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The normal course of action is to blame Java, since it has led to a simplistic approach to CS assignments.

You should blame Java. And you should blame C++, Python, and any other similar medium-high level language, if that's the intro language and your sole teaching language.

Here at MIT we have 4 intro courses. The first, the famous Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs, is taught entirely in Scheme, a purer and more pedagogical dialect of Lisp. You learn how to do all the high-level algorithms (e.g., sorting) in a purely mathematical/logical fashion, since Scheme has automatic object creation / memory handling, no code-data distinction, etc. At the end of the class you work with a Scheme interpreter in Scheme (the metacircular evaluator), which, modulo lexing, teaches you how parsing and compiling programs works.

The next two are EE courses. The fourth starts EE and quickly moves to CS. You use a SPICE-like simulator to build gates directly from transistors. (You've done so in real life in previous classes.) Then you use the gate simulator to build up more interesting circuits, culminating in an entire, usable CPU. From gates. Which you built from transistors. The end result is, not only are you intimately famliar with assembly, you know exactly why assembly works the way it does and what sort of electrical signals are occurring inside your processor.

Once you know the highest of high-level languages and the math behind it, and the lowest of low-level languages and the electronics behind it, you're free to go ahead and use Java or whichever other language you like. (Indeed, the most time-consuming CS class is a regular OO Java software design project.) You're not going to get confused by either theory or implementation at this point.

So yes, blame Java, if you're trying to teach memory allocation or algorithm design with it.

The normal course of action is to blame Java, since it has led to a simplistic approach to CS assignments.

You should blame Java. And you should blame C++, Python, and any other similar medium-high level language, if that's the intro language and your sole teaching language.

Here at MIT we have 4 intro courses. The first, the famous Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs, is taught entirely in Scheme, a purer and more pedagogical dialect of Lisp. You learn how to do all the high-level algorithms (e.g., sorting) in a purely mathematical/logical fashion, since Scheme has automatic object creation / memory handling, no code-data distinction, etc. At the end of the class you work with a Scheme interpreter in Scheme (the metacircular evaluator), which, modulo lexing, teaches you how parsing and compiling programs works.

The next two are EE courses. The fourth starts EE and quickly moves to CS. You use a SPICE-like simulator to build gates directly from transistors. (You've done so in real life in previous classes.) Then you use the gate simulator to build up more interesting circuits, culminating in an entire, usable CPU. From gates. Which you built from transistors. The end result is, not only are you intimately famliar with assembly, you know exactly why assembly works the way it does and what sort of electrical signals are occurring inside your processor.

Once you know the highest of high-level languages and the math behind it, and the lowest of low-level languages and the electronics behind it, you're free to go ahead and use Java or whichever other language you like. (Indeed, the most time-consuming CS class is a regular OO Java software design project.) You're not going to get confused by either theory or implementation at this point.

So yes, blame Java, if you're trying to teach memory allocation or algorithm design with it.

1. Zork understood english sentences. All other text-based games used 2-word commands, like "take beer" and then "drink beer". Zork would understand things like "pick up the beer and drink it".
2. Zork used an interpreter (Z-code), so the game content was separate from the code. This allowed them to port to far more platforms than their competitors (and back then, there were a lot more platforms!)
3. Zork was marketed more like a book. When new games came out, the old games remained on the shelves because they still had value. This was a revolution in marketing game software.

Also, read this. It's a fascinating story about the company behind zork.

"Habibullo Abdussamatov, head of the St. Petersburg's Pulkovo Astronomical Observatory in Russia, says the Mars data is evidence that the current global warming on Earth is being caused by changes in the sun."

"the average surface temperature of the nitrogen ice on Pluto has increased slightly less than 2 degrees Celsius over the past 14 years."

"The latest images could provide evidence that Jupiter is in the midst of a global change that can modify temperatures by as much as 10 degrees Fahrenheit on different parts of the globe."

"At least since 1989, Triton has been undergoing a period of global warming. Percentage-wise, it's a very large increase," said Elliot, professor of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences and director of the Wallace Astrophysical Observatory. The 5 percent increase on the absolute temperature scale from about minus-392 degrees Fahrenheit to about minus-389 degrees Fahrenheit would be like the Earth experiencing a jump of about 22 degrees Fahrenheit."

"Habibullo Abdussamatov, head of the St. Petersburg's Pulkovo Astronomical Observatory in Russia, says the Mars data is evidence that the current global warming on Earth is being caused by changes in the sun."

"the average surface temperature of the nitrogen ice on Pluto has increased slightly less than 2 degrees Celsius over the past 14 years."

"The latest images could provide evidence that Jupiter is in the midst of a global change that can modify temperatures by as much as 10 degrees Fahrenheit on different parts of the globe."

"At least since 1989, Triton has been undergoing a period of global warming. Percentage-wise, it's a very large increase," said Elliot, professor of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences and director of the Wallace Astrophysical Observatory. The 5 percent increase on the absolute temperature scale from about minus-392 degrees Fahrenheit to about minus-389 degrees Fahrenheit would be like the Earth experiencing a jump of about 22 degrees Fahrenheit."

You bet me to the punch :) Mars is not just the only other planet warming,,, But just to give our claim some credence, here are some reputable links.. MARS http://www.space.com/scienceastronomy/mars_ice-age _031208.html http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2007/02/07 0228-mars-warming.html PLUTO http://www.space.com/scienceastronomy/pluto_warmin g_021009.html JUPITER http://www.space.com/scienceastronomy/060504_red_j r.html TRITON http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/1998/triton.html We now live in what i call the DisInformation Age, and not the Information Age. No one can doubt global warming is happening, but we sure can doubt the cause as being man made.

Athena is free. And books exist on using LDAP+Kerberos to administer unix systems. Also, security is a lot more of a problem then administration considering what the EU requires of computers with personal data on them.

Cilk has been around for years, indeed it won the ICFP 1998 programming contest.

Cilk has been around for years, indeed it won the ICFP 1998 programming contest.

According to the traditional definition of GNU software (stuff that can be found in ftp://prep.ai.mit.edu/pub/gnu/), you can easily find a few examples, with the most widely used probably being less.

Actually Anonymous Scientist is right: almost every single object recognition system these days uses learning, and several are inspired by biology. For example, look at http://www.cs.nyu.edu/~yann/research/norb/index.ht ml, or
http://www.cs.ubc.ca/~lowe/papers/06mutch.pdf, or http://web.mit.edu/serre/www/Research.htm.

we make it harder for the terrorists to get passports (ha, yeah right) but make it really easy for them to dup them!

Uh, don't look now, but all of the 9/11 hijackers *weren't* terrorists until the morning of 9/11.

This won't change, either. If you're trying to deal a terrorist attack against a target, you're going to use people who have demonstrated their ability to get past security, not known terrorists.

If there is a life on earth ending event occurring from some asteroid they COULD find, does it matter at all? There is nothing we can do about it anyway.

To put this in practical terms, most of MIT's courseware is written using, say, PowerPoint and a word processor. MIT does not make the "source" (PowerPoint and wordprocessor) files available for download. Instead, MIT makes the courseware available in PDF format, which means that you can use the courseware material "as is" but cannot modify it. Also, the license forbids you from making money from the courseware. The inability to modify the "source" and the inability to commercially exploit the courseware mean that it is not open source.

I am not saying that what MIT is doing is bad; far from it. I just want to point out that, despite the impression given by the title of MIT's program, it is not open source.

We're starting to get an understanding of this. There are some well known mechanisms in the brain which confer a survival advantage but are not rational. One is the tendency to see structure in random data. Related to this is a tendency to perceive cause and effect relationships that aren't justified by the data.

Some of this has a survival advantage. It's useful to trigger the flight or fight reflexes before the situation is clearly dangerous.

Someday we'll get to the bottom of the human tendency to band together under insane males, and then we'll make real progress.

The original article mentions Mars as having global warming, but scientists are also reporting that Jupiter http://www.space.com/scienceastronomy/060504_red_j r.html, Triton http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/1998/triton-0715.htm l and Pluto http://www.space.com/scienceastronomy/pluto_warmin g_021009.html may also be warming up. Coincidence again?

I see the recent IPCC report mentioned often, but I wonder how many folks that refer to it have only actually heard about it through the news or even actually read the summary. I wonder because at least 7-8 of the scientists that wrote the detailed reports have complained that the IPCC official summaries and press releases show the opposite conclusion from the detailed reports. In other words, at least some (if not much) of the actual science behind the IPCC report apparently was unable to find any definite correlation between humankind's effects and climate. That doesn't mean that anyone thinks current pollution levels should continue, or even that the Earth isn't getting warmer right now. One interesting series of articles about those scientists is at http://www.canada.com/nationalpost/story.html?id=2 2003a0d-37cc-4399-8bcc-39cd20bed2f6&k=0

Personally, I'm suspicious of the global warming industry because of some of the funding issues I've read about (but don't have references handy, sorry). For one, the funding rate went up by a factor of about 100 after global warming was announced around the time of Pres. Regan. Also, it seems that anyone who attempts to publish any research contrary to popular views has their funding cut (and some have lost their jobs completely). To me, that sounds like an organization that wants to stay alive at any cost, rather than one interested in real science. Especially since the funding seems to be tied to producing proof that, rather than determining if, Man is responsible for global warming.

+1 on the MIT flea market. Here's a link to some information on the flea market. I haven't been since I lived in Boston years ago, but I was able to find all sorts of old, cool stuff for cheap (most of it was stuff that I wasn't looking for -- like 40w lasers, etc).

>
> Since when is XHTML2 going to be backwards compatible?
>

Yeah, but you forgot about HTML 4.5 ^_^;

http://dig.csail.mit.edu/breadcrumbs/node/166

I don't even have the energy to quote you some "morceaux choisis"...

There is all this stuff about how using quotes for attributes, using "xml:lang" or closed empty elements being such a huge forward step than most people are so confused they are mixing HTML 4.01 and XHTML 1.0 without a care... and I'm not even talking about XML in general... God...

So, chaired by some Microsoft guy (some guy who "likes standards", it seems), they created some workgroup to create something like HTML 4.5, as a transition...

Enjoy. ... doh, I just saw they published my comment on http://www.w3.org/QA/2006/10/reinventing_html_disc uss.html#c016916 ^_^; At least, they are relatively transparent (which does not change much, though). Really, this is what they are doing, knowingly: `Do you feel the web developer/master job is still too easy? I mean, "let's make it a bit harder, so we won't lose our job because everyone would otherwise be able to do it"... is this it?`.

This is what Web 2.0 is all about... but they are adding yet a bit more of mud, with this HTML 4.5, which they will never ever use themselves...

> > "He installed backdoors at 3 companies"
> Objection! Assumes facts not in evidence, your honor!
Ok sorry, just Intel.
Sorry for implying you're an asshat, but that linked document made you sound like one. Guess i should read more about it from your perspective before passing judgement.
Glad your legal battle is finally over.

tji wrote:

The slashdot crowd has a short memory.. This is not a simple issue of "embarassing the management", as the summary states. In fact, in all the original writeups, I don't remember ever hearing executive passwords being an issue.

I remember reading this in a column in a free weekly computer rag, shortly after it happened. The author of the column wasn't willing to mention "Intel" by name... but he was willing to mention that a vice-president of the company was using the password "vicepresident".

In point of fact, I have a long memory. It is not always very good, however, but in this case I think I did okay (though the password in the story is "pre$isdent"...):

• System Administration as a Criminal Activity or, the Strange Case of Randal Schwartz
• Vulnerability scanning can be hazardous to your career
• The Case of Randal Schwartz

What is more, some first-class journals and conference proceedings in CS are completely free and persistently available on-line. Some of these have been this way for more than a decade now!

Which is exactly why these free and open but reviewed and edited online sources are much better than arXiv.

Yep, that is right, nobody pays the editorial boards, just as nobody pays the reviewers. We do it because we are saints. Also, you are right, slashdot is one big groupthink, which is why nobody ever disagrees with anybody here.

Of course, back in realityland, reviewers do get paid. They don't get paid by publishers, they get paid by their universities. No, not per review or anything. However, at a typical research university, each prof is expected to spend something like 50% of his or her time doing research, 50% of his or her time teaching, and 10% of his or her time doing service. (Does this add up to more than 100%? Well, there is a reason we work more than 40 hours per week.) Guess what? Reviewing papers can be counted as service. So can editing (or helping to edit) a journal.

So, the people doing the work are covered. The websites? These are pretty small and low traffic and the costs can be easily covered by Universities for the prestige of it. The only cost that isn't covered at this point is for the printed copies to go into University archives and these can be farmed out to publishing companies that will sell them to libraries for a couple hundred dollars per year. If people become convinced they don't need these, that cost will vanish.

The only reason more journals and conferences haven't gone this route is momentum. To start up a new journal or conference, or to switch an existing one to open, online access takes time and effort. Did I mention we already work long hours? You don't need massive government warehouses of information. You just need to pay a few faculty a couple of semesters per journal you want created/switched over and we'll take it from there. We want our research to be available to everyone.

Dean

The slashdot crowd has a short memory.. This is not a simple issue of "embarassing the management", as the summary states. In fact, in all the original writeups, I don't remember ever hearing executive passwords being an issue. The issues were egregious violations of corporate security policy, and basic logic:

- His position at Intel was not involved in security, intrusion detection, or other areas that might actually call for "white hat hacking" as part of the job function. He was a contractor, not an Intel employee, which I'm sure made Intel even more concerned about his security violations.

- He had installed backdoors on Intel machines, which allowed him to access the Intel network from outside the company.

- He took passwd files and ran cracking tools against them to break other users passwords.

- Not only was he cracking password files from Intel organizations, he was using Intel systems to crack password files from other companies, including O'Reilly and Associates.

See this writeup for information from the person involved in shutting him down.

Whether this was "white hat" hacking could be debated. In any case, it was fucking stupid. Bypassing network security for an inbound back door?!? Cracking password files from other companies on Intel computers?!? These are just stupid moves, which anyone should expect to get fired for doing.

This really isn't such an interesting story at all. There is, in fact, a type of CMOS logic called Domino Logic. So nothing really suprising then.

Heh. I wrote an article years ago making the case for that sort of "UFO."

Sagan's book blames widespread belief in the alien kind of UFO on bad science education and a set of popular media that make no effort to distinguish between magical Atlantean healing crystals and legitimate science. Surprisingly, I found the Roswell UFO Museum fairly rational, willing to show the interesting stories behind purported alien encounters. (In one incident the "alien wreckage" happened to resemble the work of the discoverer's friend, who practiced an obscure Japanese metalworking technique. The museum freely explained this.) Now that Sagan is dead, we need more people willing and able to articulate real science to the public.

Actually, SCO [slashdot.org] (back when it was called Caldera) invented Open Source back in 1996 [google.com]. Yes, that's before the OSI thing, though after the foundation of the FSF.

The Tech Model Railroad Club of MIT had open source software as early as the 1960s and early 1970s beating out SCO by a long shot. The first computer game, Spacewar, came out in 1962 as a result of many programmers' contributions in an open manner. They used to compeat to see who could come up with a nifty hack, something that was considered impossible, never thought of, or was able to shave a few lines out of a program. Those programmer were amoung the first computer hackers and followed the Hacker ethic.

The MIT Leg Lab has been doing this since the early 80s.

The MIT Leg Lab has been doing this since the early 80s.

Subtle difference, Diamond v. Diehr was the case which allowed processes which include a computer program as a step to be patented. In re Alappat , the case I mentioned, was, AFAIK, the first case to allow a patent on a computer program.

If you understand the fundamental concepts, learning the particular syntax of any given language is not a big deal at all. And the idea that creating a language specifically suited for a task is bad is crazy. Creating languages is very easy if you do it intelligently (linden did not of course). Using languages which make compiler/interpreter creation easy like ML makes this downright trivial. You end up saving alot of time writing the ideal language and using that vs making do with a language that is not designed for the task at hand. Do yourself a favour and read SICP. Or if you like, take the opencourseware version of the class: http://ocw.mit.edu/OcwWeb/Electrical-Engineering-a nd-Computer-Science/6-001Spring-2005/CourseHome/

Quicksort usually has a worst-case O(n^2) runtime, but it doesn't have to. It is possible to implement a guaranteed Theta(n log n) Quicksort. Excerpt From "Introduction to Algorithms", 2nd ed., by T. H. Cormen, C. E. Leiserson, R. L. Rivest, and C. Stein, p. 149 (section 7.2, "Performance of quicksort"):

"The running time of quicksort depends on whether the partitioning is balanced or unbalanced and this in turn depends on which elements are used for partitioning. If the partitioning is balanced, the algorithm runs asymptotically as fast as merge sort..."

A little further on, the section "Balanced partitioning" shows how this can be achieved and gives a formal proof of its Theta() bound. However, given that the expected worst-case runtime of randomized quicksort is O(n log n), the true Theta(n log n) quicksort isn't usually implemented. It's guaranteed worst-case performance is asymptotically better, but its average-case performance is slightly worse than randomized quicksort (by a constant factor only), and the "random" part in randomized quicksort doesn't depend on your data. (I.e., randomized quicksort won't perform poorly on bad input data. It will only perform badly if your input data is bad AND you get a really unlucky string of numbers from your rand() function.)

http://mitpress.mit.edu/sicp/full-text/book/book.h tml

Is this a book? or a Website?

Actually is both of them, but it's to me more a book than a website. A book is defined by its contents, the sequential flow of text where you keep reading it from start to end. With coherent writing and good spelling.

So I think that a book that uses HTML and CSS is still called a book. An online book, but still a book.

75 percent of MIT students have at least a combined math/verbal SAT score of 1430. If you don't have that, chances are poor that you will get in unless you are "more equal than others", i.e. you are anything other than a White male.

Here's a homework assignment for you:

SAT score is a good enough proxy for IQ that most high IQ societies will accept it in lieu of an official IQ test. You can find out the mapping between SAT (and other tests) here:
http://www.iqcomparisonsite.com/GREIQ.aspx

1. Find out the 25th percentile SAT score of the top 5-10 schools. (They are very similar.)
2. Find out the freshman population of all these schools in total, times that by .75 to get the number above the 25th percentile. (You might want to subtract international students, or just estimate.)
3. Using US population pyramids and the IQ distribution (bell shaped curve), estimate the total number of US students who these schools can actually draw from to get such a student population.
4. From there, estimate the probability that they will accept you based on SAT score alone.

(Hint, it's pretty damn high).

As to your case, colleges stay pretty constant in their 25th or 75th SAT percentiles. I think the SAT may have been renormed recently, but it was still the same test around the early 2000 era.
http://www-tech.mit.edu/V122/N40/40usnews.40n.html
http://www.cmu.edu/ira/CDS/c_9900.html

MIT was 1410 versus 1270 for CMU (25th percentile). That means if you take a random sample of the population who would just make it into the 25th percentile of CMU, there would only be 1/6 of them who would just make it into the 25th percentile of MIT.

The solution is to nix net-neutrality legislation and allow the consumer and the producer to come to terms on need versus price.

You're not by any chance a lobbyist for the non net neut advocates are you? i

Net Neutrality is not a business concept, it's based on a theory in computer science that the most efficient and cheapest networks are those based on the principle that protocol operations (i.e. TCP/IP) should occur at the end-points of the network.

See "End-to-end arguments in system design" by Jerome H. Saltzer, David P. Reed, and David D. Clark: http://web.mit.edu/Saltzer/www/publications/endtoe nd/endtoend.pdf

This principle was used by DARPA when it worked on Internet design and it's the reason TCP/IP communications have experienced massive growth.

It's a principle supported by almost everyone except the backbone owners. Verizon's CEO has said many times that the pipes belong to him and if you're going to make a profit off them then he wants a cut too (referring to Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, et al who oppose Net Neut).

Compare with mobile carriers who don't follow the principle of network neutraility where you pay more for cell phones that use a zero cost medium (the airways) than you do for the Internet which uses an expensive wired system. And where every service is separately billable. Is that the network of the future you're suggesting is better for us?

I wouldn't be so opposed to your argument if I could be convinced the telcos weren't running a gnarly scheme to make my ISP bill look like my cell phone bill.

The net has been so successful perhaps because it was designed and developed in large part, not by private companies, but by scientists an d engineers in an academic environment who were mostly employed by the government. Profit was not their goal. You want to give it over to the business folks because you think they can do a better job if they're involved in how the Internet continues to evolve?

Be careful what you wish for. I'm not necessarily disagreeing with you. But what worries me the most about non net neut is that we're going to be giving companies a large hand in determining, not how the Internet will look in a few years, but ultimately we're going to be giving them a lot of power in influencing how it's developed later on down the road. I say we tread carefully.

If a parrot can genuinely do what the article claims, then why not chimps?

One of the things that makes this kind of research very tricky is another amazing ability of Homo sapiens: the ability to read meaning into just about anything. Horst Hendriks-Jansen argues that this ability is crucial for bringing up children: we interact with them as if they understand far more than they actually do, which gives them the cues they need to start understanding what we thought they already understood.

So there's a strong selection pressure in favour of anthropomorphism, and historically there's been a weak selection pressure against it: there have been few situations where attributing human-like consciousness to natural phenonema would lead to faulty predictions (this has changed recently because our models of natural phenomena have become much more sophisticated, bringing them into conflict with institutionalised anthropomorphism in the form of religion).

It seems arrogant and almost pre-Darwinian to dismiss comparisons between humans and other animals on the grounds of anthropomorphism, but if we're going to ask questions such as "are parrots intelligent?" or "do chimps have culture?" we first need working definitions of intelligence and culture that aren't defined in strictly human terms. It's hard to imagine what those definitions would be, but until we have them the questions remain ill-posed.

There are various Logo environments, some are free. They are great for kids that know a few letters (see http://el.media.mit.edu/Logo-foundation/)

There used to be a free program by Prof. Mark Overmars called Drape (see http://www.cs.uu.nl/people/markov/kids/drape.html) but unfortunately it is no longer available for free download (though there might be ways to get a copy). It's advantage over Logo is that it is used through a graphic interface and does not require the child to know anything about letters (perhaps it has some value as a preparation to reading as it makes a child realize how sequences of sybols arranged in different ways have different meanings.

The real reason to let kids use these is that it gives them more ways to be creative. It is not supposed to completely replace things like building blocks or Legos.

Game Maker (see http://www.gamemaker.nl/) by the same Prof. Overmars is suitable for older kids. My 6 year old child can do some things with it (actually he did when he was 5) but it's really not for his level and his success owes a lot to help from his 12 years old brother. For older kids it is a great way to learn programming in an environment that balances their needs for fast results with the ability to do complicated programming (and I've seen my older son progressing from simple graphic UI programming by dragging icons around and editting their property sheets to using more and more scripting). It's Windows only and the author claims it is not suitable for open sourcing or porting to other platforms as the code is too Windows-centric, but I think it can serve as a good model for creating a similar open source alternative - a programming environment that grows with the child.

Finally: even a standard graphics program such as MS Paint can let a child be creative, especially if a child learns to use Google images and copy/paste images to his/her own work. My younger son convinced himself at the age of 4 that he needs to learn to read because this is the key to obtain images from Google, and that he needs to learn English because searching in English produces more and better search results.

Prof. OverMars has one more cool program that kids can use to be creative and it is "Drawing for Children" (see http://www.cs.uu.nl/people/markov/kids/draw.html). It is not a replacement for a standard graphics program but it lets kids be creative in a different way (composing images from erady made components.) I think it has some cool things like fractal-based generation of trees, letting the child "draw" a forest with each tree a randomly generated fractal. (I haven't followed Tux paint too much. Does it have these things? Tux paint have a problem of "too many penguins". It makes a child's drawing look like a Windows desktop after an ISP instalation disk has been run, assuming the ISP's logo is a penguin ;-) ).

That's complete nonsense! In the future, all computers will be a series of tubes, and computations will be done with water, not electricity!

It may have been slashdotted in 2003, but its from a class in Fall 2000
http://alumni.media.mit.edu/~paulo/courses.htm
How to build (almost) anything (MAS 863)

00 01 10 11
00 000 001 010 011
01 001 010 011 100
10 010 011 100 101
11 011 100 101 110

Oh ye of little faith, here i present thee with The Facts. Or a paper at the very least: One size fits all? a Benchmark

Here's a good comparison of the two approaches:
http://glinden.blogspot.com/2006/05/c-store-and-go ogle-bigtable.html
(per my post below, Vertica is a commercial version of MIT C-Store: http://db.lcs.mit.edu/projects/cstore/ )

This looks like it will be a commercial version of the Michael Stonebraker and MIT developed C-Store column-oriented:
- Web site: http://db.lcs.mit.edu/projects/cstore/
- Wikipedia Entry: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C-Store
They distribute the source with a fairly liberal license, so this looks like something the open source community could pick up and run with.

Stonebraker and co. recently presented an academic paper with some benchmarks in it. Here's the link: http://nms.csail.mit.edu/~stavros/pubs/osfa.pdf See section 3, which starts on page 2.

Here you go:
Stonebraker, Mike; et al. (2005). C-Store: A Column-oriented DBMS (PDF). Proceedings of the 31st VLDB Conference.
From the paper:
Among the many differences in its design are: storage of data by column rather than by row, careful coding and packing of objects into storage including main memory during query processing, storing an overlapping collection of columnoriented projections, rather than the current fare of tables and indexes, a non-traditional implementation of transactions which includes high availability and snapshot isolation for read-only transactions, and the extensive use of bitmap indexes to complement B-tree structures
:-)

This is a useful suggestion, but is something that Citizendium is really already doing. Their restriction of only allowing real-names is a breath of fresh air too. I am just waiting for the day some angsty script kiddie teeny bopper incorporate a random paper generator into a botnet to attach Wikipedia. With some good cloaking (first have one IP on the botnet obviously vandalize a page, then have another on the botnet "fix' the vandalization but add something from the random paper generator) the damage will be years fixing.

Say what you want for anonimity, it is turning the internet into a sewer. The number of attacks on my web server in a day is staggering, and my web site isn't all that popular. One of these days soon, someone will create an overnet on top of the internet where each site only accepts packets from users registered with a real name and real address.

Truthfully, I think that it would be better to let the kindergarteners play with blocks, color with crayons, and generally let them act like little kids.

This is exactly right. Let them build with their hands and socialize for a few years.

After a few more years, when they are ready to move from blocks to a computer, try Scratch

So finally the tile processor architecture makes it to the industry. People in the comp arch group at MIT envisioned and prototyped something pretty similar to this years ago as the RAW processor.
http://www.cag.lcs.mit.edu/raw/
http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=624515
http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpls/abs_all.jsp?isnumb er=13382&arnumber=612254

Can I call Bullshit on your source? You're looking to a blog for all your information on something you believe may cause the end of the world as we know it. Something that important I would think you would try to find someone who isnt just saying "What I Know Is...." Plus, we all know the real reason for global warming is lack of Pirates.

But something I found interesting that also may be used to support the solar radiation hypothesis is that at least three other planets in our solar system are also expereiecing "global warming." Mainly Mars and Pluto. Now that would likely mean one of two things, at least a large percentage of global warming has absolutly nothing to do with human impact, or the greenhouse gases we produce are also warming Pluto.

The architecture is very much like how one might build a cellular automata machine, albeit with FPUs instead of lookup tables.

As an example, check out CAM-8: http://www.ai.mit.edu/projects/im/cam8/
This dated from 1993 or so, it took at least a 1 GHz Pentium III to match its cellular automata performance, if I recall correcly.

This versatile model could one day be used for automobile driver's assistance, visual search engines, biomedical imaging analysis, or robots with realistic vision

• There already exist working automated driving software. The december 2006 issue of IEEE Computers magazing was on them last month. Read about the car that drove a thousand miles on Italy's road thanks to Linux, no less.
• Visual search engine exist, at the research level. The whole field is called "Content Based Retrieval", and the main issue is not so much to search, but to formulate the question.
• Biomedical image analysis has been going strong for decades and is used every day in your local hospital. Ask your doctor !
• Robotic vision is pretty much as old as computers themselves. There are even fun robot competitions like robocup.