, the wearable will
annotate the environment with 3D and 2D content, and relay information
back to a base-station using 10Mbit wireless networking. Annotation
will include web pages, which the user will be able to brows and
navigate using the fabric keyboard. The system weighs slightly more
than a laptop, but the weight is distributed throughout the
ergonomically design vest; the only obvious sign that the user is
wearing a computer is the HMD, which in this case is full-color VGA
resolution.

Attribution time:

The demo application is "City of News" by Flavia Sparacino, much of
the hardware hacking is being done by Steve Schwartz, and I'm working
on the localization system so that the wearable knows where it is (and
hopefully what it's looking at). Sandy Pentland heads up the Vision
and Modeling Group at the MIT Media Lab where this work is being done,
and we are also getting help from Thad Starner who was one of the early wearable pioneers at the lab before becoming a professor at Georgia
Tech. Numerous other MIT students are also contributing to this
project.

More information on wearables at MIT can be found at The MIT Wearable
Computing Web Page, although this project does not yet have a
link.

Now that they consider LZW profitable, they continue to make their rounds on enforcing their LZW patent ( Patent #4,558,302). But they didn't always consider it profitable enough to actually enforce. They sat silent as CompServe promoted the GIF 87 standard as an open and free graphic file format. Two years later when the open & free format was revised to GIF 89 and GIF 89a, Unisys continued to sit silent. It wasn't until 1993 when GIF had taken on popularity due to it's free nature that Unisys choose to actually take action. If they had taken action back before 1990 instead of 6 years after GIF's original introduction then programmers/users looking for a free file format would not have accepted GIF/LZW and would have looked for an alternative. By remaining blind to the most popular computer image format in BBS history, Unisys ensured an entrenched critical mass of patent infrigement to tax. If Unisys had available to it an even dirtier and non-professional method of making a buck, I'm glad I haven't heard about it.

The League for Programming Freedom has some good information on the GIF Controversy. And, since there is always two sides to every story, Unisys has written their take on the issue. This document explains their stand on requiring licensing from EVERYONE including for what they refered to as "so-called 'freeware.'" They also have a special email address set aside to answer licensing questions. You may wish to email them to find out more on why they refuse to provide a license which is fair to the "so-called 'freeware'" software developer.

Fortantly, this form of Unisys terror will come to an end. Libungif provides a work-around while resulting in files larger than a xpm or bmp containing the same image. The Unisys action also hopefully will help further promote the use of PNG. Most users of web browsers that don't support PNG have much more to worry about than PNGs showing up as a broken image--the public keys for the SSL Certificate Authorites in non-PNG supporting web browsers have either expired or will expire shortly. Since SSL doesn't cleanly handle expired CA entries, users of non-PNG supporting web browsers may be open to a masqurade attack. And to bring things to an end once and for all, 20 years from the filing date of June 20, 1983, US Patent 4,558,302 expires. I suggest that Slashdot mark June 20, 2003 on it's calendar for a party!

1995 statement from Unisys : http://lpf.ai.mit.edu/Patents/Gif/uni sys.html .

? Go figure.

Now, regarding user comments and such, as a science author I find Fatbrain's website to be vastly superior to Amazon's. For example, I submitted information about my book's website in August of 1998 to both Fatbrain and Amazon. It appeared at Amazon's page for my book in April of 1999 --- a mere 8 month delay. On the other hand, Fatbrain built a rather elaborate page for my book before the book even hit the stores. (To be clear, I only started writing for Fatbrain about two months ago, so this has nothing to do we them giving special treatment---they didn't even know me at the time.)

That said, if you are looking for a Stephen King book, then definitely go to Amazon; but if you are looking for scientific and technical books, it makes sense (at least to me) to shop at a place where they specialize in geek books, seek out authors to improve their website (with original content, author recommendations, etc.) and put a great deal of effort into building an informative website that contains user review, excerpts, and author information, not just for Oprah's book club authors, but for science and technical authors that are regularly ignored by Amazon.com.

Here is an interesting paper about doing just that, generating power from your shoes. Here is another. And another from IBM. I believe that MIT media labs has this technology used to power their "wearable" computers. But this could certainly be extended to power an ordinary laptop

Spyky

I read an article a few years ago about a "computer" built from molecules of chloroform. I think that it was tested by searching through a snapshot of the web to find a particular word. Bookmarks come and go, but I found a few articles on the subject:
A Vision of Synthetic Prophecy
Quantum Computing with Molecules
The computing aspect of this is really cool, as it would make factoring Really Large Numbers a snap (because these computers would be massively parallel and would be execute many instructions in one step). These machines would have the ability to factor a 400 digit number in about a year. The networking applications of quantum computing are pretty interesting as well. If you can create two photons with opposite polarization, as soon as you measure the polarization of one, the state of the other is immediately fixed, regardless of the distance.

As for being innovative, I would be careful to distinguish between invention, incremental improvement and radically new. Universities are more likely to focus on the radically new, especially exotic languages which tests out specific ideas that eventually get incorporated into mainstream (orthogonal persistance is one example coming through the current pipeline). Application developers focus on the inventions that make like simpler, creating the killer apps of the day (VisiCalc for spreadsheets), followed by later imitators and refinements. It generally takes something about 10 years in moving major technologies from university to mainstream (assuming that anyone is interested :-( ).

Considering that most people can't live on air for 10 years, Linux hackers usually end up with (hopefully) decent jobs and play around in their spare time. The amazing factor is that the relatively recent arrival of the web which allows many slices of people's spare time to accumulate into solid products, especially when they have the time luxury to reengineer a clean architecture.

Commercial vendors on the other hand have to keep in mind certain things like pleasing the stock-holders whose gracious generosity has lent them some trifling few billion to accelerate development and hype their products. Time is not a luxury and corporate secrecy (due to requirements for patenting) is an absolute. This leads to a rather closed worldview in which old techniques applied to a different setting is interpreted as "innovation". In my book truely innovative companies are those that have creately completely new sectors of the computer industry (Adobe for desktop publishing, SGI for OpenGL, AutoDesk for CAD) that wouldn't have existed otherwise.

The big problem that the Linux crowd has to address is to separate proprietary from open from expensive. Some code by it's very nature is expensive to develop (safety/fault tolerant stuff because of extensive testing). Other stuff like compilers are needed in the intermediate stages before creating the sale goods to consumers and business. Despite what people think, there is no free beer (unless you're prepared to go out and plant the crops and brew it yourself).

LL

As for being innovative, I would be careful to distinguish between invention, incremental improvement and radically new. Universities are more likely to focus on the radically new, especially exotic languages which tests out specific ideas that eventually get incorporated into mainstream (orthogonal persistance is one example coming through the current pipeline). Application developers focus on the inventions that make like simpler, creating the killer apps of the day (VisiCalc for spreadsheets), followed by later imitators and refinements. It generally takes something about 10 years in moving major technologies from university to mainstream (assuming that anyone is interested :-( ).

Considering that most people can't live on air for 10 years, Linux hackers usually end up with (hopefully) decent jobs and play around in their spare time. The amazing factor is that the relatively recent arrival of the web which allows many slices of people's spare time to accumulate into solid products, especially when they have the time luxury to reengineer a clean architecture.

Commercial vendors on the other hand have to keep in mind certain things like pleasing the stock-holders whose gracious generosity has lent them some trifling few billion to accelerate development and hype their products. Time is not a luxury and corporate secrecy (due to requirements for patenting) is an absolute. This leads to a rather closed worldview in which old techniques applied to a different setting is interpreted as "innovation". In my book truely innovative companies are those that have creately completely new sectors of the computer industry (Adobe for desktop publishing, SGI for OpenGL, AutoDesk for CAD) that wouldn't have existed otherwise.

The big problem that the Linux crowd has to address is to separate proprietary from open from expensive. Some code by it's very nature is expensive to develop (safety/fault tolerant stuff because of extensive testing). Other stuff like compilers are needed in the intermediate stages before creating the sale goods to consumers and business. Despite what people think, there is no free beer (unless you're prepared to go out and plant the crops and brew it yourself).

LL

Check out the explanation for the de-featuring on the AOLServer development forum here