Slashdot Mirror

Specifically related to the issues I mentioned: If you are interested in some of the challenges around flatness, you can learn more about dummy fill that must be added to metal layers, by looking at the layman's version or a technical description.

With regard to reflection, you can check out a rather old background article or how anti-reflection layers must be used in modern semiconductor manufacturing to reduce problems.

More specific articles on 3D fabrication can probably be found in recent journals (most likely not available online), or if you're not concerned about reading patents, by reading patents from the USPTO (for reasons of US law which you're probably familiar with, I'm not going to search that and provide you any links). There may also be more by searching for Matrix Semiconductor (which I didn't realize at the time of my first posting has been acquired by SanDisk).

Having said that, there is also 3D packaging, which takes various forms. Semiconductor Cubing (as it's apparently called) can stack lots of semiconductor devices, but note that these are originally fabricated as single layer chips and then they are bonded together to form a larger block.

More recently (and in real production), 3D packaging is being performed through a System in Package (SiP) methodology (you may also see this referred to as a 'chip stack' technology). This is distinct from a multi-chip module (MCM), where the chips are aligned horizontally on the packaging substrate. Today, a SiP is generally a memory module bonded upside down onto a non-memory device (though it can also be used to bond an RF device onto a non-RF device). This form of packaging is receiving attention from SEMATECH as well. Further information from SEMI is also available if you Google for "SEMI Forum: Mapping progress in 3D IC integration".

Beyond that, it's again hard, due to the password protected nature of conference materials and journals... but hopefully that's a good set of links to explore.

• http://www.pdos.lcs.mit.edu/scigen/ "SCIgen is a program that generates random Computer Science research papers, including graphs, figures, and citations. It uses a hand-written context-free grammar to form all elements of the papers. Our aim here is to maximize amusement, rather than coherence. ... The code for SCIgen is released under GPL, and is currently available via anonymous CVS."
• http://www.elsewhere.org/cgi-bin/postmodern/ FYI: The Postmodernism Generator was described by Dinitia Smith in her article, When Ideas Get Lost in Bad Writing as "an Internet site that automatically creates a "post-modern" essay, replete with bloated jargon and incomprehensible sentence structure, every time someone logs onto it."

Well here is a random paper generator that has managed to get generated papers published, no idea what this robot would think of it though.

http://pdos.csail.mit.edu/scigen/rooter.pdf Is where you can view the paper

Hmmm, something got lost in edit. 'This tool' refers to the CS Paper Generator used by the group in their earlier prank.

http://pdos.csail.mit.edu/scigen/rooter.pdf

Gmail has minor problems relatively often, although the last major outage that I can find was a year & a half ago (when it was in beta).

The GP has a point - a large business would be mad to trust their core business applications to a third party with so many potential points of failure.

The patent covers Real's groundbreaking technology innovations dating back to November 1994, four months before the introduction of RealAudio, which forever changed the Web by bringing streaming audio to the Internet for the first time.

Not to be rude, as you may fool some younger Slashdotters, but not me. Fact is, there were streaming audio solutions on the Internet well before 1994. How do I know? Well, I took part in the development of one of them, and helped with the porting effort of several others.

I'll keep the list of examples short and sweet, others may add as they please.

AudioFile
The Network Audio System (NAS)

Note: These systems, as were several others, were OSS right from the start.

http://ocw.mit.edu/index.html

Enjoy !

...I refuse to buy electronic textbooks until they have zero DRM whatsoever. In addition, I don't even buy regular textbooks unless the professor actually uses them for graded assignments. They're just too damn expensive to do otherwise!

More universities need to make things like MIT's OpenCourseWare, or better yet, work together to make one big system.

Also, The Right to Read is a great story -- and is becoming more real every day. Everyone ought to read it, because it doesn't just apply to textbooks, it applies to music, movies, and other media too. Pay special attention to the notes at the end; the summary of the current trends towards DRM is downright scary!

This isn't true. The $100 laptop is using the new Minix 3

This is why Gmail has an alternative to the Ajax interface , and you can switck to HTML mode , and it just removes the AJAX dependant features :
* Filter creation
* Settings (Including Forwarding and POP)
* Spell checker
* Keyboard shortcuts
* Address auto-complete
(from http://mail.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?answe r=15049)
Google really sets a fine example here by letting users choose what kind of interface they prefer , even though they could easily just ignore these users, as I personaly dont know anyone that uses this feature . Making a dual interface for AJAX applications on all these fluffy Web2.0 sites is a good idea , specially for mobile/light clients like that 100$ laptop

I have to say that, personally, I think MIT's OpenCourseWare is excellent.

Oracle, like IBM, Sun and others are still all experimenting with the ways that they can make FOSS development work for them. Oracle is not likely to try to "own" any distribution of Linux, there's no profit or future in that. Instead they, like everyone else, want to set the open standards. Leading on open standards is leading the competiton. Rebecca Henderson, Professor of Management at MIT, has a a great talk on the new hyper-competitive world of open source. You can view it for free through MIT's Open Course Archive: http://mitworld.mit.edu/video/274/

MIT does OpenCourseWare. Not sure about Harvard

Space War and Source Code from MIT!

Space War and Source Code from MIT!

This is cool, I have unfortunately been put off attending university because of prices and not knowing if I could be commited enough, I have instead turned to self study, lots of great books available and also http://ocw.mit.edu/ is absolutely awesome.

I ask for scientific studies and you give me a opinion piece from the Tuesday, April 23, 1991 issue of the MIT Tech encouraging people to attend the "City of Boston Earth Day event remembering the Chernobyl human and environmental victims".

This is nothing more than op/ed piece. It has no scientific value.

Care to try again?

First link off Google:

http://www-tech.mit.edu/V111/N21/gamota.21o.html

Qouting Wikipedia: The primary advantage of a pebble bed reactor is that it can be designed to be inherently safe. As the reactor gets hotter, the rate of neutron capture by 238U increases, reducing the number of neutrons available to cause nuclear fission.

I read an article in Wired that really piqued my interest in a form of Nuclear Power plant that the Chinese had been working on. These are called Pebble Core Reactors, and basically look like a big tylenol capsule stood on its side. I am by no means an expert in this area, but in layman's terms the system works like this. Instead of radioactive rods, the system uses radioactive pellets. As the pellets heat up they fall through a grating system to the storage below. If the thing overheats, the system collapses onto itself. MIT continues to work on this, along side the Chinese and many others. One interesting thing from the Wired article, this technology goes all the way back to the 50s. The decision to go with the water cooled system was partly based on the Navy's desire for Nuclear submarines and ships. Of course the others were waaay more expensive, so naturally business wanted those.

You can find Geoff Goodfellow's note at the Telecom Digest archives. Note that the Telecom Digest has been running continuously since 1981, on the Internet and its predecessor (the ARPAnet), and is in some sense, the original ancestor of services like Slashdot.

You can find Geoff Goodfellow's note at the Telecom Digest archives. Note that the Telecom Digest has been running continuously since 1981, on the Internet and its predecessor (the ARPAnet), and is in some sense, the original ancestor of services like Slashdot.

Here is some more info - BTW, it is Neil Gershenfeld - small typo, sorry...

However, in the book FAB by Neil Gershefeld, there is described an interesting "Hello World" circuit, which is supposedly open-sourced in some manner by (MIT Media Lab?) - that uses a 2 or 3 wire physical layer protocol, coupled with a low-speed packet protocol, based on TCP, but in a much simpler format (similar to morse code) - it was supposedly dubbed "Internet0" or some weirdness. HERE IT IS - anyhow, I am pretty sure that is it - if not, it is probably located somewhere else in the FABLAB wiki. Also, look at this too...

http://agents.media.mit.edu/projects/voice/ is one way to increase recognition (this only scratches the surface compared to what Google could sematically do)

http://www.mit.edu:8001/people/dinoriki/phliez/wor k-well-together.html

You know what? I don't like him either, for completely ridculous reasons. Here's the deal:

I haven't heard of him before this whole laptop thing, so I Googled him. Ah, fuck it, I'll be honest. I wanted to see if he's black. I'm not racist... but that would be God damn funny. Don't look at me like that, picture a black dude named Negroponte, and try not to laugh. I thought so. Anyway, he's not, but in every picture of him with glasses on... well, see for yourself:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicholas_Negroponte
http://archives.obs-us.com/obs/english/books/nn/nn bio.htm

He's a douche. I know you shouldn't judge people based on appearance, but nobody but a giant douche would pose with their glasses like that. Even when he's not wearing glasses, he's a douche. He either tans, or somebody tried to get rid of the bags under his eyes and edited the photo way too hard. Since you can clearly see the acne or whatever it is in his 300dpi publicity photo, and since the white is above his eyes as well as below, I'm gonna say he tans. Maybe whoever did his makeup had no idea what they were doing, but trust me, it's not that, he tans.

So, to sum up, I don't really trust anything that comes out of this guy. They're crappy reasons. I'm a bad person for disliking this guy based on a couple of pictures, and maybe someday when he feeds all the starving children of Africa I'll eat my words. But I make crap knee-jerk reactions like this all the time, and 95% of the time they're right. Mark my words, this guy's a douche.

Journalism went to hell in a handbasket after the search engine became a common feature in everyday life. The main reason is that journalists are lazy.

There's quite a bit of truth here. But ...

On the other hand, as information warfare and counterwarfare continues, it will eventually be harder to do a search and get uncontested data (not that "uncontested" is synonymous with "true", so in a way we already have the problem). One might argue that some of these lazy people console themselves and their consciences by saying it must be true because it stands uncontested, and in some cases that's true. In that case, there might be reason for some optimism over the possibility that as searches turn up not just arguments but counterarguments, good reporters will realize that they have to inform people enough to decide.

But as things progress, I expect a world that looks more like the chaffing effects described by Ron Rivest in his should-be-more-well-known chaffing paper. (He cites it as an encryption technique, but I think there's a curious accidental (or perhaps sometimes intentional) relationship between encryption and political obfuscation.)

In the case of encrypted or chaffed data, you'd think people would work to decode it, not simply report on the fact of an encrypted stream of data as if the average reader could read past it. The question is whether there's a threshold of obfuscation beyond which even lazy reporters will see that they are offering encoded data and will start again to try to decode it. Or is steganography a better model and will journalists never realize that they ought to be decrypting the messages that clever politicians feed thme because they don't even recognize the messages as encoded.

I think laziness plays in but so does conscience. So understanding whether conscience will ever overcome laziness seems to me on understanding the paradigm that's in play.

Probably it's a mix, and probably the results will be mixed. But that makes for boring discussion... or worse than boring: it degrades to the cable TV approach to journalism, where when one person alleges that the world was created by Leprechauns and another alleges a natural physical process, and so they (a) declare that a controversy exists and (b) try to rectify it by giving equal time to each side. Sometimes I think that's about laziness, too, but sometimes I think it's that people have forgotten how to reason, and have somehow assumed that scientific consensus is the same as "scientific democracy", where one vote one viewer determines truth. Laziness, at least, can be cured by a sudden change of heart and desire to act. Losing the skill of how to think critically in a culture is harder to rectify on short notice.

We all see Eliza or what not all the time (M-x doctor?), but I was totally blown away by this account of Julia. Compared to this piece of old technology, I really think we live in the dark ages. What's even more amazing, is that it seems to be written in C. No Lisp?

You may not remember the Morris Worm, which had no payload but itself but succeeded in bringing core servers all over the country to their knees because the idiot who wrote it forgot to check how many copies were already running on a machine.

It must have been nice to hide for 3 days at Harvard, trying to hide his traces instead of publishing the thing and saving millions of dollars and many thousands of man-hours all over the country wasted by it. It must have been even nicer have his daddy, the head of the NSA at the time, play the "get out of jail free" card for him. It must have been even nicer than that when MIT somehow ignored his criminal negligence and made him a computer science professor (http://pdos.csail.mit.edu/~rtm/, for refercnce).

At last look, he still handed out loaner laptops with no Administrator password.

Isn't the eighth commandment:
0x8: Thou shalt not exceed exceed the speed of light. ;)
http://hacks.mit.edu/Hacks/by_year/1992/cathedral_ 7/father_tool_description.html

(But the MIT cannon is red, and the Mudd cannon isn't.)

You're right. The pictures I was looking at didn't have anything in them for scale (and I didn't look at them all because the site was so slow). When I finally pulled up this one, it's clear that the cannon is much bigger than it looked at first, and they're the same cannon.

This should do the job nicely:

http://hostshdesk.mit.edu/pictures/hammer.jpg

Those banners are SO amature. For a good sign changing prank check out this classic.

more pictures

Since you all killed our webserver I put the pics up on our personal server: http://donkeykong.mit.edu/cannon/. It's only an old AlphaServer DS20 so play nice.

http://www.swiss.ai.mit.edu/~gjs/gjs.html

I think the blurb is misleading in not making it clear the the Brass Rat is a proper noun. Specifically, it is the amusing name given to the MIT class ring, which traditionally pictures a beaver, nature's engineer. Capitalize proper names, you tards! Oh, but I guess that would be considered "editing", and they don;t do that around here...

Ahhh, the one reason why I would have considered going to MIT. So many of their hacks are truely inspirational.

IHTFP : Interesting Hacks To Fascinate People

s/pronk/prank/
Easy typo seing as they are so close to each other on the keyboards... :x

BTW: http://web.mit.edu/jotong/Public/Photos/MIT/Caltec h%20Cannon%20Hack/photos/photo4.html another pic of the ring on the canon ;)

Back on the topic at hand: I too am wary of government money being spent in this way. But if the money is going to be spent, I'd rather it be spent to build the network that is the least offensive to my libertarian sensibilities as possible.

What we're calling, alternately, 'User-Driven Infrastructure Development' or 'Bring Your Own Router', is a minimal city backbone mesh network, with the majority of the coverage being provided by users buying and installing their own equipment. Want to extend the mesh down your street? Go buy a $100 mesh router, put it in your window, and plug it in. Your neighbor can get onto the mesh using your router, but maybe in her house the signal is only available in one room...so she goes out and buys a mesh router, places it in that one room, and extends the signal throughout her house and to the next street over, where the other guy has a week signal, so he goes out to the store....

You get the idea. There's a lot of refinements that can be made to make it work faster, have better coverage, etc. I am not going to go over them here. This is all built on the high-quality, open-source mesh networking technology RoofNet, which can run on commodity hardware. I am doing some improvements to it and building mesh routers for rooftops, etc. You can do the same. Excuse me while I tout my business, but you may be interested, and it is relevant: XA Networks.

As I mentioned in another post on article, we are building this for the City of Cambridge (of which Boston is a suburb). I've also sold equipment to other places in the US, Africa, and India. It's good, cheap technology...and it's NOT PROPRIETARY!

http://www-tech.mit.edu/V125/N48/chunt48.html

and http://www-tech.mit.edu/V126/N13/RIAA1306.html

These were written before TFA. The first link was about two weeks previous, and the second was written back in October when she first learned that she was being sued.

http://www-tech.mit.edu/V125/N48/chunt48.html

and http://www-tech.mit.edu/V126/N13/RIAA1306.html

These were written before TFA. The first link was about two weeks previous, and the second was written back in October when she first learned that she was being sued.

I found some more info about this particular student and her case with the RIAA, if you're curious as to how these things pan out.

Run Over by the RIAA (a previous article)

Xanga site

I thought it was interesting that she got busted for sharing on i2hub -- I was surprised when I heard of pending MPAA lawsuits against movie swappers on i2. I'm still not quite sure how the *IAA infiltrated I2, I presume they must have just paid off some undergrads to act as a proxy onto the network. It was a sad day when i2hub got shut down, it was the only cool I2 application if nothing else.

Also, Kudos to MIT for apparently at least trying to delay giving up the student's name. I know that, at my Uni at least, the IT admins have no love for the RIAA lawyers, though there's not a whole lot you can do against an army of lawyers.

http://web.mit.edu/finaid/tuition_fees/index.html and don't forget the travel money.

Less than 10%? Just pay the fine and go on with your life, but please don't turn it into a fight out of principle. You'd expect MIT students to be either a lot less ignorant of the law, or savy enough not to get busted if they do break the law.

Wait a minute, she says "Last fall I wrote an opinion piece on music piracy (How to Avoid Getting RIAAed, Oct. 21, 2005)"

http://www-tech.mit.edu/V126/N13/RIAA1306.html

So an MIT student writes an article detailing how to avoid being sued by RIAA, then gets sued by RIAA? Is she a slow learner or what?

In New York State (New York City is different) it is legal to pass on the right if you can do it safely. I've looked over the traffic laws on several occassions to try and verify that passing on the right is illegal, but in NY it simply isn't unless by doing so you're creating an unsafe condition. The same is true in Minnesota.

So when driving, it's a good rule of thumb not to pass on the right, but it's probably not a bad idea to read the traffic laws of the state in which you live just so you know what is really legal and what isn't -- not just what you've heard people say.

http://www.mit.edu/~jfc/right.html

Depending on what your current degree is in, you might want to follow it up with a degree in Computer Science with a heavy emphasis on Computer Security and Information. A while back, when I was applying to graduate schools, I found that there were very few universities, on the list that I had created, that specialized in Computer Security; albeit, I was more concerned with their EE/Computer Engineering than Computer Science.

With that said, I do know that there are a variety of courses available at places like Johns Hopkins University (http://www.cs.jhu.edu/academics_catalog_grad_cour ses.html), New York University (http://www.cs.nyu.edu/web/Academic/Graduate/cours es.html), George Washington University (http://cs.seas.gwu.edu/academics/graduate/courses /), Virginia Tech (http://www.cs.vt.edu/site_pages/courses/), and the University of Florida (http://www.cise.ufl.edu/student_services/grad/cou rses/) that might suit your needs. While computer forensics is useful for a variety of agencies and institutions, the fundamentals behind those methods are important, as it governs how new tools can be created. MIT (http://student.mit.edu/@5675354.9107/catalog/m6a. html) also has a very interesting course selection, and the techniques and research coming out of there are very top-notch. If I had the time, I'd attend more lectures there, as the content is very diverse and alluring, especially when a grade is not on the line.