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We question the need for digital-to-analog converters. It should be noted that we allow DHCP to harness homogeneous epistemologies without the evaluation of evolutionary programming [2], [12], [14]. Contrarily,the lookaside buffer might not be the panacea that end-users expected. However, this method is never considered confusing. Our approach turns the knowledge-base communication sledgehammer into a scalpel.

Through WMSCI conferences, we are trying to relate the analytic thinking required in focused conference sessions, to the synthetic thinking, required for analogies generation, which calls for multi-focus domain and divergent thinking. We are trying to promote a synergic relation between analytically and synthetically oriented minds, as it is found between left and right brain hemispheres, by means of the corpus callosum. Then, WMSCI 2005 might be perceived as a research corpus callosum, trying to bridge analytically with synthetically oriented efforts, convergent with divergent thinkers and focused specialists with non-focused or multi-focused generalists.

Rather than "Starter Edition," here's some suggestions, if anyone from Redmond just happens to read this. (I know they won't do it - it's more a mental exercise while I eat)

1. Go download this, and make it natively multi-user if it isn't already. Give it a strong native security model, too...you can get some ideas here, and the best part is, they won't mind you doing that if you don't try and patent said ideas. Also, modularise your GUI, and don't prevent users from accessing the CLI when they want to.

2. Have the CLI composed of this and this for us CLI types.

3. Make the Add/Remove Programs panel essentially a net-aware frontend for either this or this.

4. Use this for hardware detection. Also re drivers, get rid of the suicidal policy of seeing third-party hardware vendors as the enemy, and actually support them...via tools, docs, etc. These people are your friends...they'll help you stay relevant.

5. Download this and use it as your default FS, and then get this and this, (although you already seem to know about this last one) and incorporate both of those into your stock UI. You've essentially got WinFS right there, without all the added complexity you'd no doubt throw into it if you tried to code it from scratch.

6. For the Agent angle, incorporate the last point, as well as putting help/docs in a non-binary format, making them searchable with this, converting said search results for use with this, and then use the AIML output as input for something like this. Also, instead of making the agent a tightly anthropomorphic personality, make it more generic, and more as though it's simply "the operating system" communicating with a user, rather than that dog or Clippit instead.

7. Give Outlook a major overhaul. This and this are examples of directions it IMHO should go in.

Just some random ideas, anywayz. Dreaming's fun. ;) I'll probably get modded Offtopic, but it was worth it.

reminds me of Nikita Pashenkov's Spinalcat. read his MIT thesis on the "Optical Turntable as an Interface for Musical Performance" (28mg PDF). here's more information on the optical turntable.

reminds me of Nikita Pashenkov's Spinalcat. read his MIT thesis on the "Optical Turntable as an Interface for Musical Performance" (28mg PDF). here's more information on the optical turntable.

A Firefox (only works on Firefox) plugin that I'm certain everyone's going to find interesting (works on Slashdot too).

http://simile.mit.edu/dist/piggy-bank/piggy-bank.x pi [8.7Mb]

they couldn't get into Caltech: Soldering while eating pizza is just this side of eating paint chips.

http://haystack.lcs.mit.edu/

The above can serve as a nice front-end to Dspace.

Perhaps you could do a little checking before just tossing out insults.

I feel like that was a hack 5-10 years ago but couldn't find any supporting information. this is a similar hack to what you're proposing, http://hacks.mit.edu/Hacks/by_year/1993/green_bldg _vu_meter/

"Build a USB dance floor, gosh!"

Ah, then I digress...

However, yes, they DO get scholarships. Otherwise someone better tell MIT: ;) http://web.mit.edu/finaid/fin_aid/grants.html

Man, for what I could see, this First East group have some good chicks! even, if you enter to their homepage you can go to the girls homepage and see some pictures.

I guess it has sense to create the Disco no? hehe

You can even send the floor an email, though it might not write back.

I don't see the part about emailing the disco floor (unless it's in the video which I haven't seen yet.) You can email the creators, but not the floor itself.

Could you explain these telephone wires running from building to building in Buenos Aires?

Also, the U.S. government is much worse than you are saying: Unprecedented Corruption: A guide to conflict of interest in the U.S. government.

How many Iraqis has the Argentine government killed? None, right? How many Vietnamese has the Argentine government killed? None, right? The U.S. government killed 2,000,000. Guess how many Vietnamese directly threatened the U.S. at the time? None.

Why do you picture this as being a world so far beyond what we have now? Do you know what BioBricks are? It's kind of scary how close we are to this being a realistic possibility for a small group or even an individual. I can show you about a dozen web sites where you can go and enter in a custom gene sequence and they'll send you a ready-to-go plasmid that you can insert into an organism a couple weeks later, for a dollar or two per base pair.

I imagine the cure to be also-as-fast-spreading as the bacteria

Indeed. However, the bacteria has, at best, half a year's head start on the cure. In reality, people might miss the signs for a lot longer - humans can really "drop the ball" on unexpected things.

I don't imagine the cure fighting off the deadly bacteria, as it is not a priority at first

Both are priorities. You don't fight anthrax just by going after the toxin it produces ;) If you only address the symptom and not the cause, you're fighting a losing battle. The nerve gas source will keep producing more toxin - especially since the cure has to catch up with the source's half-year head start. Even in a best case situation where the cure is far more efficient than the producer, some nerve gas will get blown out of reach of the curing organism, and there will always be a low level in the water. If the curing organism *isn't* as efficient as the casuative one? Forget about it.

Taking out a link in the food chain before people even realize what is wrong can be surprisingly simple. Take mosquitoes - a plan has been floated, quite realistically, that should wipe out all of a certain type of malaria-spreading mosquito within months. It involves the use of "greedy genes" - genes which instead of being passed down with 50-50 odds, get passed on almost 100% of the time. The idea is to use a lethal, recessive, greedy allele - the gene builds up in the population until almost every mosquito has it, and then suddenly they start dropping like flies (no pun intended). In modelling, it works quite successfully.

You take out a species (or in the case of nerve gas, everything with a nervous system in the water and many things out of the water), and we're talking about a completely devastated food chain, for whatever survives. Yes, we have the technology to bring back species - but when the damage is already done (starvation, disease, and whatnot), it's too late. If you lose your food supply, or a critical amount of your populations, or whatever be the bioengineered disaster of discussion, it would take decades, centuries, or more to repopulate it - time that you just don't have.

Probably a silly question, but you have checked http://www.linmodems.org/ haven't you?

The main site is full of information to help identify and get working "windows" modems under Linux. The list still seems to be active. Before ADSL arrived in my corner of the world I was dependant on them to get connected via inbuilt modems. I can't fault the helpfulness of the people on the list.

It doesn't matter if the modem cards you're getting are unpredictable provided that you know that it's one of a small subset and you know how to get each one (or most of them) to work. When I was last looking at this (over a year ago - but I guess that the kit you're seeing isn't new) the most manufacturer that modems identified themselves as was Agere/Lucent, for which there are various drivers around.

Some modems will probably just never get Linux drivers - the 3com 3c556 and relatives are examples of that. See:
http://zurich.ai.mit.edu/pipermail/omnibook/2002-A pril/001275.html

...a really HUGE magnet?

http://mit.edu/urop/ The Undergraduate Research Opportunities Program. MIT will pay you or give you credit to do research, for professors. If you have good ideas for research that nobody is currently doing, the office or a professor can sponsor you, and you can get money to travel to facilities, run experiments, etc. The program not only makes doing research fantastically accessible to undergrads, but also maintains programs like MIT's FormulaSAE and SolarCar teams.

Buzzing speakers happen. I'm sure they happen at CalTech too. The claim that a buzzing speaker implies professors do not care about their students is outrageous.

You've obviously never been to http://hacks.mit.edu. If the only Caltech prank worth talking about (which I assume it must be since two separate people felt the need to put the whole story on here) was 35 years ago, that's sad.

If this stuff intrests you, read If At All Possible Involve a Cow by Neil Steinberg.

This book also mentions some MIT hacks. But if you're more interested, check out the three separate books that have been written solely about MIT's hacks.

You're "feeling" was wrong.

First of all it's "YOUR feeling" not "YOU ARE (YOU'RE) feeling"

Secondly, he is absolutely right. MIT does not cater to undergrads. They are unapologetic about this fact (and it is a fact). They are a research university, and like other research universities, research is done by grad students, not by undergrads.

When I was younger, being naive and idealistic, I always wanted to go to MIT. However, even Dr. Edmund Bertschinger told me not to bother, that there were many other schools which focus on, and do a better job of, teaching undergraduates.

You really sound like you're trying to rationalize your own going to MIT for undergrad, except that your atrocious grammar suggests that you didn't. That or they really aren't a very good undergrad school after all.

a school that has strong liberal arts, business and humanities colleges.

http://mitsloan.mit.edu/index-noflash.php
http://web.mit.edu/shass/
You mean like MIT?

a school that has strong liberal arts, business and humanities colleges.

http://mitsloan.mit.edu/index-noflash.php
http://web.mit.edu/shass/
You mean like MIT?

>Replicators aren't standalone.

Proof by forceful assertion? We've already created simple self-replicating molecules. If you have some magical theory of why such things couldn't form in nature, I'd love to hear it.

Approximately 1/4 of Engineers are foreigners, so it may just be that some of the people who run your country or it's large companies went to MIT.

The T-shirt concept has been used in the MIT-Harvard rivalry for *years*. Can't fin a picture but here's a reference.

Surely the best hack was http://hacks.mit.edu/Hacks/by_year/1998/disney_buy s_mit/

IMHO, MIT's R2D2 Great Dome Hack was pretty cool, and that was just a few years ago.

Even though I'm an alum (you guess from where), the following are un-biased examples of inscription hacks.
(1) recent hack by the west coast school
(2) a classic inscription hack

It's clear which of the two is more thoughtful, creative, and true to the spirit of hacking.

As one of the folks at MIT, you have managed to piss off a large number off people with your "neener-neener" tone. For example, there have been a few notable hacks in the last ten years -- perhaps you missed the scale model of the Wright Flyer or the One Ring or the police car? At MIT, the hacks are done for the amusement of others; that is, a hack is done _for_ something. At Caltech, it seems that pranks are pulled _on_ someone. Which is why I think so many hackers here at MIT are so irritated with Caltech's silly one-upmanship attempts.

As one of the folks at MIT, you have managed to piss off a large number off people with your "neener-neener" tone. For example, there have been a few notable hacks in the last ten years -- perhaps you missed the scale model of the Wright Flyer or the One Ring or the police car? At MIT, the hacks are done for the amusement of others; that is, a hack is done _for_ something. At Caltech, it seems that pranks are pulled _on_ someone. Which is why I think so many hackers here at MIT are so irritated with Caltech's silly one-upmanship attempts.

As one of the folks at MIT, you have managed to piss off a large number off people with your "neener-neener" tone. For example, there have been a few notable hacks in the last ten years -- perhaps you missed the scale model of the Wright Flyer or the One Ring or the police car? At MIT, the hacks are done for the amusement of others; that is, a hack is done _for_ something. At Caltech, it seems that pranks are pulled _on_ someone. Which is why I think so many hackers here at MIT are so irritated with Caltech's silly one-upmanship attempts.

Maybe you just haven't been paying attention.

This event [Big Screw] is still run; this year's event happened this week.

See here for a slightly outdated list of winners and charities; Chuck Vest (Make a Wish Foundation) won in 2004 and Prof. George Verghese (Doctors Without Borders) won in 2003. The 2005 winner will be announced tomorrow evening, and will be presented with the four foot long, left-handed aluminum wood screw.

Caltech = balloons, a banner, and some t-shirts

MIT = a freaking huge droid

I don't know about you, but the winner is clear...

MIT pranks tend to be so much more artful than the ones listed here. Caltech has yet to transform an MIT building into a cathedral or cause the president's office to disappear entirely.

I'm unimpressed by Caltech if they can't pull pranks that are better than the pranks MIT pulls on itself.

MIT pranks tend to be so much more artful than the ones listed here. Caltech has yet to transform an MIT building into a cathedral or cause the president's office to disappear entirely.

I'm unimpressed by Caltech if they can't pull pranks that are better than the pranks MIT pulls on itself.

Oh. Shit.

If I were Caltech, I'd watch my back.

MIT's Blaise Gassend has a space elevator simulation available, which produces some rather neat animations of what happens when a space elevator breaks. It might be good as the basis for a more elaborate project.

GPL'd source code

MIT's Blaise Gassend has a space elevator simulation available, which produces some rather neat animations of what happens when a space elevator breaks. It might be good as the basis for a more elaborate project.

GPL'd source code

What We Can Learn From BSD
By Chinese Karma Whore, Version 1.0

Everyone knows about BSD's failure and imminent demise. As we pore over the history of BSD, we'll uncover a story of fatal mistakes, poor priorities, and personal rivalry, and we'll learn what mistakes to avoid so as to save Linux from a similarly grisly fate.

Let's not be overly morbid and give BSD credit for its early successes. In the 1970s, Ken Thompson and Bill Joy both made significant contributions to the computing world on the BSD platform. In the 80s, DARPA saw BSD as the premiere open platform, and, after initial successes with the 4.1BSD product, gave the BSD company a 2 year contract.

These early triumphs would soon be forgotten in a series of internal conflicts that would mar BSD's progress. In 1992, AT&T filed suit against Berkeley Software, claiming that proprietary code agreements had been haphazardly violated. In the same year, BSD filed countersuit, reciprocating bad intentions and fueling internal rivalry. While AT&T and Berkeley Software lawyers battled in court, lead developers of various BSD distributions quarreled on Usenet. In 1995, Theo de Raadt, one of the founders of the NetBSD project, formed his own rival distribution, OpenBSD, as the result of a quarrel that he documents on his website. Mr. de Raadt's stubborn arrogance was later seen in his clash with Darren Reed, which resulted in the expulsion of IPF from the OpenBSD distribution.

As personal rivalries took precedence over a quality product, BSD's codebase became worse and worse. As we all know, incompatibilities between each BSD distribution make code sharing an arduous task. Research conducted at MIT found BSD's filesystem implementation to be "very poorly performing." Even BSD's acclaimed TCP/IP stack has lagged behind, according to this study.

Problems with BSD's codebase were compounded by fundamental flaws in the BSD design approach. As argued by Eric Raymond in his watershed essay, The Cathedral and the Bazaar, rapid, decentralized development models are inherently superior to slow, centralized ones in software development. BSD developers never heeded Mr. Raymond's lesson and insisted that centralized models lead to 'cleaner code.' Don't believe their hype - BSD's development model has significantly impaired its progress. Any achievements that BSD managed to make were nullified by the BSD license, which allows corporations and coders alike to reap profits without reciprocating the goodwill of open-source. Fortunately, Linux is not prone to this exploitation, as it is licensed under the GPL.

The failure of BSD culminated in the resignation of Jordan Hubbard and Michael Smith from the FreeBSD core team. They both believed that FreeBSD had long lost its earlier vitality. Like an empire in decline, BSD had become bureaucratic and stagnant. As Linux gains more and more market share, and as BSD sinks deeper into the mire of decay, their parting addresses will resound as fitting eulogies to BSD's demise.

I'd love to take a ride with her up a space elevator! I must... become... a rocket scientist at once!

http://haystack.lcs.mit.edu/screenshots/full-scree nshot.png

http://helium.knownspace.org/manifesto.html

http://www.daml.ri.cmu.edu/Cal/

It was the Monty Python skit "Spanish Inquisition". http://people.csail.mit.edu/people/paulfitz/spanis h/script.html

"With all due respect, I'm quite familiar with the basics of computer science. My areas of expertise include computability and algorithm analysis. I have spent more time staring at FSMs and models of computation than any human should. Do you mind sharing some of these granted patents on the basics of computer science? I look at anywhere from 5-200 computer-related patents every business day and have yet to find them. (Cue the requisite jokes about a patent examiner's inability to find something *rimshot*)"

Rather than fill this post with links to a myriad RLE and other compression patents, discrete transform patents, Djikstra algorithm variants, memory management algorithms etc. etc. I'll just say this: Congratulations! - it's not every day one comes across someone who knows more about computer science than Donald Knuth.

START knows that too and knows the average air speed velocity of an unladen swallow

it probably works quite similarly to mit's START natural language processor. reading mostly creative commons sites like wikipedia.

from that site:

The European parliament will now be taking the last stand against software patents in a voting for which an absolute majority is needed. Such a majority is hard to come by in a parliament with a low attendance level.

But not all is lost yet as long as you decide it is time to make a difference and take action. This is our last opportunity to fend off software patents worldwide, there will be no second chance for the foreseeable future.

Signing petitions will not suffice. Contact your local EU representatives and educate them why software patents are a bad idea in the first place and why they must attend that parliament session to vote against them. Make it clear that they need to stop the machinations of the EU council and reaffirm the power of the EU parliament, the only democratically elected EU institution. For in-depth information and starting points to get active visit the software patent page of the FFII (Foundation for a Free Information Infrastructure) and NoSoftwarePatents.com.

...This will mean that the US will be left behind....

This isn't a legal battle within the US. IIRC this patenting algorithms nonsense has been legal in the US for a while. This comes a result of a new ruling within the European Union, and these projects are all hosted within EU countries.

There's still a chance that this can be stopped, it still needs to pass the Euorpean parliament, so anybody within the EU who's concerned should contact your representative in the EU parliament and explain why software patents are a bad idea.

That isn't to say a distributed system wouldn't also be able to accomplish some of this stuff, but rather that Subversion is very usable Right Now (already much better than CVS), and its flaws compared to distributed systems are minor. Maybe the nature of cooperative development will change in the future -- that is very possible! -- but Subversion is a good tool for Right Now.

There are several reasons why these patents should not have been granted. Here's two:

1. Prior art - slashdot itself has reported several times about the efforts of researchers who have allowed monkeys to control machines. with thoughts In fact some of this research has now been extended to human beings as well.

How then can Sony, without showing any kind of proof of concept or research, claim to have intellectual property rights in this area? Even if they have been granted this patent, I doubt that this will stand up in courts if they ever try to defend it.

2. If Sony gets the patent rights just for conceptualizing this, shouldn't the Wachowski brothers be granted these patents instead? They after all do have a low-fidelity model (the movies).

I find it sad that a big company like Sony can get away with these frivolous patents when genuine research work takes forever to get a patent on, and has to jump through lots of hoops too. I've had a patent application being worked through for over a year now and the hassle is just inane. And we have the the research, working prototypes and demos, not just fruity "prophetic" concepts.