Slashdot Mirror

Found these links when I was doing a websearch on monotone and other CMS systems.

Problems with BK's license

A critique of the license.

And a nastygram of BK to the subversion group.

Incorrect. It's not an arbitrary distinction whatsoever. The region where the solar wind drops below the speed of sound is called the "termination shock". Just like how on an aircraft, differences between supersonic and subsonic regions of flow create strong turbulent artifacts, so will happen with the solar wind (which is charged, meaning that it produces electromagnetic radiation when its path is changed). More significantly, at the heliopause, another issue arises: charge. The heliopause is where the solar wind balances out the pressure of the interstellar medium. Do the charged particles collect there, and if so, how densely? This could have profound effects for any kupier belt (or beyond) missions, as well as our models of solar system formation. Heck, we don't even know how far out the termination shock and heliopause are (and they're not in constant locations, as the sun is moving with respect to the local interstellar medium; the shape is something like a comet). Despite what we don't know about it, we do know this: the heliosphere is the source of the most powerful radio waves in our solar system - more than 10 trillion watts. By the way - it was Voyager who first detected these emissions.

After the heliopause comes the heliosheath, which has its own set of properties which are largely unknown. It's the area where the solar-influenced material blends into the interstellar medium (and getting any data on the interstellar medium would be a great boon for astronomy)

...RoboTuna!

What you need to pick up really depends on what kind of work you want to do in the field. There are absolutely people with little understanding of biology all over. They typically do things like optimize and translate code or tweak algorithms for biologists. To move up to more interesting problems, though, you'll have to teach yourself quite a bit of biology and chemistry.

My advice is to start with the basics. Pick up a college-level Intro to Biology textbook and learn the relevant stuff: Biological molecules, Natural selection and evolution, basic Genetics - the whole pathway from gene -> protein -> enzyme. These kinds of concepts are the foundations of biology that you need to understand before you can get into the hardcore stuff.

If you enjoy chem, keep going through it too - finish general chemistry and work your way up through some organic chemistry and biochemistry. Structural and computational Biochemistry is HUGE right now, and you can definitely choose to go more of a chem path, if that's what floats your boat.

MIT OpenCourseWare has whole sections devoted to Biology, Chemistry, and Biological Engineering. It's probably worth checking out, if nothing else, to guide you to some topics to look more closely at.

Lastly, I'm going to encourage you to do your homework and make the jump. Both Universities and corporations are salivating over anyone with knowledge in both the life and computer sciences that can help bridge the gap between the two. (I should know - I'll be working on my PhD in Computational Biology starting this fall)

MIT is currently developing $100 computers for children growing up in third world countries. Nicholas Negroponte, of the MIT Media Lab, enthused, "When the kids bring them home and open them up, it's the brightest light source in the home". Mr. Negroponte was uneasily silent when questioned about things which are more essential to living like food, clean water, freely available and affordable medicine he could only weakly respond "It comes with linux pre-installed!"

MIT is currently developing $100 computers for children growing up in third world countries. Nicholas Negroponte, of the MIT Media Lab, enthused, "When the kids bring them home and open them up, it's the brightest light source in the home". Mr. Negroponte was uneasily silent when questioned about things which are more essential to living like food, clean water, freely available and affordable medicine he could only weakly respond "It comes with linux pre-installed!"

If you want a machine that learns like a human, it may very well need the same kind of extremely rich interface with its environment that a human has.

Some researchers now believe that "the intelligence is in the IO". See for example the human intelligence enterprise.

The Cognitive Machines Group @ the MIT Media Lab under Deb Roy seem to be on the right track. Steve Grand's work is interesting as well.

One could as well block Flash altogether, except when you need it. Very convenient.

MIT recently announced that they are launching a new program to develop a $100 laptop--a technology that could revolutionize how we educate the world's children. http://laptop.media.mit.edu/
Although these are very low end systems according to the specification "500MHz, 1GB, 1 Megapixel.", still I feel they can be of great help in education in third world countries.

Check out the MIT Cricket Indoor Location System. http://cricket.csail.mit.edu/.

It is commercially available from Crossbox Technologies http://www.xbow.com/Products/productsdetails.aspx? sid=116

ClarisWorks was developed with a four-figure startup cost, starting in 1989, and became a top-selling product with millions of users. It's true that that success was not achieved until the program was sold to Claris, and additional development resources were added.

But from the point of view of the original developers - myself and Scott Holdaway - our startup costs were very small. We bought two computers, rented a house together, and hacked. Details here:

http://www.swiss.ai.mit.edu/~bob/clarisworks.php

I should add that from my personal point of view, the open source meme has made it much harder to figure out how to make a buck selling software. In the old days it was simple. OK, call me clueless. I gave up and went back to school.

Okay, I concede that Montana and Washington allow that, but they seem to be the ONLY states that do. I looked through PA's laws (since that's where I am) and there's no exemption for this unless it's in some regulation somewhere (if Pendot even has that power). This page about traffic laws mentions those exemptions, but no others, which leads me to believe that there aren't others.

So with regards to the US, I'm mostly right.

I didn't expect a kind of Spanish Inquisition.

*What* fundamental advances? Name them!

Firm semantical foundations, the Pi-Calculus, Game Semantics, Full Abstraction results for various languages, Zero Knowledge Proofs, Breakthroughs in Program Logics (Separation Logic, Honda-Logics), Proof-Carrying Code, Model-Checking.

Yeah that's right, nothing came out of CS research in the last 20 years, everything's been already invented. To take just one example, this whole web thing of the 90s should not count for anything. CS research is worthless, real progress comes from companies like Google or Akamai. Oh wait... both came to us straight from the university (Stanford and MIT, respectively).

I've thought abput this for the subway here in Boston. It seems like there will be some concerns w/r/t terrorism that will need to be addressed first though.

Also MIT has rigged something like this up for their shuttle system: http://shuttletrack.mit.edu/

Wow, 9.3! Do you have access to some unpublished version of the Classic Mac OS?

Viola ... OS X Lite.

Viola? I thought music was more related to that other Apple company ...or were you thinking of et voilà?

They can join the military to pay for school, at which time wealthy MIT students will show their appreciation:

http://mit.edu/thistle/www/v16/1/resistance.html

As the cost of an MIT degree continues to spiral above inflation, does MIT continue to attract students that have the "Manus" part?

The article says:

Over the past four months, Lorenzo had flourished, learning a new set of acronyms and raising his math grade from an F to an A. He had grown up rebuilding car engines with his brother and cousin. Now he was ready to build something of his own. The team had found its mechanics man.

I would argue that Lorenzo's hands-on experience was a key factor in his team's success.

I wonder how many of MIT's students arrive as freshman with hands-on skills? I would guess that this number has been declining over the years.

When I was a freshman at MIT, I remember fixing an old stereo on my desk. One of my eletrical engineering classmates, an absolute math genius, who had already aced the intro eletrical engineering class, asked, "Hey, what are those little things with stripes on them that you've got there?" I said, "You're kidding, right? Those are resistors, you know, "R" in all the problems you've been doing." "Oh", he said, "I'd never seen a real one before."

Mens ET Manus -- Gotta have both to be a world-class engineer. Congratulations to the "La Vida Robot" team for having what it takes!

Seems to me that MIT is actually doing something to help people in situations like this. All they need is Internet access and they can go to MIT, sort of. They'll earn no degree, but they could still get an education.

this picture should be titled return of the mac

Man, is it Flea Market season already?

Actually, yes. April 17th. Don't miss the first one. It has the best crap.

Sorry, I don't want to be staggering around chasing after my alarm clock...!

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 market share and as BSD sinks ever deeper into the mire of decay, their parting addresses will resound as fitting eulogies to BSD's demise.

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 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 was SOOOO hoping the lego bots would rebuild themselves each generation.

Actually, I really like this guy's idea. I wonder if there's a way to build a commodity bot to implement the idea...

Something like this

If I were to list the design criteria it would be:

cheap programmable controller (like one of those $3 PICs or something)
commodity IR gear
two-motor steering
bump sensors
changeable actuator
simple charging

The actuator would be things like a pincer on the front (to pick things up), or a crane, or a pronged fork. Doesn't matter. Point is to differentiate the population to give natural selection a chance to do its thing.

The charger, I would probably make the wheels metal and make charging areas such that any orientation the bot goes over the area will result in a charge. Use mini supercaps for energy storage.

I even have a perfect platform in mind;

zipzaps.

Give me a zipzap chassis with a few modifications (like ripping out the radio gear and replacing it with a PIC)

Ideally I'd like to get the build cost under $10. Then you could afford to run a real population. Anything that doesn't get back to the sensor pad gets killed from the genome and recharged. If two bots are in the charge area and agree to reproduce, they both send their genomes to the wiped bot who does his combinatorial magic on it.

I'd be interested to see what sort of emergent behaviours might occur...

Back a few years, IBM sold a laptop where you could detach the back cover of the lid, exposing the screen so that it could be placed on an overhead projector. I worked with Ted Selker who invented it, so I had a homemade prototype version. When I presented at conferences and everyone else struggled with F7 and video formats, I just whipped the back off my Thinkpad and put it on top of the overhead projector. I don't think anyone listened to my talk because they were all craning their necks to see what I had done with the display. All of the questions afterward were about where to buy such a nifty device rather than anything about my talk!

The removable back was also useful for working outdoors. You could put a white reflective surface behind the screen and backlight with sunlight, making it usable no matter how bright it was.

The project in the article comes from the MIT Media Lab, which is good at funding and publicity but lacks the intellectual rigor of the rest of MIT.

Projects in the Program Analysis Group in the EECS Department are more along the lines of tools for people who are professional programmers: upgrade testing, invariant discovery, fault detection.

If this link doesn't convince you... I don't know what will...

http://web.media.mit.edu/~nanda/personal/images/cd _5.jpg

Are you thinking what I'm thinking? Yes, that's the girl that invented this alarm clock. I think she got tired of the "natural" way of waking up that special someone.

..which will lead to these kind of situations..)

What about this? kekekeke ^______^

party girl needs special alarm clock after late nights of hot, drunk girl on girl action:
Smart idea now. see her party fotos:
blonde tongue wash
boob sqeezah
don;t look down my shirt, naughty boy
MIT swim team
I wish go to MIT for hot girls too,, but I get 430 combined on my SAT, so stay home on computer. I rule!!!

party girl needs special alarm clock after late nights of hot, drunk girl on girl action:
Smart idea now. see her party fotos:
blonde tongue wash
boob sqeezah
don;t look down my shirt, naughty boy
MIT swim team
I wish go to MIT for hot girls too,, but I get 430 combined on my SAT, so stay home on computer. I rule!!!

party girl needs special alarm clock after late nights of hot, drunk girl on girl action:
Smart idea now. see her party fotos:
blonde tongue wash
boob sqeezah
don;t look down my shirt, naughty boy
MIT swim team
I wish go to MIT for hot girls too,, but I get 430 combined on my SAT, so stay home on computer. I rule!!!

party girl needs special alarm clock after late nights of hot, drunk girl on girl action:
Smart idea now. see her party fotos:
blonde tongue wash
boob sqeezah
don;t look down my shirt, naughty boy
MIT swim team
I wish go to MIT for hot girls too,, but I get 430 combined on my SAT, so stay home on computer. I rule!!!

Yeah that's hot alright. Nothing like making my corn-dog hatred diminish a little....

Corn Dog Pic

Oops. A URL would have helped. Gauri Nanda

Thus my standard sequence of events is to go to one of the PC labs on campus, print to PDF using Acrobat and setting it to 9-up, then copying the PDF file to my commp sci network space, going to the Solaris labs, and printing the PDF. I'd like to streamline this process. Any idea?

Try these:

• Google search
• One way
• Another way

oh! and this one

man that thumbnail size is really annoying. its so small its useless. how am i supposed to efficiently goto through and virtually stalk her to find good pictures like this , this , this or this

man that thumbnail size is really annoying. its so small its useless. how am i supposed to efficiently goto through and virtually stalk her to find good pictures like this , this , this or this

man that thumbnail size is really annoying. its so small its useless. how am i supposed to efficiently goto through and virtually stalk her to find good pictures like this , this , this or this

man that thumbnail size is really annoying. its so small its useless. how am i supposed to efficiently goto through and virtually stalk her to find good pictures like this , this , this or this

The given link displays a blank page in Firefox on my computer, unless I disable the style sheet (View / Page Style / No Style). This link works fine and has more information anyway.

If her friend is around, I'm not sure I want her peeing all over the bed...

Still no hope for you...
umm... and me.
party18.jpg

If you wanted to show a picture of the girl who made this, you should have shown this one.

http://web.media.mit.edu/~nanda/personal/images/gb each_9.jpg

Here she is on the beach. My little "clocky" certainly isn't hiding.