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There's already others doing this (at least in the UK), most notably two commercial services using call centers, Re5ult and AQA, as well as Nuggets, an automatic service.

Quite right, LISP's parentheses blow everybody's mind, including Paul Graham's.

From Graham's "On Lisp" errata site:
p. 85. `(,a ,(b `,c))) has an extra close paren.

(((I) (wonder) (why)))
;-)

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He surely doesn't have to read it to understand how the system works...

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I could give them a better deal (only $ 0.2 mio): $ 0.2 mio. worth of OpenOffice 1.1 CDs and a single free advice. ;-)

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...and the technique of using short-cut for the equality

(define (IsNot x y) (not (eq a b)))

The good things is that everybody can actually use the operator because the patent (if granted) won't be upheld in court.

Having said this, everybody please move on now and get back to your source code windows, folks, so that the debate may not adversely affect productivity of the OS community, because after all that's what scares M$ the most and makes them want to protect such no-brainers in the first place. ;-)

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And cancer is not cancer until diagnosed?

Who still believes the 'security through obscurity' mantra these days?

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The UK population is even more keen on trivia, sometimes with dramatic consequences, according to this BBC news report.

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That's almost a flamebait in the original post, because it's so utterly unprincipled, ineffective and inefficient.

• Ineffective: Most importantly, it doesn't actually search a term index, but you can only search for file names (so you have to know already what you're searching for). There is no good desktop search tool for UNIX that I'm aware of (although I've used SWISH-E to index plain text document collections, but that's still different from a tool intended to index whole directory trees for full-text search.
• Inefficient: The find/locate commands don't use an index. People below have proposed updatedb, but I doubt that uses incremental index updating, which can become essential if you run it once per night on a large machine. Full-text indexing is much more resource intensive than just indexing file names, so you want to be even more sure that when tomorrows cron job starts, today's will have finished.
• Unprincipled: You could actually find a pipeline of UNIX system commands that implement full-text indexing and search, but that's not a good way to do it. I am aware of the power and versatility of the pipe paradigm, but search is such a fundamental (pervasive, important) problem that it licenses a dedicated development.

Ideally, there'd be a search engine which is part of the operating system, and Microsoft has recognised this and has been working on it for quite some time now. It will be a major selling point of Longhorn, and I predict it will dramatically enhance Windows usability compared to Linux.

Unfortunately, the open source community has not recognised the problem as a whole, but I'm aware the people on the ReiserFS file system have ambitious future plans to include features in that direction (but that might come too late), and I wouldn't count on the likes of Yahoo/Google to deliver the ultimate UNIX/Linux search solution.

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This previous post deserves to be modded up for containing this sentence.

Yes, please consider this advice, fellow geeks: how many monitors are always on even when they're not used for hours? And who pays attention to buying energy-efficient servers? Green PCs with power-saving modes? Recently left on the light when you weren't in the room for hours? Do you drive a car that needs more gas than the state of the art per 100 km? You don't even know how much your car needs?

If only more people had constant awareness of such issues, and taught their children to treat energy as something precious that must never be wasted, then this might have a higher impact than technical advancement in engergy effectiveness.

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It's nice to see that cross-national EU procedures seem to be in place to monitor these kinds of worrying development. It shows that the EU is not (just) about bureaucracy and 'being ruled from Brussels' as my British friends like to put it, but actually an effective means to watch what all its member governments are doing.

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Exactly. The US have piled up tons of VX nerve gas, and chemical/atomic weapons (yes, WMD by any definition) and THAT is wasting taxpayers' money, IMHO, not launching another GPS service. Some things have to be done multiple times to learn and incrementally improve the technology. It's good not to have to rely on US technology, but to have everything available locally, because this gives Europe more independence.

And about attacking: honestly, this is thank God the last thing Europeans have in mind. Our American friends are more under attack from the inside: their economy is stumbling, and there is an unprecedented loss of those values that were considered US-American (civil liberties, for instance).

Thankfully Europe is a project about peace and long-term economic strength, not about waging more unnecessary wars. By the way, if you're interested in how GPS is to be seen as a mosaic piece of a larger process of human learning, and how better navigation improves scientific progress and understanding, I recommend the book The Mapmakers (2nd ed).

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In the case of laptop v tablet PC I suggest size comparisons to be based on the surface are of the opened/unfolded laptop, which is after all its working size (the surface it occupies when it's actually used).

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Maybe, maybe not. The new technique would certainly be more difficult to analyse mathematically, but just stacking complicated but flawed methods does not necessarily result in a more secure method: typically, the security of the weakest link determines the security of the whole system.

What you say reminds me of Don Knuth's experience when he wrote his first innocent 'super' pseudo random number generator (reported in his Art of Computer Programming, Volume 2, page 4: "Algorithm K" ;-): he composed all sorts of complicated operations, but had to learn the resulting number sequence was far from more (pseudo-)random, in fact much worse than the the standard 1-line modulo function.

Another case of (false sense of) security through obscurity?

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• in London, there's a shop called 'All things left-handed'; they have special scissors for left-handed people and other hillarious items
• there's a great book about laterality called 'Left Hand, Right Hand' by Chris McManus (nomen est omen -- the Latin for 'hand' is manus ;-). Here's the Website of the book: click me

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USENET should be free again, not free as in beer, but free as in Freedom.

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Another recommendation (less related to your question, but very important nevertheless) that makes success in the industry more likely is to consider spending one term/semester abroad (it proves your flexibility and widens your perception and personal network).

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Same holds for hardware. I have known employees who bought their own harddrives and installed them (illegally), just because it was the only way to get their work done....

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I would be very surprised if those people could come up with a test that didn't rely on Microsoft technology entirely. When I read they want to test people's problem's solving abilities, I heard an alarm bell ring in my head and a little evil voice said "Excel!"

Just a prophecy, let's see...

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• (a) there is some consensus among the developers about the price, which in turn depends who many such private licenses are likely to be granted (which in turn depends on whether Mr Murkey plans about sharing his acquisition with others), and
• (b) whether he can practically manage to locate and convince all developers. Not all developers might be known, but that's not HIS fault. If people contribute to the kernel without leaving a comment of what they did and who they are, I'm not sure what copyright law says about claims those people can make. Think about somebody who came out in 2004 claiming to have authored your favorite folklore song; I don't think any court would assign rights a posteriori, with the song being printed in thousands of song books marked "traditional".
  Even the unknown authorship in Linux sources could be solved by asking all known authors to delineate sections of code in Linux they have developed. Regions that have no known owner would have to be re-implemented. (Does such an ownership map exist? How many LOC are owned by 'Anonymous'?)

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Assuming that the Honeywell-based IMP was a using a 7-bit ASCII-like encoding without checksum bit and transferred bit sequentially from most to least significant bit, then the first sequence was 1001100. But I guess it was perhaps rather based on a five-bit teletype scheme.

There wasn't much info on the DDP-516's homepage about that. But I like this quote: "The Honeywell DDP-516 was chosen for its high clock speed (aprox. 1.1 MHz) and expandability"

Birth of the Internet

Honeywell Series 16

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What about XML with dedicated DTDs for calendar, meeting minutes, support messages, FAQs, software documentation, etc.? You could use XSLT to create XHTML from those automatically, even on the fly.

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And if you're having a small car accident somewhere and both parties don't want to bother calling the police you can quickly exchage your (authenticated!) name.

In effect, the ID card is a downsized version of the ID card that is already part of EU passports (the plastic, machine-readable part). And there's no secret information stored on it either, because you can tell how the information is encoded in the two machine-readable lines of text:

• The lead string "ID" to calibrate the card readers.
• Surname
• First mame
• Number of the ID card
• Country issued
• Date issued
• Expiration date
• Checksum

IDGB<NEAL<<<<<COWBOY<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<
7101245447G B<<770101X<380119Y<<<<<<<Z

So it's very simple and transparent, no Orwellian tech built in. That's why I love my (German) ID card and always carry it (even in Britain) to give evident that I'm me (and not Elvis), fly around without having to remember did I forget my passport, and yet nobody can easily abuse the system.
A biometric passport, on the other hand, would be a completely different matter...

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• Why _load_ Firefox/OOffice when you can run it in the ROM? It might run a bit slower, but the perceived responsiveness is often determined by application startup time.
• Why _boot_ a machine at all? I'm ok with developers' machines being booted, since they stay up 27/7 anyway. But a consumer who wants to check something on the Net or write a quick letter can't be bothered to go through a 3-minute boot cycle.
• Also, it can't hurt to modify the hardware slightly so that a LED indicates there are new emails even if the whole box is switched off, to save energy.

The only idea that goes a little bit in this direction is modern BIOSes that have a built-in Web browser that doesn't need an OS.

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The statistical properties of languages are utilized in most (successful) approaches for natural language processing, from part-of-speech tagging, information extraction, syntactic parsing, machine translation to question answering; you could almost say that NLP=S(tatistical)NLP nowadays.

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On second thought it wouldn't be too bad to be able to browse all O'Reilly books, real paper version, at 5:18 a.m...

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Well, it already had a virtual machine (like the Java JVM), the P-machine back in the early 1980s. PASCAL is very readable, and Wirth's booklet on compiler construction is still a great introduction to compilers, which contains the very short and readable source code of a simple compiler.

However the editor sucked as much as vi, as you had to press 'i' for insert. Thanks to Emacs, pico and fellows.

For those lamenting FORTRAN posters: There was a system around called Oxford PASCAL for the Commodore C64, which actually was an interpreter, probably the only PASCAL with line numbers...

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1) The current tool runs with Administrator permissions.

This is simply a tiny technical oddity that Google will soon be able to fix.

2) The current tool indexes cache content.

We users don't want that. Even if the fact that it merely exposes underlying OS or app security flaws (by virtue of the power of indexing), it's not likely to impress users if Google brings these things up as search results.

This can be easily fixed by excluding cached content from indexing.

3) Search might move in a direction where global repositories and Web content are accessed using the same query.

This is tough: because it's such a useful feature, many people will want to have it. However, by submitting all your local searches in parallel also to a global search engine that maintains knowledge about your IP and a cookie, Google will soon more about you than your next to kin. This needs a theoretical solution (most likely there needs to be an intermediate layer of anonymization, like Freenet has it).

4) Google might be transferring "interesting" local content they find to their site to spy on you.

I don't believe they do this now, but that doesn't matter. The problem is they might in the future: imagine a fictional country passed a law that allowed their agents to get access to Google's infrastructure to fight a made-up enemy.... Right now, you have to TRUST them, but nobody monitors this in a principled way, so there should be a well-found mechanism in place to render potential temptations meaningless. Freedom is at stake here.

5) Even if you index only your own account, you don't want to see everything all the time. When you're being watched by your nine-year old boy, a search for mum shouldn't perhaps bring up and email revealing somebody close to him will probably die from cancer within 6 months. There are more examples.

This is tough, and it's a conceptual HCI issue, and a social one, not a technical security flaw. One solution could be to introduce a MODE to indicate the privacy/trust level of your context/environment, e.g. "I'm working alone at home", "I'm working in a group of colleagues in my company", "I'm on a public terminal in a busy shopping mall" (some people access their home machines remotely). The problem is somewhat related to watching other people type their passwords: it's always been part of hacker etiquette to look away when somebody logs on to a machine rather than stare on their fingers and take pencil notes. But the search issue is more complex, and there really needs to be a mechanism in place, not a social norm.

In summary, the Google desktop search tool is useful, because it forces us to re-think security and privacy as boundaries between local and global systems are blurred. After all, the network is the computer.

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I've always been wondering where the title of his book came from (recommended, BTW). Now I suspect it's what his boss said when he found him "working" on his office safe late at night...

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For researchers in style or computational linguistics, the prospect of getting the hands on more people's INBOXes is mind-boggling. Eventually, I hope this will improve the horrible present-day interfaces to email.

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It has been verified that the returned hard-drives are the originals ... The hard-drives will be treated as "hacked" (compromised)

That's an interesting aspect. It might be worth not re-formatting the drives, but rather investigate whether any spyware has been installed (or maybe data modified), using the same forensic methods that law enforcement agencies use.

The hallmark of democracy is that state powers are also controlled themselves, by institutions and its citizens.

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Since the two languages have striking similarities, one wonders when people will begin to develop source code translators to shield problem-oriented developers from the idiosyncrac differences between the two languages.

For instance, ISI's STELLA is a LISP dialect which compiles to Common LISP, C++ and Java(R). Along the same line, it would be nice to have a compiler for a "JaC#" language that compiles to both, utilising tons of Java APIs and C#'s ability to do native compilation (I am aware there are portability limits, but I'd much rather be able to be confined to a common subset while able to easily move between the C++/Java/C# worlds than using obscure language features that others can't decipher anyway).

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Maybe roller-skating is much easier than cleaning a real home with all its niches and obstacles, after all. You'd have to teach the robot that the carpet has to be hoovered, and the windows need to be cleaned with a sponge, water and a few drops of dish washing liquid in it and not the other way round. You need to tell it not to pour any water over your brand new 21" TFT, and you'd have to hardwire the use of stonger detergents for cleaning the toilet. You might even have to encode a map of your place so that the robot doesn't get lost (if the robot needs energy, do you really have _two_ unused sockets in each room of your house--one for the robot, one for the hoover)?

There's two way of tackling this: bottom-up or top-down. Top-down means you do research on robots that roller-skate, somebody else might do a little project teaching robots how to climb stairs etc, and none of the might have applications in mind. The bottom-up approach starts from the current-day state of the art and uses proven engineering principles to push that state of the art just a little bit further with each product generation. So you'd start designing hoovers, then hoovers that detect vases and avoid bumping into them, then you add an additional arm that cleans windows on the fly etc. Each generation is rolled out to alpha/beter test users and eventually to real customers before the next stage. In practice, the first type of research and development ("academic") and the latter ("industrial") usually interact, but not nearly as much as one would wish, since assumptions and motivations are very different.

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You're cursing the wrong guy. The real (Edward A.) Murphy(, Jr.) can't be blamed for your dishwashers leakage because (a) he is dead now AFAIK and (b) he was an aircraft engineer, not a diswasher technician...

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[I]t's quite difficult to spend time in Cambridge, England without encountering Newton.

Well, hard to not encounter anyone who has a King Kong sized statue in his old college's chapel.

I wonder whether the discovery of the Turing Machine, the machine that can be all machines, at the very same place might not be an equally impressive achievement.

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Could they analyze your files and give your government access to their index for cash?

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"Turn left!"

"Sorry, Dave, I can't do that."

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Is there any evidence to back up the claim that Koreans have poorer IT security than, say, the US or Europe?

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They should be ashamed to even think about patenting a no-brainer like that. No honourable geek would even consider working for Sun now.

Come to think of it, how about filing a patent entitled 'Method and apparatus to evcuate human excrements using a water-flushed chair (T.O.I.L.E.T)'? What, you have seen/used such a device before...?

When the patent system was invented, it was never meant to keep ideas proprietary. It was meant to encourage innovation by protecting significant investments in research and development. Licensing models might be clever, but they aren't a result of investing in a 5-year plan to build a new factory. Now it's time to modify the law to ensure that the innovation-fostering rationale gets to apply again.

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I'd rather they sign and ratify the Kyoto agreement like 166 odd other states, and work on means of transportation that consume less energy and don't pollute our environment as much, because THAT'S what we really need (IMHO).

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Maybe you like the Cambridge HTK better, then ;-)

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