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My school offers a distance ed. program based on technology.

You can check it out here.

Anyway, this is a big deal to me. I'm 28, a parent, and I'm married. It would be very hard on me and my family to go back to school now. With this program I'm able to get a comp sci master's degree without taking away from my income or family time (I do the work after my two year old goes to bed.)

In addition to that, on campus students are able to make up classes or watch critical sections twice. The school makes money on VBEE (video based engineering education) students even though they are charged less because they don't use the same assets. They make even more money when they reuse the lectures. (A lecture is good for about 18 months in comp sci.)

Anyway, on campus students benefit, the school benefits, and VBEE students benefit. It's not cheap. To do it right you need a camera man, you need to mic every student, you need streaming realplayer servers, you need good presentation monitors in the room, etc. Production quality matters. However, it's enabled me to get a masters (I'm almost done) and learn *a lot*. It's improved my career and my life.

One of the Universities here in North Carolina has a big Computer Science program that actively participates in advancing Linux (great project). NC State University also has their own Linux distro based on RedHat...I believe all of the engineering students use their Linux distro, but the rest of the students still use Windows.

I find the second name on the left hand frame of this page very interesting. pb? what have you to do with this?

How do the news stories get uploaded to the paper? The "e-paper" might be light and thin, but a wireless networked computer isn't. What happens when it gets dirty? Breaks? Oh, and what about batteries? They're not exactly environmentally-friendly.

People treat magazines and newspapers as disposable items. It's going to take a serious cultural change for people to treat their periodicals with love and tenderness. Quite frankly, why should they? To replace a highly recyclable product like newspaper?

Just to respond to you, out of all the people talking about warehouses - you should realize that there is already an existing market, with existing suppliers, for industrial vehicles. Cushman is a popular maker of such vehicles. Check out this outline of material handling equipment, including industrial trucks. A stock picker offers vertical elevation as well as horizontal mobility - most warehouses have tall racks. If that's not an issue, don't you think something like this Taylor-Dunn Stockchaser is a more sensible machine to use in a warehouse?

It amazes me that some folks think that a huge industry like material handling would just be languishing in the dark ages because nobody thought of the right kind of vehicle, and some guy from the medical equipment industry suddenly invented it. Please don't take it personally.

Interestingly enough, the BT patent credits a 1965! patent awarded to UIUC Professor Don Bitzer for his PLATO work that sure seems like suitable prior art on its own for hyperlinks.

Don Bitzer is the true unsung hero of computer science - his work touched virtually everything people love today about computers and the Internet!

Check out the patent - bitmapped graphics, audio and photographic quality images back in 1965!

Other (pre-1975!) PLATO innovations included instant messaging, near zero latency multiplayer network gaming, distance learning, groupware, newsgroups, online newspapers, animated email, network delivery of music, client/server computing, touch screen interfaces, flat-panel displays (the basis for the ones you're just now seeing at Circuit City!), and multimedia that were delivered across a worldwide educational network with satellite and cable communications.

In his ACM article on the early days of Smalltalk, Alan Kay states that he had no idea how to implement his Dynabook concept before seeing a demo of Bitzer's patented plasma display.

Search some of the early WWW documents, and you'll be surprised to see PLATO's influence. Here's e-mail inventor Ray Tomlinson and Ethernet papa Robert Metcalfe attending a 1971 conference that included a demo of Bitzer's PLATO system before their breakthrough work. And there's communication from none less than Tim Berners-Lee encouraging early Internet pioneers to try to meet Professor Daniel Sleator's challenge to try to provide the Web with easy-to-use PLATO features from two decades earlier.

Prominent users of Bitzer's PLATO system at the University of Illinois included Groove's Ray Ozzie (who credits PLATO with giving him the idea for Lotus Notes) and Brand Fortner, a founder of Spyglass, which produced the original Internet Explorer for Microsoft.

At the risk of overestimating PLATO's profound influence, it certainly is an odd coincidence that "ground zero" of PLATO just happened to be across the street from Netscape founder Mark Andreesen's NSCA gig (where Fortner also worked at one time).

For more info on PLATO, check out David Woolley's excellent PLATO: The Emergence of Online Community.

After reading it, you'll see that Bitzer's PLATO of the early '70s had far more in common with today's popular Internet that Berners-Lee's Web of the early '90s.

Don Bitzer's been the Rodney Dangerfield of the Internet for far too long - it's time to give the guy the proper respect he deserves!

huh. where are the universities? look around, see plenty of stuff going on.

at my institution (I'm a grad student, not in CS), there are strange wars around campus over operating system choice. the campus is sponsored by Sun and so we have these javaboxen all over the place. however, there are a pile of machines owned by various faculties that are all running iis, and yes, they were all hit by code red. one of my (non-CS) profs has a linux server in his office. so by no means is it a MFC house: rather it would be best characterized as a war zone. the only CS prof I know seems to be doing all his work in java. also, I know of plenty of other places where perl is running everything.

but then, I'm in library science, and here in LIS open source is considered a very good thing, because we always need to tweak stuff for our environments. (example: my library, written in perl and GPL'ed).

is of course that they were able to do something useful with the heart afterwards.

I'd like to point out that the average mammalian heart will keep beating of its own accord for several minutes after it has been removed from a living body. The normal heart has a set of electrodes, called the sinoatrial node and the atrial ventricular node, which broadcast electrical impulses to coordinate the simultaneous contraction of the heart muscle. Read all about it here.

I remember this because of a rat vivisection lab in sophomore biology. We opened that sucker up, and cut its heart out while it was still beating, and dropped the heart (it was about the size of a garbanzo bean) into a 100-mL beaker full of saline. The heart functioned like a little underwater jet-ski, pumping itself around the inside of the beaker for a good 5 minutes after it had been removed from its host.

the point is that the heart wants to keep on beating for a while...

I believe that North Carolina State University has a number of linux computer labs(Red Hat). Although I get the feeling that you were not referring to educational institutions.

As an undergrad I majored in Math and Philosophy and minored in Comp Sci (graduated 1991) at a small liberal arts college. It happens this college is hardly a technical powerhouse, although their Math and Science departments are quite solid. I took a lot of courses in philosophy which taught me writing and discussion skills as well as logic skills. Just under half my course load was foreign language, psychology, literature, writing, history, chemistry, fine arts. In other words: writing, speaking, logic, math, science, art -- the classical liberal arts. "Well rounded" doesn't mean a little of everything, it means the things that are fundamentally useful, the skills that other skills are founded on. After graduating I got a masters in Comp Sci at a huge state engineering school. I learned a lot about computers there, so much more than I did in college or on my own. But what I learned there is less useful in the long term I think. The liberal arts are useful in industry, they just don't show up as keywords in an HR skills database.

Finally, you might like to take a look at Richard Gabriel's Patterns of Software. Although he doesn't specifically address curriculums, he does talk about his experiences in school and in the business world, as well as how to write software. I found it quite valuable, I think you might too.

Personally I wouldn't judge which colleges are underfunded by comparing them to other, possibly overfunded, colleges. "Corporations invested $34,193,280 with NC State", and "NC State received $6,881,136 from foundations". Or by comparing them to a college like Georgia Tech, which gets a large chunk of it's funding by being 'employed' under the government for it's research.

me too.

When I'm not in a hurry, I'll try to use: http://www.csc.ncsu.edu/cgi-bin/ispell.pl . It's so hard to get things done right under NT. :)

Awww, shoot. It did not work and I hate using a mouse only to have Word or Outlook screw up my formating. I have not been able to make ispell work on this stupid work NT box yet so that I can check text text file spellings like a human being.

This subject has come to us, pre-flogged, like the dead horse it is, so I'll be brief.

1) Block ads. Proxies. Junkbuster.

2) Disable Java, disable JavaScript, whenever possible, disable, disable, disable.

3) Avoid sites with annoying ads, wherever possible. Like those annoying OSDN sites... some even with banners on the top and the bottom!

4) This is NEWS??

5) oh... there is no five. I lost interest. Sorry. What was this about again?
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

WRAP

http://www.sentrisystems.com
http://sysnews.ncsu.edu/wrap

But the rest of the world knew that gets() was bad before Microsoft even knew what the WWW was. Or before anyone knew what the WWW was, since it didn't exist at the time. Robert T. Morris's Internet Worm, 1988.

that is mostly true; it depends on that first part, which is getting wine to emulate an i386 for you. At the moment this is almost nonexistent (listed at 5%, no serious effort, from the Wine Status page).

However, if it ever is, then Wine will end up being a modern replacement for tools like Wabi (which was very cool at the time) instead of just a toy/tool for us Intel users.

Until then, there's always Bochs, at least, but that's pretty slow; Plex86 is not quite ready for prime time, and DOSEmu doesn't have that much support for i386 emulation, but more than Wine does...
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

So... once we crossbreed humans with cockroaches, we'll have the perfect soldiers?

Don't get me wrong, biotechnology might have some interesting applications here, but it's easy to see how this could be taken too far. Quite readily taken WAY too far.

Personally, I'd be more in favor of CLONING the perfect soldier than actually creating something non-human. Somehow I find that less frighteningly creepy.
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

I sense... a bad...
remake... coming to...
my cable... network...
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

I've been a huge fan of the Ultima games, and even besides that Origin used to put out good, wacky stuff. (rembember Tangled Tales?)

The last few Ultima offerings were pretty poor in comparison, (I'm a big fan of Ultima VI, and everything before that) so I hope that Lord British brings us some new, original stuff. (even if it isn't Ultima)

Damn you, Slashdot. You finally put out a story I'm interested in, and now I can't wait!
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

Just wait until some cop or politician or something in India gets their history published all over the tabloids.

Even if it's fake, people will soon see that stupid technology like this cuts both ways, and can easily turn on its implementors....
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

Don't worry, you'll hear from the consumers soon enough.

I've got a copy of Windows XP Beta 2 from my University, and it annoys me greatly that I can't disable MSN Messenger.

I don't use it, I don't have an account, I don't want it. And yet, it runs on startup. Even if I try to get rid of it. And now msconfig does too, for no apparent reason.

It's bothersome, not helpful. The last thing I need is more crap automatically running whenever I login. Crap I don't use. Crap I don't want. Microsoft.

Good thing I never boot into Windows XP. :)
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

The above issue (78) has an article entitled Distance Education Using Linux and the MBONE, by Kelly Davis, Dr. Tom Miller, and Charles Price, primarily focused on lecture (push) needs.

However, it describes several tools including a whiteboard with clients for both windows and Linux, an A/V session recorder, etc, etc.

The article includes an URL: www.engr.ncsu.edu

Good luck!

(PS: I agree with the first author re Wacom, and disagree with the Trolls.)

Great job, Carnage4Life!

I didn't think I'd see the day when someone got actual content posted on Slashdot.

Or, for that matter, that you'd post a Java article that I thought was somewhat interesting and useful... :)

Anyhow, wouldn't it be easier to integrate all this with C? Especially considering the huge body of existing code, and the well-known primitives involved.

And are there any less proprietary OODBMSes out there that anyone would recommend?
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

Avoiding any possible Microsoft-jokes, I think this qualifies... Although I'm not 100% sure it's bigger, documentation-wise. Who knows, your favorite might be implemented as a symlink to this classic? ;^)

Then don't use Napster, silly!

The entire reason that .mp3's were successful is that encoders, data, and players, regardless of their legality, became easy to find and use. That made it a de-facto standard.

No content service gets more users by censoring them, or restricting their rights; it's quite the opposite, really. They get more users *either* by dumping lots of money into advertising, and squashing their competitors, and keeping their service closed, (see AOL, Microsoft, MSN, and now Napster...) *or* by letting their service, integrity and reputation do their advertising for them. (a great example of this is google)

...and given a choice between the two kinds of companies, I'd always pick the latter. Unfortunately, people who don't know enough to ignore the advertising or find the alternatives will back the former, and more's the pity.
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

That's what 'anonymous' means, and it's about time someone realized that.

My question is, does the judge care about privacy, i.e., would he do the same thing if the company in question was Microsoft, or if the .com's were still successful.

I know we still have some good judges out there, but commercial interests are rapidly taking over our gov't, and I don't think our judicial system alone will be enough to salvage it.
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

That's actually pretty funny. And I'd like it if you kept posting articles with such decent explanations and interesting articles.

But then, how could I distinguish Slashdot from, say, The Onion, or BBSpot, or other weblogs with such high journalistic standards?
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

Unfortunately, that doesn't give me much more information. It did load eventually, though.

However: download PDF files? Bah. And they call themselves "on the web". In my day, we had HTML documents. And content that wasn't marketing gibberish...

pb is obviously an old, crotchety websurfer, from 1994. (and a BBSer before that...)
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

Exactly. That's almost as worthless as the original description, and definitely worse than writing a coherent story submission.

Oh, and by the way: what do you call a suggestion to raise the bar of "Slashdot Journalism"? Troll, of course!

For bonus points, why is it a troll? Because "Slashdot Journalism" is a made-up phrase; it doesn't exist! Therefore, anyone who mentions it is obviously trolling.
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

Similarly, that post deserved your -2 Bonus. :)

And yea, they obviously rushed this one even more than usual. Intel sucks...
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

Although that's not really acceptable for a released, commercial processor, I must say that it sure beats overheating!

Why can't processors dynamically adjust their clock speed based on temperature in the first place? Transmeta does this somewhat, but it'd be nice if my chip could overclock itself, insofar as that is safe. :)
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

Yea, you're right. I was, of course, writing a reply to a slashdot review of a movie by Katz, instead of going to see the movie in question.

However, no movie theaters in my area seem to be showing the movie in question, so it seems that it would be unlikely for me to have seen it. I could similarly harangue you to "check the listings in my area before you post a useless reply", but that would be equally pointless.

However, if you think it was a good mystery, then maybe I'll rent it sometime, or even see it in the theater if it catches on the way CTHD did...
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

There's a fine line between "think" and "intentionally confuse".

If Hollywood wanted to make me think, they could give me a traditional mystery, with some complex characters and interaction.

If they wanted to, instead, intentionally confuse me, they could run the whole thing backwards.

It sounds like they tried to do both, and put it in a blender for a while. And I'm not sure if I like that yet.

And I have no idea where you get off with the "politically correct" "Steven Seagal movie" bit, but I'm curious. :)
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

What, so now I should pay Katz?

I'm sorry, but after Columbine, I don't think I could afford it. :)
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

What a great idea: harrass the audience by not telling them the story in a straightforward manner.

So... if we don't understand it all, can we pay half-price?

Similarly, I'm glad I read your content for free, Katz!
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

These plans are always sketchy, but I'd love to see a Linux PDA.

More importantly, I'd love to see the software!

Heck, I wouldn't mind having handwriting recognition apps on regular Linux to play around with...
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

Yeah, and guess what.

Those Makefiles run as root on your system, and can therefore do anything, bla bla bla.

Besides, all an rpm file is, is a fancy cpio archive. You can rip it apart and not let rpm do anything extra.
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

Yea, I found it, eventually. No help from slashdot, though. A.I. is such a generic term that "AI Movie Promo" doesn't help me. I mean, shit, that could be "Short Circuit 3", for all I know.

You're right about that movie file: "Sorensen Codec, Unsupported"

The IMDB has links to different trailers, as well. But I already posted a link to the official site, and if Slashdot can't be bothered to tell people WTF they're reporting on, then I sure as hell can't be anymore...
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

A search on IMDB actually found an "A.I." movie.

And they at least bothered to link to the official site.

But really. Is that too much to ask?
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

The trailer for *what*?

Is the thing in the second frame the name of the movie?

How about a link to the IMDB instead?

Christ. If this is journalism, then I'll just read M-x psychoanalyze-pinhead for news.

P.S. Whatever the codec is for that .AVI, it's unsupported in XAnim. So could you please just *tell* me something about the movie in a coherent fashion this time?
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

Sorry, Ben; I couldn't find an easy way to get to the source, but google could.

Perhaps in the future you might consider using a robots.txt file to help restrict this as well?

Since it doesn't look like I'll be able to build this on Linux easily, you won't have to worry about my copy of the source. :)
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

It's not a problem, and it's easily explained. Most likely, there is no vast conspiracy at work here.

First, AmIHotOrNot does calculate your percentiles against everyone else; they probably all have a similar distribution.

Second, that spike is probably from people who load up the site with both "Girls and Guys" and don't notice, when they only want one or the other. They get to your picture, give you a 1, and switch to Girls only...

But whatever the case, assuming no one is out to get you, the percentiles should still be pretty fair, and accurate insofar as they compare you to the rest of the people on AmIHotOrNot...

And if it were 'just a site about rating women', it would probably still belong on Slashdot. Slashdot posts what the editors want to post. Period. "News for Slashdot Editors, Stuff that they think is cool." They've said this on several occasions.
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

VTP looks really cool.

Source Download Is Here

I'll tell you if I can build it. :)
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

Hahah, cool. I've been here for about five years now. If you're curious, drop me an e-mail, and I'll tell you what's messed up with the Realm now, and why.

Basically the platforms on campus are Solaris, Windows NT, and Linux, and none of them are standardized. It used to be that at least any Unix on the realm mapped to the same sort of locker space, but now it's pretty messed up...
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

Actually, I think we will have at least E-Bay and Paypal in a year or so, if they don't fuck it up. I'm not so sure about Amazon, but they'll probably still be there too.

But, more to the point, there will always be work for people who fill that same economic niche, and I think there is a niche there now.

And yes, there have been times like that, it depends on external history, and you're exaggerating greatly. Prohibition, cocaine, and stuff like that are good examples. Even the stock market (NASDAQ and tech stuff) hasn't gone down by more than 60% since its peak; certainly not 99.4%

And of course they're tired of $20/month dialup; that's because dialup is slow. They're getting cable modems or DSL. They're all addicted to e-mail, have websites, and have favorite websites. Some of them are on lists, and some of them use chat programs. And I'm not even talking about the geeks I know here...

Oh. Nice post, and I have to ask: why are you still here? If there's any has-been site that should be mentioned here, it's SLASHDOT. :)
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

Hey, cool. You're in NC too?

And you've messed with OpenSRS?
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

This sounds like a cool application, but not a ground-breaking one. It's like 802.11b without an access point, and hopefully it'll be more robust as well.

But... ho hum, I'm sure we'll have a whole different set of wireless protocols in two years. If Bluetooth survives, it'll be faster, and 802.11b will have to do something (better) to deal with interference from other concurrent wireless protocols.
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

"The first world regulatory body"?

Don't we already have the UN?

Also, since this *is* the Internet we're talking about, shouldn't we be just as worried as everyone else who sets policy for it?

I mean, really, damn those standards boards, making us all do things the same way! It's a plot, I tell you!

I'd take ICANN over NSI any day...

Oh wait. "Former NSI CTO". I Have Been Trolled.

Damn you, Slashdot!
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

That would be a really cool app. Heck, having an sshable Linux install like the Cobalt Qube running on Xboxes would be awesome. Almost enough to make me buy one.

And, obviously, if it could run Linux, then Linux could run apache. I suppose that just a web server would be good, but why think small? Use it for a cheap firewall or router. Run sendmail. Run RC5.

And, obviously, make a beowulf cluster of these. :)
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

The story isn't even amusing, and the methodology is flawed. E-Business is here, and it's here to stay. The only fact we've seen so far is that companies that can't make money fail.

Note the structure in each of these "dumb moments".

Person x starts company y. Blah blah blah. Then, n months later, company y dies horribly.

Ooo, big surprise. Then you just pick, like, 50 people and companies, and a couple of anecdotes about each one, and figure out how long that n months is until the market collapsed. Whee, I'm a journalist now!

What is more interesting is, instead of stupidly gloating, to note which companies are still *in* business and why, rather to glibly talk about the failure of e-business. Some companies are making money, or have viable business models. Ok, so pets.com is dead. Oh darn. But look, we still have Amazon.com, Paypal, and E-Bay!
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.