Slashdot Mirror

Academic head of the MIT Media Lab Alex Pentland and Eric S. Raymond (ESR), software evangelist and straight-shooting author of some of the Free software world's most influential essays, will be there. If you can cough up zero dollars (or the equivalent in lire, pesos, krugerands, galactic credits, etc.) and get to Boston on Friday (31st March) or Saturday (1st April), you'll be well met at the 3rd annual Geek Pride Festival.

The Festival is free and brought to you by Andover.Net / VA Linux, Addison-Wesley and SwitcHouse.

Also in attendance will be the esteemed Cmdr. Taco himself, Rob Malda, and Christopher Locke and David Weinberger, authors of The ClueTrain Manifesto. Listen to them address the assembled throngs, and ask questions. In addition to speakers, there will be food, chair massages, a $500 cash-prize Quake III competition, an install fest with support from the Boston Linux Users Group, and booths representing groups like Perl Mongers, the Free Software Foundation and more.

Roblimo will be there, enjoying the street party he secretly believes is being thrown for his and lovely wife Debbie's wedding anniversary, and JonKatz may be there as well. The first person to ask Katz about his dog and the manhole, then transmit a recording of his reaction to hemos, will win an as-yet-undetermined fabulous prize. If you can't make it to Boston for April Fool's Day, you can vicariously experience the gathering via downloadable video and audio, available for the same price as the festival, less the cost of getting there.

haase writes: "James Gleick has written a thoughtful and compelling piece on software patents for the New York Times magazine. This would be a good piece to send to your representatives. You can read it at the NY Times Web site. (Registration required.) "

LocutusMIT writes, "Scientists have discovered the bones of what could be largest meat-eating dinosaur ever to walk the Earth -- a needle-nosed, razor-toothed beast that may have been more terrifying than even Tyrannosaurus rex." No word on when the findings will be properly published in a scientific journal.

Straker Skunk writes, "Loki, in conjunction with Creative Labs, has announced OpenAL, an LGPL'ed audio library for 3D sound generation. It's aimed for use in games as a cross-platform, nonproprietary means of accessing the 3D sound features on many newer sound cards. What's especially cool about it is that the API is designed with the same style, philosophy, and polish as OpenGL. Given enough time, it might very well become just as popular. " I've always been a fan of Loki and it's great to see them supporting the community - someone also sent an interview with Michael Vance, one of the developers behind OpenAL, who talks about the development of OpenAL and how it compares to other sound offerings.

This week's Linux Weekly News is reporting that Victor Yodaiken, the developer of RT-Linux (Real Time linux) has been granted a patent on method used by RT-linux. He intends that Linux users be granted a no royalty license, users of closed OS' may have to. It's unclear whether Hurd or *BSD would be granted a royalty-free license. While this could be heralded as the beginning of a new defensive patent trust for free software, it also jars somewhat with the hacker ethic. What do you think? Is Victor's idea one which is technically original, and which would not have been published had the author not had the protection afforded by a patent? Was RT-Linux's status as prior art not sufficient to keep RT-Linux free from other patent claims?

C. Scott Ananian has written a beautiful article for Salon: "Every day, in our increasingly networked world, our freedoms and privacy are being stolen from us. And most of us just let it happen -- most of us tend to accept our computer's workings as immutable, that we are chained to an irrational, vindictive, uncontrollable machine destined to rule over our 9-to-5 days."

Tirisfal writes "The Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Nanovation Technologies Inc. today announced plans to establish a world-class center dedicated to the research and prototyping of photonic technologies, a 21st-century field that will make communications hundreds of times faster. Check out the press release here."

Milkman Ken writes "I just received an email from NVidia's Dave Schmenck about this press release about VA Linux, NVidia, and SGI collaborating on a 100% OpenGL 1.2-compliant graphics subsystem for Linux. According to the press release, this graphics subsystem should make OpenGL apps as fast or faster than they are currently in Windows. They're going to be demoing it during LinuxWorld in Feburary. "

Gary William Flake writes "A new study by Inktomi and NEC Research Institute show that there is at least one billion unique indexable Web pages on the internet. The details are pretty interesting; for example, Apache dominates the server market. "

Today's TBTF has interesting data and links on the state of X-ray astronomy; ABCNews has an overview. For five months, the orbiting Chandra observatory has been producing great data and potential desktop art. Now, by focusing on a small area of sky, Chanda has resolved what was formerly just known as "X-rayglow" into distinct sources (photo), many of which even Hubble can't find in visible light. The American Astronomical Society will talk about this and other Chandra findings in a live webcast today at 2P.M. EST. For a two-year overview of our universe's secret life in invisible radiation, check out All-Sky Monitor Movies. And oh yeah, in visible-light news, microlensing provides strong evidence for stellar-size black holes being numerous.

Jim Bumgardner took it upon himself to review two of the major Legos Mindstorms books out on the market. The first, O'Reilly's The Unofficial Guide to LEGO MINDSTORMS Robots, has been reviewed here before, but this review adds a comparsion to the second book. The second is from Apress Press, and is titled Dave Baum's Definitive Guide to LEGO Mindstorms (Technology In Action). Click below to learn how to use your Mindstorms more effectively. The Unofficial Guide to LEGO MINDSTORMS Robots & Dave Baum's De author Jonathan B. Knudsen & Dave Baum pages 266 publisher O'Reilly & Apress rating 8/10 reviewer Jim Bumgardner ISBN 1-56592-692-7 & 1-89 summary A broader overview of the Lego Mindstorms world, with coverage of alternativefirmware and building your own sensors. & An in-depth look at building and programming Lego Mindstorms Robots, witha particular emphasis on robot design and NQC programming. An Embarrassment of Lego (books) As you know, this year's best holiday gift for the important geek in your life is a Lego Mindstorms Robotic Invention System (RIS). Through strategic use of heavy-handed hinting, I managed to get my loved ones to purchase one for me a few weeks ago for my birthday. I've been obsessed with the thing ever since, and recently picked up copies of the two available books on the subject, which I'll compare for you below. Knudsen's book was reviewed here recently, while Baum's has not.

Since Robotics involves a lot of different disciplines, these books are going to have a pretty varied audience. In my case, I'm a longtime programmer and (extremely) novice robot builder who couldn't properly handle a soldering iron if my life depended on it. I'm not particularly interested in the chapters on the ins and outs of the C language, but very interested in things like gear ratios and sensing algorithms, which I never learned in school. The mileage you'll get out of these books will vary, depending on your background.

In the comparitive sections below, Knudsen's book (and Knudsen himself) will be referred to as K, while Baum's book (and Baum himself) will be referred to as B.

Cover First let's get the important stuff out of the way... K's cover is prettier, having a picture of a cute bunny wobot. It's an O'Reilly book after all.

Length B is 34 pages longer, but K uses a smaller font. I suspect B is a bit longer, but not by much.

Value Both are 25 bucks retail, and cheaper online (typically 20 bucks). B comes with a CD-ROM. K doesn't. The CD contains all the sample code, a copy of NQC and related utilities, some demos and a QuickTime movie showing the assembly of one of the simpler robots (tankbot). With the exception of the sample code, the CD-ROM is kind of superfluous.

Illustrations K uses photos, which have been tweaked in Photoshop to remove the backgrounds. B uses computer-generated models rendered in isometric projection (also known as "2 1/2 D" -- similar to what you see in the Lego Constructopedia). Both books' images are reproduced in B&W and suffer for it. It's particular hard to see (and count) the holes in black beams, for example.

B's illustrations are definitely clearer than K's, primarily due to the use of computer graphics. The isometric projection definitely helps in figuring out how pieces fit together. K's illustrations have helpful lists of pieces and arrows showing where they go, however there are problems due to poor constrast and fuzziness, as well as distortions introduced by the camera's perspective. Despite these problems, I managed to get even his most complex bot, Minerva, assembled relatively quickly.

Breadth and Depth In general, K has more breadth, while B has more depth. K's book includes more introductory material about robotics (e.g. "What is a Robot?"), while B jumps right into installation instructoins, assuming you know that stuff already (e.g. "Robotics is nothing new"). K covers a lot of ground, including various available software packages, such as pbForth and LegOS, while B sticks to RCX code and NQC. K also gets into some interesting topics not found in B such as Subsumption Architecture and building your own sensors. On the other hand, B gets much more in depth into specific programming and modelling issues. There are a lot more examples of algorithms for handling touch and light sensors, and discussion of specific problems that might arise and how to deal with them. B's line following algorithms are different, taking advantage of the percieved "gray area" on the edge of the black line, using upper and lower feedback limits, while K uses a "zig-zag" approach with a single threshhold value (when I implemented them, I found K's approach to be more effective - the "gray area" approach requires more minute adjustments). B also has good coverage of the strengths and weaknesses of the different mindstorm kits and parts.

Programming B coverage of algorithms is generally better, particular in his detailed handling of touch and light sensor issues. K has a nice example of Rodney Brooks' subsumption architecture, written in NQC.

B, being the author of NQC, makes NQC programming an intregal part of his book. Every program is shown in both RCX Code and NQC versions (although the RCX Code version is often seriously crippled (as needs be). Nonetheless, B appears to have more success in getting RCX Code to do useful things than K, who pretty much gives up on RCX Code after a couple of chapters. A personal note: I found RCX Code to be a general pain in the ass. Personally I'm not all that convinced that it is a better alternative for the novices it is aimed at. Especially when you have to go though such contortions to to get it to do such useful things. Is mouse pushing really all that simpler than typing?

Design Both books cover design reasonably well. I'd give the slight edge to B, who has a good design chapter before going into the specifics of building individual robots. The chapter not only covers some of the things covered in Fred Martin's "Art of Lego Design" paper, but also covers the use of Pulleys and Ratchets. K tends to weave similar design lessons directly into the chapters on specific bots. There are design issues in both books not covered by the other. B's discussion of stresses in bumpers is quite good. K has some nice examples of directional transmissions (which don't necessarily use the differential).

Robot Models Both writers' basic robots, are simpler and more utilitarian than their Lego counterparts from the RIS's Constructopedia, which tend to be a bit more fanciful (although K uses the all important wings parts for Minerva). Both books start with a basic tread robot which make ideal learning tools for learning to program with touch and light sensors. K's robot is geared down right away (for more power and lower speed). B doesn't gear down until the reduced speed is needed (for line following). B's book has designs and programs for 14 different robots, some mobile, some not. K only has 4 robots (all mobile robots). Both of these numbers are misleadingly high, since some of the bots are quite similar. Some of B's more advanced bots require extra parts not included in the RIS kit. In some cases, the extra parts are needed to explain an interesting concept, like rack and pinion steering. B includes some designs for some interesting non-mobile robots, such as a brick sorter and a vending machine, which reads lego "punch cards". Both books' final robot is an armed robot - apparently the holy grail of many robot designers (there's one depicted on the cover of the RIS kit which I'm guessing can't be built with the stock parts). B's robot, RoboArm, requires an extra motor and bricks. K's robot, Minerva, manages to do a lot of stuff using all stock parts from a single 1.0 RIS kit (he accomplishes this via a directional transmission and an ingenious one-motor grabber arm borrowed from Ben Williamson). When I built this model using my 1.5 kit (which has a slightly different allotment of pieces), I found I was missing a couple bevel gears needed to complete the model (I borrowed some old style "thin" bevel gears from my daughter's Lego bucket, but they're very flimsy). This bot certainly accomplishes a lot with relatively spare resources, although it is perhaps pushing the envelope too far, as the "arm" assembly tends to require frequent attention, as the author notes. I found it useful to test more advanced designs with a spare 9V battery box I had left over from an old Technic kit. You can also use your computer as a remote, for this purpose.

Online References K's online references are more thorough. Both books have the most important URL, of course, which is www.lugnet.com - the center of the online Lego universe.

Timeliness B, a little later to press, includes coverage of RIS 1.5, and differences between RIS 1.5 and 1.0 (they are relatively minor).

Writing Style K tends to wax a bit more eloquently. I like his prose better. B is a bit less philosophical and tends to dive right into discussions of procedures and problems. This has its merits too, as he devotes a little more time to the nitty gritty.

Conclusions In some ways, these books are a little bit superfluous. The whole point, it seems, of the Lego Mindstorms kits is to learn by doing - by playing with them. Also, a lot of the material in the books, such as coverage of NQC, LegOS and other software packages, can be easily found on the net. Nonetheless, I found myself compelled to suck up both books, and I'm sure I will ultimately use some of the tips and tricks I've learned from both.

The two books complement each other very well, and if you have the interest and the bucks, I would spring for both. Knudsen's book provides a broader overview of the Lego Mindstorm's world and robotics in general, while Baum provides a lot of valuable technical information on solving specific problems. Purchase The Unofficial Guide at fatbrain or grab Dave Baum's at from fatbrain as well.

Table of Contents (Baum)

• Preface
• Introduction
• History

• Part I-Building Fundamentals
  • Chapter 1 - Mechanics
  • Chapter 2 - Motors
  • Chapter 3 - Sensors
  • Chapter 4 - Basic Vehicles
• Part II-Programming Fundamentals
  • Chapter 5 -NQC
  • Chapter 6 - Robolab
  • Chapter 7 - Sequenced Operations
  • Chapter 8 - Event Based Programming
  • Chapter 9 - Making Decisions
  • Chapter 10 - Using Feedback
  • Chapter 11 - Data Logging
  • Chapter 12 - Using more than one RCX
  • Chapter 13 - Advanced Programming
• Part III-Robots
  • Chapter 14 - Garbage Truck
  • Chapter 15 - Copy Machine
  • Chapter 16 - Vending Machine (or ATM)
  • Chapter 17 - Robot Tag
  • Chapter 18 - Elevator
  • Chapter 19 - Brick Sorter
  • Chapter 20 - Electric Train Controller
  • Chapter 21 - Stair Climbing/Walking
  • Chapter 22 - Multiple-RCX Robot
  • Appendices
    • Appendix A. Other Resources
    • Appendix B. On-line Resources
    • Appendix C. Robolab Development Environment
    • Appendix D. Lego CyberMaster product
  Table of Contents (Knudsen)
  • Preface
    
  1. Welcome to MINDSTORMS
     • What Is a Robot?
     • Mobile Robots
     • What Is MINDSTORMS?
     • What Now?
     • Online Resources
  2. Hank, the Bumper Tank
     • About the Building Instructions
     • Building Instructions
     • A Simple Program
     • Wheels
     • Bumpers and Feelers
     • Gears
     • Multitasking
     • Online Resources
  3. Trusty, a Line Follower
     • Building Instructions
     • Some Tricky Programming
     • The Light Sensor
     • Idler Wheels
     • Using Two Light Sensors
     • Online Resources
  4. Not Quite C
     • A Quick Start
     • RCX Software Architecture
     • NQC Overview
     • Trusty Revisited
     • Online Resources
  5. Minerva, a Robot with an Arm
     • Building Instructions
     • Programming
     • Directional Transmission
     • Pulleys
     • Mechanical Design
     • Two Sensors, One Input
     • Where Am I?
     • Online Resources
  6. pbFORTH
     • Replacement Firmware
     • pbFORTH Overview
     • About Forth
     • pbFORTH Words
     • An Expensive Thermometer
     • Minerva Revisited
     • Debugging
     • Online Resources
  7. A Remote Control for Minerva
     • Two Heads Are Better Than One
     • The Allure of Telerobotics
     • Building Instructions
     • Programming the Remote Control
     • Programming Minerva
     • Online Resources
  8. Using Spirit:ocx with Visual Basic
     • You May Already Have Visual Basic
     • About Spirit:ocx
     • Calling Spirit:ocx Functions
     • Immediate and Delayed Gratif ication
     • Programs, Tasks, and Subroutines
     • Tips
     • Retrieving the Datalog
     • Online Resources
  9. RoboTag, a Game for Two Robots
     • Building Instructions
     • Subsumption Architecture
     • Online Resources
  10. legOS
      • About legOS
      • Development Tools
      • Hello, legOS
      • Function Reference
      • New Brains for Hank
      • Development Tips
      • Online Resources
  11. Make Your Own Sensors
      • Mounting
      • Passive Sensors
      • Powered Sensors
      • Touch Multiplexer
      • Other Neat Ideas
      • What About Actuators?
      • Online Resources
  • A: Finding Parts and Programming Environments
    
  • B: A pbFORTH Downloader
    
  • C: Future Directions
    

roger writes "Feed Magazine has an interesting column on etoy/eToys, Leonardo, etc., and the recent patent law insanity in the United States." Cogent commentary on *why* so many big companies are doing such dumb stuff from Hunter College Professor Clay Shirkey.

mwalker writes "Transasia Corporation is claiming over a million dollars in damages based on their claim that a search engine request using the word 'Leonardo' brings up not only their web sites but also those of the MIT-published Leonardo arts organization. What's worse is that the police have now raided the publication for incriminating papers (papers containing the word 'Leonardo')." Okay. This is over the edge. Way worse than the Etoys/etoy stupidity. I'm making a personal donation to the Leonardo Defense Fund, 425 Market Street, 2nd Floor, San Francisco, California, 94105, U.S.A. I strongly urge other Slashdot readers to take their own appropriate actions - short of lawbreaking or violence, of course. Here's the Leonardo Finance site so you can see the enemy's face first-hand. Unbelievable!

N. D. Culver sent in an interesting Village Voice story. Here's a quote: "...Randell Mills, a Harvard-trained medical doctor who also studied biotechnology and electric engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, says he's found the Holy Grail of physics: a unified theory of everything." And, the story says, Mills' company, BlackLight Power, has rounded up over $25 million in investment capital to exploit practical applications of Mills' work, which traditional physicists claim is nothing more than cold fusion rehashed. Is Mills a charlatan, or is this cutting-edge science? Read the story and decide for yourself.

Desco writes "Two MIT professors are filing a suit against the Ask Jeeves, Inc. search engine for it's "qestion-and-answer" interface. The Boston Herald reported in this article. The two professors, Patrick H. Winston and Boris Katz, are in the Electrical Engineering/Coputer Science and Artificial Intelligence departments respectively. Ironically, on the institute's artificial intelligence department's webpage, this article can be found on the dangers of software patents. " Thanks to sudog for this update on Yahoo!.

Chris Johnson writes: "When you think about PalmPilots or the new crop of wearable computers or, perhaps, even computers themselves, you could sum it up with a single nonword - Borgification. By this, I refer to the way computers can extend a person's abilities, in the same way that wearing clothing can extend a person's ability to survive hostile climates, or standing on ladders can extend a person's ability to reach high-up things. This is a central theme of computer use, and the development of GUI speaks eloquently toward how far a computer's interactions can be bent to make them look like human interactions." Keep reading (below). Chris has lots more to say, and it's all good. He'll get you thinking, whether you agree with him or not.

There's a huge amount of effort being made to stretch computers in this manner. In the Linux field alone, there are lots of window managers and entire competing desktop environments. Looking at the commercial OSes, it turns out that the latest fad (starting with IBM's RealThings such as RealPhone, continued through Apple's Quicktime 4, and now taken up by Microsoft Media Player) is for simulated object interfaces- trading off access to consistent interface behavior for access to interfaces that are closely modelled on real physical objects. This includes the conscious decision to model a volume control (for instance) after a thumbwheel, despite the fact that the control is not used with your thumb and is suboptimal for GUI use compared to controls like sliders and scrollbars. The idea is that people are so accustomed to altering volume on the thumbwheel controls of radios and Walkmen that this overrides the need to optimise controls for the computer screen environment... and for better or worse, the commercial mainstream is diving in this direction.

My personal suspicion is that this may have been a 'Tar Baby'-like strategy on the part of Steve Jobs, who had to know that Microsoft Media Player would follow Quicktime down that road. That's as may be. The more interesting concern for Slashdot readers is this: should this industry trend prove a mistake, how can Linux and alternative operating systems seize an advantage?

It's interesting that the assumptions about user interface always seem to mean the computers will do all the 'stretching' toward the humans. For instance, on the one hand, J. Random Grandmother is the last person you'd expect to be wearing Borg implants, yet the direction of wearables seems always to be GUI displays so the person needn't hack with weird commands, voice recognition so the person needn't _type_, etc etc. and so on. This is an incongruous combination, designing these uber-geeky things for the NON geeks.

What would an alternative approach be like? Well, first of all, a very obvious move would be to keep the heads-up display but redefine it from a GUI screen to an Xterm. This could be cheaper to implement and would be better for the context (a tiny little screen). The OS could be Linux, certainly: but rather than asking whether it would be running KDE or Gnome, one would ask whether it's running bash or csh or tcsh or ksh. The device would store really large amounts of text information, for instance a Mac repair person such as myself might have in the gigs of disk space the entire Apple Tech Info Library and Archive, the body text of utilities such as Extensions Overload, and the total content of several mailing lists. Using such a device, I'd be working on something and would pause to type queries on my arm (presumably as grep searches or something). The HUD would return the entries I searched for, and might also occasionally produce notes I left for myself using cron to echo text to the screen or to kick off little scripts that would evaluate how I wanted things prioritized. Anyone who's dug into the classic Unix approach enough to become fascinated with the possibilities will appreciate what's being suggested here. Significantly, removing the GUI load from such a device and expecting entirely console-based interaction would simplify the design, allowing it to run very fast and efficiently on little embedded processors and not some desktop powermonger.

Naturally, when you talk about using stripped-down Linux implementations on wearables instead of using some sort of Windows, or a Linux desktop, the immediate assumption is that this is all about available computer resources, and that the future is about having enough resources that you can run KDE on a watch, or Windows on your garbage disposal. The only question seems to be if you have enough CPU and RAM. However, this distracts from the really interesting possibility- that the ideal geek wearable situation is not to have the computer stretch all the way towards the user, but to have each assimilate each other to some extent :) This is somewhat unobvious in the current marketing climate of the computer industry, but there's a lot of evidence to suggest that people can and do stretch the other way to 'jack in' to their computers more effectively.

A brief example to illustrate this: I was trying to make lists of syllables from different languages. This is maybe a weird thing to do, but it was what I was trying to do- ultimate goal was to make a naming system for my open source game project, but the important thing was this: I was presented with a problem for which there was no prebuilt solution. I found ways to translate writing of mine into other languages. I found ways (abstract) to break a text into 'trigrams'- So far so good. I ended up with some big text files in different languages, and a list of each one's 'trigrams', but I also needed/wanted to grab the most common first three letters and last three letters from the original words, as I meant to make additional lists of word starts and endings.

Enter grep. Interestingly, the grep I used was built into 'BBEdit Lite', not a Linux application- however, what I was using was not any specific application, but regexps, which I've not had lots of experience with. After giving each word its own line with a nongrep search and replace, and after some experimenting around with having the program just select the resulting patterns, I settled on ([a-z][a-z][a-z]).* replaced with \1, editing the pattern to be .*([a-z][a-z][a-z]) for the end-of-word cases. For the latter, I didn't need to experiment. Why? That gets back to the concept of rules.

The significant rules here are not strictly a list of the regexp commands- they are 'chunked' pieces of learning that can be extended and built upon. (parentheses) isolate bits of the matched pattern and save them for playback. This implies that if I had separate sets of parentheses, I could isolate separate bits of the pattern. [Brackets] match a range of characters, and the dash in the brackets means 'match from a to z'. This matches a character- so it's possible to place several of them in a row, matching a series of a-to-z characters. Lastly, I saw that .* matches everything else in the line, so if I put it outside the parentheses, it would select the whole line but would then replace it with only the parts I marked for 'yanking'. Putting this together, it becomes obvious that I could, for instance, do ([a-z])([a-z])([a-z]).* and replace each line with the argument \3\2\1 which would result in the first three letters of all lines being retained- only reversed!

Which, granted, is not the sort of thing consumers ache and pine for ;) however, discounting this too readily is a serious mistake, because what we're looking at is not a 'replace lines with the first three characters reversed' app- instead, it's a regular expression that is emergent from the rules of regexps. The only bits of regexps which entered into it were the ability to yank bits of text from a matched pattern, and to replace the yanked bits in whatever order I chose- yet, from these simple pieces, a more complicated result was reached. It required some looking up initially to be able to produce the regexp that I used for cropping all the words to three letters- but, interestingly, the idea of reversing the letters took no looking up at all. It was absolutely self-evident, and added itself to the possibilities of what could be done with such a grammar. The thought of 'And what else could you do?' was immediately answered- the underlying rules of how regexps work, including details such as 'the regexp is read from left to right', became instinctive and a novel result came out, a result that was structurally different from any of the experiments, but still obvious.

When you look at Linux as a whole, particularly if you have spent time doing little abbreviated installs on old 486es and seen the sort of programs you end up with, this one area (regexps) becomes just one of countless examples of this nature. The whole classic Unix approach of shell scripting and little programs that can be piped into each other, the sea of weird incantations, is deeply founded in this concept. There is no chance that such things can be made user friendly, because 'user' is not a concept that applies here. Approaching a computer this way is more like melding yourself with it, like the Borg metaphor we started with. Your brain becomes the amazingly powerful top level of the kernel- the whole Unix system becomes elaborate device drivers for your brain, completely dependent on your better human judgement for how to proceed. People sense this without being able to fully articulate it, and that's when you see them starting to claim that virtual teletype interfaces are far more powerful than OOP graphically-inherited widget collections.

Of course, the actual code of the virtual teletype interfaces is indeed more crude and primitive- but this misses the point entirely. A person who is willing to actually merge with the machine, go some way towards letting it focus on the things it's good at, is plainly going to gain an advantage over a person who refuses to meet the machine on its own territory. Imagine my example in the consumer sphere- how long would I have been waiting if I chose to simply bug commercial software developers for a program that read a file and put out only the first three letters of each line? Such a thing would never be done, so my project would have been stopped unless I was willing to do all that manually- but my willingness to deal with the computer on its level with regexps made it possible. Imagine similar situations around personal finances, or keeping lists of things to do, which are more typical consumer activities. The ability of a person to move and adapt and interact with life can be enhanced by not staying limited to predefined options, but at a cost: you never lose the requirement to put some effort into the process, to keep learning. There isn't a point at which you get to sit back with your elaborate information systems and passively consume, because the pressure of novelty doesn't stop.

When you add unrestricted access to programming tools such as C compilers, the possibilities for adding to your computer 'vocabulary' become just about limitless- still with that assumption that you're going to geek out, run your computer in a very active and involved manner. The benefit you get from this directly correlates to your ability to identify things for the computer to do. Some are incomprehensible to ordinary people, but in other cases you're evaluating information, making decisions, producing results with a speed and deftness that the commercial software users (by which I mean those who take a 'consumer' approach to computers) can't even begin to touch. It might be data analysis, or it might be something as simple as converting DEM height-elevation files to a normal picture format by opening them as raw data in Photoshop. It's about the approach to problems, and it tends to awe and disconcert people, who tend not to understand why they can't do likewise if only they had 'Product X', and don't see why you bother with the 'hard way' of doing things. It's like the difference between chopping down a tree with an axe, and chopping down a tree with an electric toothbrush :)

Of course, most people would find more use for an electric toothbrush. Indeed, an electric toothbrush is easier to use than an axe no matter who you are- it's less tiring, more convenient, and extremely approachable without training or lessons in how to use it properly- but its purpose is very tightly defined. In a way, that is the inevitable consequence of making it that approachable. By comparison, when you look at the classic Unix approach, you're basically looking at an axe: a super-sharp but basically crude tool for use on problems. Many uses of the tool take practice and effort to learn. You could cut down trees with a chainsaw, but an axe can do that and split wood and be used as a hammer or anvil or doorstop or bookmark or dirty-pan-scraper: many of the individual uses are awkward, but it's the ability to adapt the tool that deserves attention. Linux may end up repeatedly adapted to work in a purely passive, consumer mode, and it may be very effective in doing so, but this is likely to be a sideshow to the real potential of Linux, as a computer system more suitable to 'Borging' with than anything else out there.

The people who learn to solve problems in this way might end up the most powerful players in an information economy, the ones people turn to for advice and help and guidance. Power like that is never free- but the outsider rarely understands where it comes from. In the case of classic Unix approaches, it isn't the crude Teletype-like interfaces and programs- it's the state of mind, the need for new solutions and the willingness to do much of the work right alongside the computer that fosters those crude interfaces and odd little programs. The people who seek complete technical solutions will get them, but such a pursuit is a defining trait itself, slowing and limiting further growth and progress. New situations will arise, and the people who embrace the chaos and DIY-ness in computing will be quicker to identify the situations and adapt to them. In an era where the headlong rush of progress is thought to be almost intolerable anyhow, an advantage in this area could be vitally important.

There's one more use for an axe: you can carve furniture out of it. You have to have a good axe, and even then it's more difficult than using knives and planes and hammers, but it's still possible to do. And there's a name for doing this, of course. It's called 'hacking'.

- by Chris Johnson

Chris Johnson writes: "When you think about PalmPilots or the new crop of wearable computers or, perhaps, even computers themselves, you could sum it up with a single nonword - Borgification. By this, I refer to the way computers can extend a person's abilities, in the same way that wearing clothing can extend a person's ability to survive hostile climates, or standing on ladders can extend a person's ability to reach high-up things. This is a central theme of computer use, and the development of GUI speaks eloquently toward how far a computer's interactions can be bent to make them look like human interactions." Keep reading (below). Chris has lots more to say, and it's all good. He'll get you thinking, whether you agree with him or not.

There's a huge amount of effort being made to stretch computers in this manner. In the Linux field alone, there are lots of window managers and entire competing desktop environments. Looking at the commercial OSes, it turns out that the latest fad (starting with IBM's RealThings such as RealPhone, continued through Apple's Quicktime 4, and now taken up by Microsoft Media Player) is for simulated object interfaces- trading off access to consistent interface behavior for access to interfaces that are closely modelled on real physical objects. This includes the conscious decision to model a volume control (for instance) after a thumbwheel, despite the fact that the control is not used with your thumb and is suboptimal for GUI use compared to controls like sliders and scrollbars. The idea is that people are so accustomed to altering volume on the thumbwheel controls of radios and Walkmen that this overrides the need to optimise controls for the computer screen environment... and for better or worse, the commercial mainstream is diving in this direction.

My personal suspicion is that this may have been a 'Tar Baby'-like strategy on the part of Steve Jobs, who had to know that Microsoft Media Player would follow Quicktime down that road. That's as may be. The more interesting concern for Slashdot readers is this: should this industry trend prove a mistake, how can Linux and alternative operating systems seize an advantage?

It's interesting that the assumptions about user interface always seem to mean the computers will do all the 'stretching' toward the humans. For instance, on the one hand, J. Random Grandmother is the last person you'd expect to be wearing Borg implants, yet the direction of wearables seems always to be GUI displays so the person needn't hack with weird commands, voice recognition so the person needn't _type_, etc etc. and so on. This is an incongruous combination, designing these uber-geeky things for the NON geeks.

What would an alternative approach be like? Well, first of all, a very obvious move would be to keep the heads-up display but redefine it from a GUI screen to an Xterm. This could be cheaper to implement and would be better for the context (a tiny little screen). The OS could be Linux, certainly: but rather than asking whether it would be running KDE or Gnome, one would ask whether it's running bash or csh or tcsh or ksh. The device would store really large amounts of text information, for instance a Mac repair person such as myself might have in the gigs of disk space the entire Apple Tech Info Library and Archive, the body text of utilities such as Extensions Overload, and the total content of several mailing lists. Using such a device, I'd be working on something and would pause to type queries on my arm (presumably as grep searches or something). The HUD would return the entries I searched for, and might also occasionally produce notes I left for myself using cron to echo text to the screen or to kick off little scripts that would evaluate how I wanted things prioritized. Anyone who's dug into the classic Unix approach enough to become fascinated with the possibilities will appreciate what's being suggested here. Significantly, removing the GUI load from such a device and expecting entirely console-based interaction would simplify the design, allowing it to run very fast and efficiently on little embedded processors and not some desktop powermonger.

Naturally, when you talk about using stripped-down Linux implementations on wearables instead of using some sort of Windows, or a Linux desktop, the immediate assumption is that this is all about available computer resources, and that the future is about having enough resources that you can run KDE on a watch, or Windows on your garbage disposal. The only question seems to be if you have enough CPU and RAM. However, this distracts from the really interesting possibility- that the ideal geek wearable situation is not to have the computer stretch all the way towards the user, but to have each assimilate each other to some extent :) This is somewhat unobvious in the current marketing climate of the computer industry, but there's a lot of evidence to suggest that people can and do stretch the other way to 'jack in' to their computers more effectively.

A brief example to illustrate this: I was trying to make lists of syllables from different languages. This is maybe a weird thing to do, but it was what I was trying to do- ultimate goal was to make a naming system for my open source game project, but the important thing was this: I was presented with a problem for which there was no prebuilt solution. I found ways to translate writing of mine into other languages. I found ways (abstract) to break a text into 'trigrams'- So far so good. I ended up with some big text files in different languages, and a list of each one's 'trigrams', but I also needed/wanted to grab the most common first three letters and last three letters from the original words, as I meant to make additional lists of word starts and endings.

Enter grep. Interestingly, the grep I used was built into 'BBEdit Lite', not a Linux application- however, what I was using was not any specific application, but regexps, which I've not had lots of experience with. After giving each word its own line with a nongrep search and replace, and after some experimenting around with having the program just select the resulting patterns, I settled on ([a-z][a-z][a-z]).* replaced with \1, editing the pattern to be .*([a-z][a-z][a-z]) for the end-of-word cases. For the latter, I didn't need to experiment. Why? That gets back to the concept of rules.

The significant rules here are not strictly a list of the regexp commands- they are 'chunked' pieces of learning that can be extended and built upon. (parentheses) isolate bits of the matched pattern and save them for playback. This implies that if I had separate sets of parentheses, I could isolate separate bits of the pattern. [Brackets] match a range of characters, and the dash in the brackets means 'match from a to z'. This matches a character- so it's possible to place several of them in a row, matching a series of a-to-z characters. Lastly, I saw that .* matches everything else in the line, so if I put it outside the parentheses, it would select the whole line but would then replace it with only the parts I marked for 'yanking'. Putting this together, it becomes obvious that I could, for instance, do ([a-z])([a-z])([a-z]).* and replace each line with the argument \3\2\1 which would result in the first three letters of all lines being retained- only reversed!

Which, granted, is not the sort of thing consumers ache and pine for ;) however, discounting this too readily is a serious mistake, because what we're looking at is not a 'replace lines with the first three characters reversed' app- instead, it's a regular expression that is emergent from the rules of regexps. The only bits of regexps which entered into it were the ability to yank bits of text from a matched pattern, and to replace the yanked bits in whatever order I chose- yet, from these simple pieces, a more complicated result was reached. It required some looking up initially to be able to produce the regexp that I used for cropping all the words to three letters- but, interestingly, the idea of reversing the letters took no looking up at all. It was absolutely self-evident, and added itself to the possibilities of what could be done with such a grammar. The thought of 'And what else could you do?' was immediately answered- the underlying rules of how regexps work, including details such as 'the regexp is read from left to right', became instinctive and a novel result came out, a result that was structurally different from any of the experiments, but still obvious.

When you look at Linux as a whole, particularly if you have spent time doing little abbreviated installs on old 486es and seen the sort of programs you end up with, this one area (regexps) becomes just one of countless examples of this nature. The whole classic Unix approach of shell scripting and little programs that can be piped into each other, the sea of weird incantations, is deeply founded in this concept. There is no chance that such things can be made user friendly, because 'user' is not a concept that applies here. Approaching a computer this way is more like melding yourself with it, like the Borg metaphor we started with. Your brain becomes the amazingly powerful top level of the kernel- the whole Unix system becomes elaborate device drivers for your brain, completely dependent on your better human judgement for how to proceed. People sense this without being able to fully articulate it, and that's when you see them starting to claim that virtual teletype interfaces are far more powerful than OOP graphically-inherited widget collections.

Of course, the actual code of the virtual teletype interfaces is indeed more crude and primitive- but this misses the point entirely. A person who is willing to actually merge with the machine, go some way towards letting it focus on the things it's good at, is plainly going to gain an advantage over a person who refuses to meet the machine on its own territory. Imagine my example in the consumer sphere- how long would I have been waiting if I chose to simply bug commercial software developers for a program that read a file and put out only the first three letters of each line? Such a thing would never be done, so my project would have been stopped unless I was willing to do all that manually- but my willingness to deal with the computer on its level with regexps made it possible. Imagine similar situations around personal finances, or keeping lists of things to do, which are more typical consumer activities. The ability of a person to move and adapt and interact with life can be enhanced by not staying limited to predefined options, but at a cost: you never lose the requirement to put some effort into the process, to keep learning. There isn't a point at which you get to sit back with your elaborate information systems and passively consume, because the pressure of novelty doesn't stop.

When you add unrestricted access to programming tools such as C compilers, the possibilities for adding to your computer 'vocabulary' become just about limitless- still with that assumption that you're going to geek out, run your computer in a very active and involved manner. The benefit you get from this directly correlates to your ability to identify things for the computer to do. Some are incomprehensible to ordinary people, but in other cases you're evaluating information, making decisions, producing results with a speed and deftness that the commercial software users (by which I mean those who take a 'consumer' approach to computers) can't even begin to touch. It might be data analysis, or it might be something as simple as converting DEM height-elevation files to a normal picture format by opening them as raw data in Photoshop. It's about the approach to problems, and it tends to awe and disconcert people, who tend not to understand why they can't do likewise if only they had 'Product X', and don't see why you bother with the 'hard way' of doing things. It's like the difference between chopping down a tree with an axe, and chopping down a tree with an electric toothbrush :)

Of course, most people would find more use for an electric toothbrush. Indeed, an electric toothbrush is easier to use than an axe no matter who you are- it's less tiring, more convenient, and extremely approachable without training or lessons in how to use it properly- but its purpose is very tightly defined. In a way, that is the inevitable consequence of making it that approachable. By comparison, when you look at the classic Unix approach, you're basically looking at an axe: a super-sharp but basically crude tool for use on problems. Many uses of the tool take practice and effort to learn. You could cut down trees with a chainsaw, but an axe can do that and split wood and be used as a hammer or anvil or doorstop or bookmark or dirty-pan-scraper: many of the individual uses are awkward, but it's the ability to adapt the tool that deserves attention. Linux may end up repeatedly adapted to work in a purely passive, consumer mode, and it may be very effective in doing so, but this is likely to be a sideshow to the real potential of Linux, as a computer system more suitable to 'Borging' with than anything else out there.

The people who learn to solve problems in this way might end up the most powerful players in an information economy, the ones people turn to for advice and help and guidance. Power like that is never free- but the outsider rarely understands where it comes from. In the case of classic Unix approaches, it isn't the crude Teletype-like interfaces and programs- it's the state of mind, the need for new solutions and the willingness to do much of the work right alongside the computer that fosters those crude interfaces and odd little programs. The people who seek complete technical solutions will get them, but such a pursuit is a defining trait itself, slowing and limiting further growth and progress. New situations will arise, and the people who embrace the chaos and DIY-ness in computing will be quicker to identify the situations and adapt to them. In an era where the headlong rush of progress is thought to be almost intolerable anyhow, an advantage in this area could be vitally important.

There's one more use for an axe: you can carve furniture out of it. You have to have a good axe, and even then it's more difficult than using knives and planes and hammers, but it's still possible to do. And there's a name for doing this, of course. It's called 'hacking'.

- by Chris Johnson

C|Net recently made waves with its "Top 10 Hacks" story which seemed to say that Hack==Website Defacement. Derek Glidden found that wrong. And I'm glad he did because he's proposed that we do our own top 10 hacks. He's written a fabulous article, and challanges us to come up with a real list of hacks: The good stuff. Not the script kiddie stuff that the media likes to use to generate extreme headlines. Read this story. Its a good one.

A lot of people pointed out in Slashdot's recent coverage of an article run on C|Net called "The Top 10 Subversive Hacks of All Time" that 8 out of the 10 so-called "Hacks" listed were merely website defacements and not deserving of the "Hack" label at all. Here's your chance, as the Slashdot community, to set the record straight!

C|Net, perhaps in some kind of bizarre response to millenia fever, has lately been printing a few "Top 10 Lists" of sensational-sounding topics but rather lame content:

The Top 10 Technology Terrors - Billed as "10 products that will scare you to death" complete with a cute little Grim Fandango-esque skeleton as a mascot. Of course Back Orifice is on the list. Are you terrified yet?

Top Ten Terrors That Scare Web Builders - I'm not even sure where this article is supposed to be going. I know when I'm building a website I'm always "scared" of the Y2K problem as it relates to interfacing with my mainframe...

Ten Tricks for Digital Pranksters - Which I'd hoped might be at least slightly amusing, but turns out to be amusing in the same way that going to a K-Mart, finding the Commodore 64's on display, disabling BREAK and writing that BASIC program '10 PRINT "K-MART SUCKS "; 20 GOTO 10' was amusing when I was 12. (But then, it's not a "Top Ten" list, so I shouldn't complain.)

Given the trend, one wonders when their "Top 10 Pr0n Websites That Will Make Your Child Grow Up Into A Pervert If He or She So Much As Thinks About The URL", "Top 10 Most Violent Video Games Guaranteed To Make The Flesh Of Your Flesh And Blood Of Your Blood Turn Into A Deviant Sociopath Who Will Probably Shoot Up A McDonalds By The Time They're 25" or "Top 10 Really Annoying Top 10 Lists That We've Broken Up Into One Page Per Entry To Maximize Our Banner Ad Display" lists will show up.

Regardless of whether or not C|Net gets it in general, (I think I've made my opinion on that clear by now. :) they surely dropped the ball on their "Hacks" article. Rob and the gang at Slashdot liked my suggestion that the question be put to the Slashdot community and find out what you consider a "Great Hack."

So what is a "Hack"?

A lot of people reading that article were disappointed that C|Net decided to more or less define "Hack" as being equivalent to "website defacement", completely ignoring the traditional, more creative and useful meaning of the word. (Notice here how I deftly sidestep the whole 'hacker' vs. 'cracker' debate...) How should we determine what's a "Great Hack", much less the Top 10 of All Time, then?

Eric Raymond's Jargon File defines "Hack" in the first two meanings as:

"1. n. Originally, a quick job that produces what is needed, but not well. 2. n. An incredibly good, and perhaps very time-consuming, piece of work that produces exactly what is needed."

(Which are entirely contradictory, but hackers never let mundane things like paradoxes slow them down.) He further refines the meaning in Append ix A, "The Meaning of Hack" as:

"Hacking might be characterized as `an appropriate application of ingenuity'. Whether the result is a quick-and-dirty patchwork job or a carefully crafted work of art, you have to admire the cleverness that went into it."

If you'll notice, nothing in these definitions say anything about a "Hack" being computer-related. There have been many great Hacks that are not computer-related; it's just that people tend to associate the word "hack" with computers.

Adding to the ideas defined above, an "All-Time Great Hack" will probably also have:

• longevity - people should still be talking about it 20 or 30 years later, or even beyond.
• social and/or technological impact - it should change some aspect of life, either by directly changing every-day life or indirectly by changing how people view the world
• "eleganc e" - note however, that this does not necessarily equate simplicty. (Some people may consider the Saturn V booster a truly moby hack, as it got its job done precisely well with no doubt as to its purpose, but was anything but simple.)
• that not-easily definable quality of "I shoulda thought of that!" A Great Hack doesn't have to be "not immediately obvious" - it may just be something nobody else has done yet. For example: the WWW - there's nothing "unobvious" about defining a set of page layout macros that include text and graphics and a way to transmit and view them, but it didn't become commonplace until Tim Berners-Lee made it a big deal.

Some examples of things I would consider "Great Hacks" by these guidelines:

• Putting Apollo 11 on the moon - the NASA engineers at the time of the Apollo project are, to my mind, some of the greatest hackers in history. When you consider the state of technology at the time, what they accomplished is amazing.
• Ken Thompson's "cc hack" - No explanation necessary. A truly elegant hack that is already part of computer folklore.
• Both the "development" of AT&T UNIX into BSD UNIX and the way BSD was distributed, essentially creating the first widespread market demand for "open source software."
• Of course, no Slashdot feature article would be complete without mentioning: the development of the Linux Kernel, both for what it is and how it was/is developed.

But wait, there's more!!

In his Appendinx on "The Meaning Of Hack", ESR also says:

"An important secondary meaning of hack is `a creative practical joke'."

and MIT's Gallery of Hacks defines "hack" as:

"The word hack at MIT usually refers to a clever, benign, and "ethical" prank or practical joke, which is both challenging for the perpetrators and amusing to the MIT community (and sometimes even the rest of the world!)."

A sure point of dissent in this definition is going to be the "ethical" clause. I'll take the easy road out and leave this point to be decided by the audience - if enough people think a particular hack is a "Great Hack" regardless of ethics - then into the pot it goes.

On the other hand, the closest thing I can think of to a "Great Hack" that skirts ethical boundaries is the Robert Morris Worm. It's an event that will live in infamy in the lore of the Internet for all times for the problems it caused, but that it could accomplish what it did shows an incredible understanding of the way the systems worked and how they were interconnected at the time it happened.

It's still not entirely easy to think of "All-Time Great Hacks" that fit this definition, including the "ethical" clause:

• The canonical example is usually the MIT hack of the Harvard-Yale football game in which MIT students caused a six-foot weather baloon covered with the letters "MIT" to inflate at the 40 yard line during a pause in gameplay
• In the Slashdot article, "Uruk" pointed out that Orson Welles' broadcast of "The War Of The Worlds" in 1938 is arguably the best example of this definition of "Hack" that the world has ever known

So we have two definitions to deal with: The "Classic" Hacks, and the "MIT-Style" Hacks. It may or may not be worthwhile to separate these out into two distinct categories - I think we'll have to wait to see if there are enough unique entries in each category to require two lists.

What now?

In this feature, I would like you to list what you think are the "Greatest Hacks of All Time" and after a time to let enough people enter their suggestions and comments, I'll come back and gather up the most popular/frequent responses. Those suggestions will go up as a Slashdot poll, and the top ten from that poll will be officially listed in a subsequent feature article: "Slashdot's Top 10 Hacks of All Time" along with a bit of background on each one; rather like C|Net, except we'll put them all on one page for you.

There is only one restriction I would like to impose on suggestions: they have to be able to be documented somehow. I used to know a guy who could make his TRS-80 machines play music with software that somehow buzzed the floppy disk motor at different rates, which is a neat hack, but as I have no idea where he lives, if he still has a copy of his software, or even where to find a TRS-80 to play with anymore it's not a good candidate for this.

I've defined what it takes for a hack to be a "Great Hack", I've given some examples to help "seed the idea pool", and now it's your turn: what do you think should go on Slashdot's list of the Top 10 Hacks of All Time?

C|Net recently made waves with its "Top 10 Hacks" story which seemed to say that Hack==Website Defacement. Derek Glidden found that wrong. And I'm glad he did because he's proposed that we do our own top 10 hacks. He's written a fabulous article, and challanges us to come up with a real list of hacks: The good stuff. Not the script kiddie stuff that the media likes to use to generate extreme headlines. Read this story. Its a good one.

A lot of people pointed out in Slashdot's recent coverage of an article run on C|Net called "The Top 10 Subversive Hacks of All Time" that 8 out of the 10 so-called "Hacks" listed were merely website defacements and not deserving of the "Hack" label at all. Here's your chance, as the Slashdot community, to set the record straight!

C|Net, perhaps in some kind of bizarre response to millenia fever, has lately been printing a few "Top 10 Lists" of sensational-sounding topics but rather lame content:

The Top 10 Technology Terrors - Billed as "10 products that will scare you to death" complete with a cute little Grim Fandango-esque skeleton as a mascot. Of course Back Orifice is on the list. Are you terrified yet?

Top Ten Terrors That Scare Web Builders - I'm not even sure where this article is supposed to be going. I know when I'm building a website I'm always "scared" of the Y2K problem as it relates to interfacing with my mainframe...

Ten Tricks for Digital Pranksters - Which I'd hoped might be at least slightly amusing, but turns out to be amusing in the same way that going to a K-Mart, finding the Commodore 64's on display, disabling BREAK and writing that BASIC program '10 PRINT "K-MART SUCKS "; 20 GOTO 10' was amusing when I was 12. (But then, it's not a "Top Ten" list, so I shouldn't complain.)

Given the trend, one wonders when their "Top 10 Pr0n Websites That Will Make Your Child Grow Up Into A Pervert If He or She So Much As Thinks About The URL", "Top 10 Most Violent Video Games Guaranteed To Make The Flesh Of Your Flesh And Blood Of Your Blood Turn Into A Deviant Sociopath Who Will Probably Shoot Up A McDonalds By The Time They're 25" or "Top 10 Really Annoying Top 10 Lists That We've Broken Up Into One Page Per Entry To Maximize Our Banner Ad Display" lists will show up.

Regardless of whether or not C|Net gets it in general, (I think I've made my opinion on that clear by now. :) they surely dropped the ball on their "Hacks" article. Rob and the gang at Slashdot liked my suggestion that the question be put to the Slashdot community and find out what you consider a "Great Hack."

So what is a "Hack"?

A lot of people reading that article were disappointed that C|Net decided to more or less define "Hack" as being equivalent to "website defacement", completely ignoring the traditional, more creative and useful meaning of the word. (Notice here how I deftly sidestep the whole 'hacker' vs. 'cracker' debate...) How should we determine what's a "Great Hack", much less the Top 10 of All Time, then?

Eric Raymond's Jargon File defines "Hack" in the first two meanings as:

"1. n. Originally, a quick job that produces what is needed, but not well. 2. n. An incredibly good, and perhaps very time-consuming, piece of work that produces exactly what is needed."

(Which are entirely contradictory, but hackers never let mundane things like paradoxes slow them down.) He further refines the meaning in Append ix A, "The Meaning of Hack" as:

"Hacking might be characterized as `an appropriate application of ingenuity'. Whether the result is a quick-and-dirty patchwork job or a carefully crafted work of art, you have to admire the cleverness that went into it."

If you'll notice, nothing in these definitions say anything about a "Hack" being computer-related. There have been many great Hacks that are not computer-related; it's just that people tend to associate the word "hack" with computers.

Adding to the ideas defined above, an "All-Time Great Hack" will probably also have:

• longevity - people should still be talking about it 20 or 30 years later, or even beyond.
• social and/or technological impact - it should change some aspect of life, either by directly changing every-day life or indirectly by changing how people view the world
• "eleganc e" - note however, that this does not necessarily equate simplicty. (Some people may consider the Saturn V booster a truly moby hack, as it got its job done precisely well with no doubt as to its purpose, but was anything but simple.)
• that not-easily definable quality of "I shoulda thought of that!" A Great Hack doesn't have to be "not immediately obvious" - it may just be something nobody else has done yet. For example: the WWW - there's nothing "unobvious" about defining a set of page layout macros that include text and graphics and a way to transmit and view them, but it didn't become commonplace until Tim Berners-Lee made it a big deal.

Some examples of things I would consider "Great Hacks" by these guidelines:

• Putting Apollo 11 on the moon - the NASA engineers at the time of the Apollo project are, to my mind, some of the greatest hackers in history. When you consider the state of technology at the time, what they accomplished is amazing.
• Ken Thompson's "cc hack" - No explanation necessary. A truly elegant hack that is already part of computer folklore.
• Both the "development" of AT&T UNIX into BSD UNIX and the way BSD was distributed, essentially creating the first widespread market demand for "open source software."
• Of course, no Slashdot feature article would be complete without mentioning: the development of the Linux Kernel, both for what it is and how it was/is developed.

But wait, there's more!!

In his Appendinx on "The Meaning Of Hack", ESR also says:

"An important secondary meaning of hack is `a creative practical joke'."

and MIT's Gallery of Hacks defines "hack" as:

"The word hack at MIT usually refers to a clever, benign, and "ethical" prank or practical joke, which is both challenging for the perpetrators and amusing to the MIT community (and sometimes even the rest of the world!)."

A sure point of dissent in this definition is going to be the "ethical" clause. I'll take the easy road out and leave this point to be decided by the audience - if enough people think a particular hack is a "Great Hack" regardless of ethics - then into the pot it goes.

On the other hand, the closest thing I can think of to a "Great Hack" that skirts ethical boundaries is the Robert Morris Worm. It's an event that will live in infamy in the lore of the Internet for all times for the problems it caused, but that it could accomplish what it did shows an incredible understanding of the way the systems worked and how they were interconnected at the time it happened.

It's still not entirely easy to think of "All-Time Great Hacks" that fit this definition, including the "ethical" clause:

• The canonical example is usually the MIT hack of the Harvard-Yale football game in which MIT students caused a six-foot weather baloon covered with the letters "MIT" to inflate at the 40 yard line during a pause in gameplay
• In the Slashdot article, "Uruk" pointed out that Orson Welles' broadcast of "The War Of The Worlds" in 1938 is arguably the best example of this definition of "Hack" that the world has ever known

So we have two definitions to deal with: The "Classic" Hacks, and the "MIT-Style" Hacks. It may or may not be worthwhile to separate these out into two distinct categories - I think we'll have to wait to see if there are enough unique entries in each category to require two lists.

What now?

In this feature, I would like you to list what you think are the "Greatest Hacks of All Time" and after a time to let enough people enter their suggestions and comments, I'll come back and gather up the most popular/frequent responses. Those suggestions will go up as a Slashdot poll, and the top ten from that poll will be officially listed in a subsequent feature article: "Slashdot's Top 10 Hacks of All Time" along with a bit of background on each one; rather like C|Net, except we'll put them all on one page for you.

There is only one restriction I would like to impose on suggestions: they have to be able to be documented somehow. I used to know a guy who could make his TRS-80 machines play music with software that somehow buzzed the floppy disk motor at different rates, which is a neat hack, but as I have no idea where he lives, if he still has a copy of his software, or even where to find a TRS-80 to play with anymore it's not a good candidate for this.

I've defined what it takes for a hack to be a "Great Hack", I've given some examples to help "seed the idea pool", and now it's your turn: what do you think should go on Slashdot's list of the Top 10 Hacks of All Time?

hws writes "A DEC PDP1 emulator running the original version of Spacewar! is online here. A group at MIT created a PDP1 emulator in Java. The original Spacewar! sources were assembled with a PDP1 Assembler written in Pearl. The emulator, assembler and game sources are available at this site. For those of you too young to remember, Spacewar! is probably the first video game and was done back in 1962. It and the scene that spawned it were extensively covered in Steven Levy's book - Hackers."

TRUSTe, the steward of the most visible symbol on the internet, is making a tough decision today. Today, it reveals what it intends to do about its client Real Networks. At stake is whatever's left of its credibility. (Update: 11/08 02:55: Real got off on a technicality: "because the transmission of user data ... did not involve collection of data on the RealNetworks Web site, the privacy incident was outside of the scope of TRUSTe's current privacy seal program.")

Unquestionably TRUSTe is the leader in third-party privacy assurance. Its only alternative is BBBOnline, which can boast only 100 members to TRUSTe's 750. But it's having a hard time living up to its motto, "Building a web you can believe in": sometimes it's hard to know what to believe.

TRUSTe's original idea was to allow a website to display one of three icons, indicating whether its privacy policy was good, ok, or bad. There turned out to be problems with this - strangely enough, no site wanted to post an icon saying that their privacy sucked - and the icons looked too similar anyway. So they went with one icon, a "badge" that every member site posts.

All the badge means is that the site has a privacy policy, and that, as far as TRUSTe knows, they haven't violated it.

If you think this is a questionable basis for a consumer advocacy group, you're right. But the real question is how it plays out in practice. Let's take a look at TRUSTe's track record.

Round I: TRUSTe and GeoCities. In June 1998, the FTC announced - to everyone's surprise - that it and GeoCities had come to a settlement regarding violations of consumer privacy.

Everyone was surprised because this was the first anyone had heard of it. Where was TRUSTe?

Caught flat-footed, TRUSTe scrambled for a few days, then made its own announcement. It pointed out that GeoCities had begun the alleged privacy violations before applying to become a member (in April) and being accepted (in May). Therefore, TRUSTe claimed, the violations were technically not under the scope of their investigation.

But turn that around and put it another way - it was able to become a TRUSTe member even while under investigation by the FTC, and TRUSTe said nothing.

It gets worse. The FTC and GeoCities issued conflicting releases about what the settlement actually meant. The FTC said that GeoCities had "misrepresented the purposes for which it was collecting personal identifying information" (including children's). GeoCities denied the charges.

So who was right? We still don't know. Despite this being precisely the issue that TRUSTe was set up to resolve, TRUSTe refused to confirm or deny the FTC's allegations.

In a 1998 open letter, I asked whether TRUSTe's initial review of GeoCities had included any really tough questions such as "are you currently under investigation by the Federal Trade Commission?" No answer. In fact, mention of the GeoCities incident seems to have been removed from TRUSTe's website.

The organization that wanted to make the FTC obsolete was not off to a good start.

Round II: TRUSTe and Microsoft. March 1999. This was the "Global User ID" case. It turned out Microsoft had been embedding a user ID into every document you created with their software. Since they put that ID on file when you registered their software, they have been capable for years of tracking authorship of even supposedly-anonymous documents.

And don't think it's just a theoretical concern. Just weeks later, the Melissa macro virus was unleashed, and its author was tracked down using this same ID. Any technology that can lead the cops to your door is potentially dangerous technology.

TRUSTe announced that this "compromises consumer trust and privacy" (duh), but said that since the Global User ID does not, strictly speaking, involve the Microsoft.com website, it had no jurisdiction. Their conclusion: "TRUSTe has determined that Microsoft.com was in compliance with all TRUSTe principles."

In reality, Microsoft's privacy page (prominently labeled with the TRUSTe seal) also discusses online registration of software products, and notes that the "personal profile" from their software registration appears on the website and is editable from the website. And that page claims that registration is covered by the TRUSTe guidelines. For TRUSTe to claim it's not requires some Clintonesque redefinitions.

CNET's headline was exactly right: "TRUSTe Clears Microsoft on Technicality."

Round III: TRUSTe and Deja News. April 1999. Again TRUSTe is taken by surprise when a computer sleuth discovers that Deja News has been collecting data on email sent by its users. When a reader clicked on an email link in a discussion posting, the destination email address was recorded, along with the presumable topic of discussion, the sender's IP number, and if registered, the sender's personal data.

This is not what one expects when sending private email! And this clearly involved Deja's website, so there was no question of another technicality.

TRUSTe's analysis of this situation was only two paragraphs long; here's all that happened:

"TRUSTe specified certain clarifying language to be included in the privacy statement. Deja News, independent of TRUSTe, then decided to discontinue the practice of tracking IP addresses in conjunction with the mail-to feature."

In fact, the situation was resolved long before TRUSTe even bothered to issue that statement. TRUSTe's suggestion of "clarifying language" had been obviated long before by Deja's indepedent action. See ZDNet's story of May 4th, which hopes that TRUSTe "will likely issue some sort of statement...this week." But TRUSTe stayed silent for four weeks.

Round IV: TRUSTe and Microsoft (again). A wide-open security hole in Microsoft's Hotmail is breached, and for a few hours everyone's inboxes are public domain. (If you don't think this is a serious privacy violation, read the stunning anonymous tale of cracking into an enemy's email, published on Salon.com the next day.)

TRUSTe's response is to call in an independent accounting firm to talk with Hotmail's programmers and security people, look over the source code, and generally try to make sure such a problem won't happen again. This isn't a bad idea - it just wasn't much of anything that Microsoft wouldn't have done on its own. Locking the barn door after the horse is gone doesn't help the people whose privacy has been lost. Microsoft is out of pocket a few bucks for the audit, and gets more than its money's worth by being able to say that TRUSTe still gives them a clean bill of health.

How can all these incidents have passed by without punishment of any kind? It's because of what TRUSTe is actually guaranteeing. Not that any company will actually keep its data private - but that the company is not lying in its privacy assurance.

That's right. You know those privacy promises you never read, the ones that are different on every website and all seem ten pages long? What TRUSTe does is promise you that, if you had read them, you'd know your rights.

If it wanted, a company could have its lawyers dress up "we will spam your email every day and sell your name and address to anyone who asks for them" in legalese, and get a TRUSTe badge on their homepage. Would you know you were being screwed? Not unless you speak fluent lawyer.

Is the FTC such a bogeyman that we really need to sell our privacy so cheap?

When Ralph Nader was pressing the government to impose strict safety standards on the auto industry, Henry Ford II complained that they were "unreasonable, arbitrary and technically unfeasible." After the laws were enacted anyway, a decade later he conceded: "We wouldn't have [these] kinds of safety ... unless there had been a federal law."

Imagine if our only automotive safety regulations were that Detroit must abide by its lawyers' fine print!

The usual argument is that requiring an actual guarantee of privacy would stifle business. The purpose in forming TRUSTe was to keep the internet corporation-friendly, by keeping the government out. TRUSTe was well-intentioned, no question. It was a noble experiment.

But, according to some influential people and groups, it has failed.

Forrester Research studies topics related to the internet and made privacy its concern in its September 1999 report, "Privacy Wake-Up Call." Its conclusions should not be surprising:

"Most privacy policies are a joke." Forrester says corporate privacy policies are legalese set up mostly to protect the corporations.

"Few companies meet key privacy protection principles." About 10%.

"Third-party programs show little traction." Hundreds of TRUSTe licensees don't amount to much on the billion-page net.

And, "third-party privacy firms...like TRUSTe...become more of a privacy advocate for industry rather than for consumers."

(Slashdot has more on this study.)

Even the Electronic Frontier Foundation, after years of straddling the fence on the issue, has finally recognized that self-policing just doesn't work. The EFF is not just the best-recognized internet rights advocacy group; it created TRUSTe.

Yet, in an October letter to the FTC, the EFF laid down its cards:

"Creation of TRUSTe and its seal program was one such early innovation of EFF. TRUSTe was successful in several areas. ... We now must move out of this awareness-raising mode and into an action mode where real protection can be achieved. Legislation is needed in order to achieve that goal. ... we think it is time to move away from a strict self-regulation approach to protecting privacy online."

The latest nail in the coffin came on November 1, when EFF Program Director Stanton McCandlish laid out the facts on the fight-censorship mailing list:

"Our stance has basically been that industry self-reg would be worth trying, but might or might not be enough. We did the 'proof of concept' ourselves, by launching and spinning off TRUSTe. But TRUSTe was intended to be and is a separate, independent entity, and was created as an experiment. The experiment is in many ways a failure..."

(McCandlish's personal opinion is even more scathing. Follow the link to read it.)

You wouldn't know this if you read the TRUSTe website. Their homepage proudly tells you about the six-month-old Georgetown study, but makes no mention of the Forrester Research report. It tells you that the FTC supports self-regulation (based on Georgetown), but won't tell you that its own parent, the EFF, thinks the ride is over.

If TRUSTe is a consumer rights and advocacy group, why are they only feeding us the feel-good stories? Aren't consumer groups supposed to be the ones that dig up dirt and tell us about potential problems?

The money trail leads to the answer. TRUSTe isn't a consumer advocacy group. TRUSTe doesn't get its money from consumers. Its money comes from corporate sponsors, and nobody wants to bite the hand that feeds them. Besides, those corporations want the message to be one of constant calm. Concerned customers are not good for sales.

Remember the GeoCities FTC findings that TRUSTe wouldn't comment on? GeoCities had just done an IPO and millions of dollars were at stake. GeoCities' sister corporation Engage Technologies (they are both subsidiaries of CMG Industries) was a Contributing Corporate Sponsor of TRUSTe. That conflict of interest was never mentioned.

(GeoCities has since been purchased by Yahoo.)

Remember the Microsoft incidents that TRUSTe waffled on? Microsoft is not just a member, but also a Premier Corporate Sponsor of TRUSTe. That conflict of interest totals $100,000 per year.

Round V. By now you've guessed that this is leading up to the current furor over Real Networks. Real is a TRUSTe member. Do I need to mention that it's also a Contributing Corporate Sponsor?

TRUSTe said that it would render judgement on Real Networks by the end of last week. Now it's saying today.

And it's making noises like they're actually going to do something this time:

"We could take the company to court for breach of contract, since they do have an agreement with us. Or, we can forward the case to the FTC... I guarantee that the damage to the reputation of the first company that we do that to will be big."

For its own sake, it had better. We're talking about a company whose product is a Trojan Horse that secretly scans your hard drive for valuable personal data. If TRUSTe doesn't unload with both barrels, its credibility will be negative zero.

Anything TRUSTe does may have a negligable effect in any case. Corporations only understand the bottom line, and RealNetworks stock shot up 25% in the five days following the privacy debacle. With the company's market cap $1.9 billion higher than it was a week ago, how much are they really going to care about some nonprofit gnat?

We can hope. Real.com today unveiled its new website, a music portal, which investors will be watching carefully. Also happening today is a conference held by the FTC and Commerce Department for data-profilers to announce what they're going to do to protect privacy. So if TRUSTe were trying to maximize the effect of their announcement, today would be the day they'd pick. It could be that the gnat will have a nasty bite that surprises everyone.

Still - you can dress an organization up in not-for-profit clothes, but that doesn't change that it's beholden to its revenue stream. TRUSTe says we can trust them to be objective, on the theory that their revenue stream will dry up if they don't do right by consumers. So far, there doesn't seem to be much truth to that. They haven't been doing us right, but their number of contributors and members just keeps growing.

I enjoy reading about the future envisioned by people like Gibson and Stephenson, where the net is totally unregulated and a "right to privacy" is a dim memory, or a joke. That doesn't mean I want to live in that future. Europe has consumer protection laws that are, from an American perspective, astonishingly strong. Maybe we should take a look at other countries' solutions, to see if there's something we could learn.

So far, all we've learned is what fails.

- Jamie McCarthy

blount writes "An interview with LSDVD developers Paul Volcko and Gad Berger is on moviebone. Paul and Gad discuss DVD crypto, patent and trade secret issues, and their plans for an application supporting hardware and software DVD playback."

Apuleius writes "Here's a BBC story about a planet that may be orbiting the sun at 30,000 AU (Pluto's at 30 AU)...." This new wanderer, which may not have been created during the original formation of our system, according to the story, orbits the Sun backwards compared to the other planets. There's one in every crowd, isn't there?

tomreagan writes "The New York Times is reporting that Microsoft has teamed up with MIT to launch a joint research initiative on educational technology. " It's the largest alliance to date of institution and company, to the tune of 25$US million with a strong focus on "instructional technologies." The feeling at MIT is "mixed" regarding the new project, called I-Campus.

Rudolf writes "Newsweek has an article this week, available here, about NASA calculating that space probes, such as Pioneer 10, 11, and Ulysses, are slowing down more than they should. A team of astronomers and physicists couldn't figure it out, so they published their findings in Physical Review Letters to generate discussion. Several possible causes of the slowing have been discussed, but nothing that completely solves the puzzle. Anyone care to rethink gravity and time?" Update: 09/29 09:00 by H :Thanks to Mark for his link to the original citation.

Eric_Scheirer writes "You can read it here. Can someone explain to me what it means?"

mirthy wrote in with this CNN story about a school in NYC that dumped individual PCs in favor of a Sun-run server/client network, and how they're oh-so-happy with their new system. And, Mirthy notes in passing, "CNN seems to be getting the 'tech beat' much better than other organizations (with articles on sendmail and now this)!" Yeah, they've been getting better lately. Kudos!

This has been submitted a fair amount, although it came out on the 18th. Microsoft has admitted to paying for ads from a California insitute. The institue, The Independent Institute got 240 academic experts to sign a document saying that the anti-trust case was bad for the consumer. Basically, it appears that the Institute ran the ads, while Microsoft reimbursed them for the cost of placing the ads, and the travel involved. Mmm...dirty tricks.

Apuleius writes "Adam Penenberg's current column in Forbes uses the Mitnick case to show the risks of letting technology case law be written by clueless judges. Raises some good points aboute CESA. "

The point I like most in the article concerns encryption. The Fifth Amendment prohibits the State from forcing an individual to testify against himself; this should include the right to keep your encryption keys secret (assuming that you've memorized them - if you've written them down somewhere and the prosecution finds them, you're out of luck). In Mitnick's case the prosecution justified withholding evidence from the defense on the grounds that they, the prosecution, couldn't understand what it said, and the Judge bought that story. (Of course, the Judge was a clueless fool who bought ALL of the prosecution's stories, including that Mitnick could hack his way out of prison if provided with a modemless computer, but we won't go into that here.)

The Question of Encryption, as it were, remains to be decided. Will defendants be forced to divulge their encryption keys? Will the FBI be granted the ability to break into your house and install trojan programs on your computer (as the CESA bill would allow them), so the Feds will already have your keys in hand? Or is there some other solution?

aegrumet writes "The History Channel is doing a show tonight at 9pm EDT on WW2 crypto called "The Ultra Enigma". The blurb on their program listing reads "British codebreaking and capture of the German military's super cipher machine, the Enigma, enabled the Allies to pull off one of the greatest campaigns of deception in military history, and changed the course of World War II." This will be especially interesting to those who, like me, are reading or have recently finished Neal Stephenson's book Cryptonomicon. "

One of the pre-eminent reviewers on Slashdot, SEGV, has returned with a review of something a bit more esoteric than our normal book review fare. Melanie Mitchell's latest work, An Introduction to Genetic Algorithms, is the subject of today's review, and is well worth the reading for those interested in said subject. Click below to find out more. An Introduction to Genetic Algorithms author Melanie Mitchell pages 209 publisher rating 8/10 reviewer SEGV ISBN summary An excellent, brief introduction to a fascinating field. ISBN 0-262-63185-7 (PB), 0-262-13316-4 (HB)

Background

It was in the early nineties when I became interested in these sorts of things. I was enrolled in a commerce program, but somehow got onto reading such popular science books as Levy's Artificial Life: A Report from the Frontier Where Computers Meet Biology and Waldrop's Complexity: The Emerging Science at the Edge of Order and Chaos.

Those books made me make my next degree a computer science degree.

Emergent Computation

I was fascinated by the idea of computation emerging from the bottom up: from simple rules acting together in simple ways. This is in marked contrast to the traditional artificial intelligence view that complex behaviour typically only arises from the top down: from the complex interactions of complex rules.

I could appreciate the uses of traditional AI techniques, but emergent computation seemed somehow right to me.

Genetic Algorithms

Notwithstanding my simplistic explanation, there's an obvious example right in front of us. Evolution is a relatively simple process (everyone's heard of Darwin, right?) that has produced very complex output (e.g. us). What if we could harness the power of this evolutionary computation?

John Holland had the idea of mimicking this process of evolution within the computer. He encoded potential solutions as strings of zeroes and ones (the language of the computer), much as human genotypes consist of DNA strands. He developed these strings into actual solutions and measured their success against a particular problem, much as we might measure our success in life. Then he bred another generation, selecting the best individuals to reproduce ("survival of the fittest"), and applying crossover ("sex") and mutation on the strings for good measure.

That's another simplistic explanation, but as time went on these strings got better and better at solving the problem. And it didn't matter which problem. The same process could be used on almost any problem. He called this process a genetic algorithm ("GA").

An Introduction

This book is a good introduction to that world. The first three chapters present an overview of the field, and illustrate how GAs can be applied both in practical problem solving and in more theoretical research environments.

The author explains some of the history and background of GAs, the biological terminology, and its equivalent GA terminology. She provides examples and uses figures effectively.

The entire book has an "overview" feel to it. It isn't very long, and aims for breadth rather than depth. Mitchell writes with clarity, and is great at explaining the subject matter. It's not a difficult book to read.

Theory and Practice

The next two chapters cover the theory and practice of genetic algorithms. Chapter 4 is the most difficult, as it covers Holland's Schema Theorem and other mathematical and statistical observations. Fortunately, you don't lose much if you gloss over the equations, and they're there if you're into that sort of thing.

Chapter 5 is the fun stuff. Mitchell doesn't provide code, but that's okay because the explanation is lucid and sufficiently detailed to implement in code. She discusses ways of encoding the problem, implementing selection methods and the various genetic operators, and setting the parameters of the GA.

To test this theory and practice, each chapter concludes with thought exercises and computer exercises.

Applicability

Dating from 1996, the book benefits from being relatively up-to-date. It borrows from papers and studies up until then, which you'll recognize if you've browsed through other literature (such as the Santa Fe Institute's Artificial Life Proceedings).

Mitchell does reserve a critical view. She's careful to point out where further study is required, and that's important as this remains a maturing area of computer science. She also points out promising avenues for future study.

Summary

I found this book to be an excellent introduction to the field, even though I'd read articles and papers on GAs beforehand. I'd recommend it to anyone interested in genetic algorithms and ready to go beyond the popular science descriptions, but not yet ready for the hardcore books and not willing to waste time on the poorer quality "GAs made E-Z" books.

Basically, this is an excellent quality "GAs in a Nutshell" book. When you've finished it, you might be interested in Goldberg's Genetic Algorithms in Search, Optimization, and Machine Learning.

The book's official site contains a more detailed table of contents, while Mitchell's book page contains solutions to selected thought exercises, an expanded index, and errata.

You can purchase this book at Amazon.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Preface
Acknowledgements
1. Genetic Algorithms: An Overview
2. Genetic Algorithms in Problem Solving
3. Genetic Algorithms in Scientific Models
4. Theoretical Foundations of Genetic Algorithms
5. Implementing a Genetic Algorithm
6. Conclusions and Future Directions
Appendix A: Selected General References
Appendix B: Other Resources
Bibliography
Index

An anonymous reader noted an amusing story where we learn that Jar Jar will make space fun for children with attention spans destoryed by MTV, and senses of humor rendered disfunctional by years of Sitcoms. It might be better if it was hosted by Darth Darth Binks (thanks SissyLaLa) Point_Blank Sent us a really interesting site that has a history of GUIs. Its just interesting to watch the evolution of those clicky interfaces that we've been using for so long. John Hebert noted that there are New Dune Novels coming out. Tim Macinta sent us a super hilarious Microsoft Advocacy HOWTO. Worth the read. $Bob was the first to tell us that the new obfuscated Perl challange is up (no I'm not entering Slash ;) Bowie J. Poag has concocted an epic poem known asTuxowolf: ..A retelling of the classic Beowulf legend in more familliar prose. Gorak sent us a great 3D image gallery at Mastering 3D Graphics that is laden with bit streams that fulfil Rob's Art Axiom (Art is better when it is a desktop image) And finally, the most disturbing bit was sent by an anonymous reader. Ever want to augment your cats the hi tech way. Check it out. Update: 07/29 12:05 by CT : Shaheen reminded me that I'm going to be on The Wednesday Night Wireside net radio thingee tonight at 9:30 EDT.

Rhys Dyfrgi writes "There is an article in this month's Scientific American about the Raw microchip. Based around field programmable gates arrays, they claim it will reach speeds between 10 and 15 gigahertz by the year 2010. Because it's a FPGA, it can be instantly reconfigured to perform any task. It is one of the central items for the Oxygen Project. "

Rhys Dyfrgi writes "There is an article in this month's Scientific American about the Raw microchip. Based around field programmable gates arrays, they claim it will reach speeds between 10 and 15 gigahertz by the year 2010. Because it's a FPGA, it can be instantly reconfigured to perform any task. It is one of the central items for the Oxygen Project. "

trims wrote to us with the an update on the AOL/Sun/Netscape triumvirate. Quite a lot of people have written that the the products are taking the name iPlanet, but it also appears that the name Netscape itself is being dropped from all but Navigator and Communicator. The article itself talks a bit about open source movement, and how the decision to drop the Netscape name was partly because Netscape had burned so many developers.

Milkman Ken writes "It seems that after several months of operating, ICANN is now a million bucks in the hole. Bummer. " Apparently the transition from the NSI monopoly over .com, .edu, and .net domain registrations to a competitive registration environment has been handled so poorly that the whole system may collapse, at least temporarily, without government intervention. And I thought the purpose of ICANN was to get the government out of the domain name registration business. Oy!

garibald gave us the link to an article in the electronic Telegraph about researchers at MIT who have built an interactive AI robot called "Kismet" that is as cute as any George Lucas character, and is supposed to function on the emotional level of a human two-year-old. The cuteness is not gratuitous. As the article makes clear, there is a sound, scientific reason for it. (For pictures, and more technical depth than the Telegraph story, you may want to go directly to Kismet's Web Page.)

Quite a number of people have written in with the news that AOLServer has been open-sourced under a GPLish looking license. You can grab the source or the documentation.

wanderingstar writes "The BBC has an article about a prototype of little Turing machines that live in your body and heal you. It's being presented at conference going on at MIT right now about "DNA Based Computers". There was also a presentation yesterday about embedding information into DNA. " Mmm...nano-bio-tech.. All of hemos' favorite things.

Slimbob wrote in with the word about UCITA, a wonderful little law that, if passed allows for remote shutdown of software if you violate the license, make shrink wrap license more enforceable, and outlaw reverse engineering, amongst other gems. Get more details here. Thanks to C.Scott Ananian for sending us a UCITA page, with the TeX version of the letter to be sent and more information.

jmtpi writes "Hackers at MIT turned the top of the Great Dome in the center of campus into R2D2 yesterday. See story in Yahoo News. " Anyone have more pics? If so, label accordingly and make a submission - I'll be sure to link them. Update: 05/18 07:06 by J : An article at Wired.Update: 05/18 07:42 by J : Shot 1, Shot 2, and Shot 3. Thanks to Aidan Low. More pics from tcs.

jmtpi writes "Hackers at MIT turned the top of the Great Dome in the center of campus into R2D2 yesterday. See story in Yahoo News. " Anyone have more pics? If so, label accordingly and make a submission - I'll be sure to link them. Update: 05/18 07:06 by J : An article at Wired.Update: 05/18 07:42 by J : Shot 1, Shot 2, and Shot 3. Thanks to Aidan Low. More pics from tcs.

jmtpi writes "Hackers at MIT turned the top of the Great Dome in the center of campus into R2D2 yesterday. See story in Yahoo News. " Anyone have more pics? If so, label accordingly and make a submission - I'll be sure to link them. Update: 05/18 07:06 by J : An article at Wired.Update: 05/18 07:42 by J : Shot 1, Shot 2, and Shot 3. Thanks to Aidan Low. More pics from tcs.

jmtpi writes "Hackers at MIT turned the top of the Great Dome in the center of campus into R2D2 yesterday. See story in Yahoo News. " Anyone have more pics? If so, label accordingly and make a submission - I'll be sure to link them. Update: 05/18 07:06 by J : An article at Wired.Update: 05/18 07:42 by J : Shot 1, Shot 2, and Shot 3. Thanks to Aidan Low. More pics from tcs.

jmtpi writes "Hackers at MIT turned the top of the Great Dome in the center of campus into R2D2 yesterday. See story in Yahoo News. " Anyone have more pics? If so, label accordingly and make a submission - I'll be sure to link them. Update: 05/18 07:06 by J : An article at Wired.Update: 05/18 07:42 by J : Shot 1, Shot 2, and Shot 3. Thanks to Aidan Low. More pics from tcs.

jmtpi writes "Hackers at MIT turned the top of the Great Dome in the center of campus into R2D2 yesterday. See story in Yahoo News. " Anyone have more pics? If so, label accordingly and make a submission - I'll be sure to link them. Update: 05/18 07:06 by J : An article at Wired.Update: 05/18 07:42 by J : Shot 1, Shot 2, and Shot 3. Thanks to Aidan Low. More pics from tcs.

Somnus writes "This essay is as well-composed an argument I have seen opposing today's conception of copyrights and patents. " Its long, but it looks good.

Eric_Scheirer wrote in to send us a decent summary of the situation regarding MP3 and patents. Its a fairly good summary of a side of the MP3 that we don't think as much about.

Otter writes " The EvangeList mailing list, the rallying point of the MacOS community during Apple's darkest years, has come to an end. Guy Kawasaki writes, "In the past two years Apple has experienced a stunning turnaround. This is due to many things including the steadfast loyalty of Apple's customers--and EvangeListas are the most steadfast of the steadfast. The original purpose of EvangeList was to counteract the negative news about Apple and Macintosh, and I believe that EvangeList has served its purpose--fantastically, as a matter of fact. So after discussing what we should do with EvangeList with the folks at Apple, we've decided to retire the list." As Apple has come off the critical list, EvangeList has pretty much petered out. Looks like Team Slashdot will be moving up in the distributed.net rankings. " Man, what's a guy to do? (Sorry, couldn't resist.)

Scott Manley writes "Astronomers have found a mile wide asteroid which has a non-zero possibility of hitting the earth i n the next century. Asteroid 1999 AN10 was found on 13th January '99 by the LINEAR system and scientists working in Italy have predicted a close approach in August 2027 and a potential collision in August 2039. This has been kept quiet after the panic last year over 1997 XF11 whic had a similar 'remote' possibility, if 1999 AN10 were to hit it would be a real civilisation killer. " I can't believe scientists are bothing with this stuff when we all know Y2k will kill us all in less than a year anyway.