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And don't forget that in Stalin's era there were only ~150million people. A much higher percentage of the population. This article also points out that he would likely have had more people in jail if he didn't kill them all...

I wonder what the mortality rate is for mice with common dirt released directly into their lungs?

Did you even bother to look for the actual research. I did a very quick search on google, and found this report. I'd love an actual link to the study, but I don't have time to do more searching.

This report talked about a study which compared particles of 20 nanometers (deadly) with ones of 130 nanometers (not deadly) in the same concentrations. Certainly these results are not perfect, a better study would make these nanoparticles into an areosol, as this would be the most likely form of real-life delivery.. that is, a light dust cloud breathed by a human after some object was moved containing nanotubes. In any case, I'm sure the same concentration of plain-old dirt would not even be noticed.

If you want to argue the results... do you own study. Oh wait, that was the point of the NY Times article wasn't it... that not enough studies were being done. Amazing.

We use req which is an email based request tracking system. It has several interfaces including command line, X Windows (tkReq) and emacs. While fairly easy to get up and running, we've found it is a little bit limited as our dept's needs/expectations have grown. Good for smaller organisations who want something simple and straightforward; maybe not so good for larger groups.

Damn, I was hoping you were talking about Tommy Maddox, one and only MVP of Vince McMahon's eXtreme Football League and quarterback for the Los Angeles eXtreme! Let's see how much trouble I get in for trying to Slashdot my school...

nothing beats the happy fun ball
mirror...

I pretty much agree with you, so imagine my surprise to find, a few links deep into the posted article, a reference to a case of what someone seriously called a rape in a MUD. This has to be read to be believed.

Oh.. I forgot to include this for folks like you:

include brain.h

Sorry.


Maybe, perhaps, I should have included this for folks like you:

Guide for Written Communication

Strunk & White's The Elements of Style

However, to do that you'd need to know where the glove is in space, not just its configuration with respect to itself, which would require more sophisticated hardware.

Sophisticated hardware such as this?

One thing which is handy for backdoor is SSH tunneling. A nice exaple can be found here Just replace port 110 with anything else and off you go

Rus

I recently heard Pual Graham speak at my university, giving this very same talk; or, rather, a foreshortened version of it. And I have to say that I agree with many of the points that he makes. I, however, have recently begun to think of hacking as a modern-day alchemy. Not only are you trying to create new things with techniques and skill (the latter is where the science and engineering really come into hacking, as well as painting), but you're also trying to determine what the rules are. In my experience, much of hacking is poking at something to see what it does, seeing if I could make X do Y, and then while also doing Z. Computer Science is really more related to the arcane sciences than the modern "hard sciences."

I wrote a paper about this topic for my Intro to Communication Theory class, available for download in pdf ... note, the pdf is actually crappy quality compared to the original cwk file, since i couldn't track down a decent distiller program

I only mention this as I was a student at the above and silent password logging TSRs were rampant on their network.

Oh yeah, and their entire collection of staff/student mailboxes and the mailspool were made available via an anonymous read/write network share if you knew enough about Novell Netware to manually map a drive.

To clarify, Boston (in Massachusetts, United States) was named after Boston (in Lincolnshire, United Kingdom) - more information can be found here.

whenYouCan(keepReferencingYourObjects)->LikeThis An d(you->use)->VerboseVariableNames(then, line(breaks,can->be))->Few(andFarBetween);


This code is a horrible violation of the
Law of Demeter. If you're doing this, formatting is not your biggest concern.

Instead of trying to make thousands of transactions a day totaling only a few pennies or less (which is what ads result in if you're lucky), I propose a simpler system; a small yearly fee (less than $10USD) which works out to a micropayment per day. Memberships and subscriptions tend to cost more money for a smaller period of time.

• implicit (yet secure) payments. The user should be able to configure their (trusted) web browser to automatically make requested per-page micropayments to a server if those payments are below a threshold (e.g., $0.001). The browser can prompt the user for permission to make larger micropayments. It's very important that the user does not need to intervene in the micropayment process every time they request a document. Since a user can not read through the whole source of the browser and anything else that might need to make payments, perhaps the browser and other programs should call an external program to make the payments, the user's `payment agent'. This would be a small program that makes payments while following the user's policies and restrictions.
• extremely low (or non-existent) per-transaction fees. If the provider(s) of the payment system are charging $0.10 to the payment receiver for each micropayment, it obviously won't work. This essentially implies the next requirement.
• contact with payment system provider(s) not required for every transaction. If the server collecting micropayments must contact the provider(s) every time a payment is collected, the system will not be feasible. The server should be able to store up many micropayments and redeem them with the provider all at once every day/week/month.

• http://ntrg.cs.tcd.ie/mepeirce/Project/Mlists/mini faq.html
• http://research.compaq.com/SRC/personal/steveg/mil licent/millicent.html
• http://www.ccs.neu.edu/home/yiannis/pubs.html
• http://www.aci.net/kalliste/cryptnum.htm
• http://www.chaum.com/articles/list_of_articles.htm

> Try and do Prolog-style logic programming in LISP,
> and you'll end up with a lot of useless effort

Not really. You end up with a lot less effort
than using Prolog, because you get all of Prolog's
functionality, plus direct access to a more general
underlying framework. See, for example, Schelog
or Poplog.

Hey, why reinvent the wheel? A dog might not be
able to walk past a tree without pissing on it, but
I would hope that a software developer could do
better than that.... Call me a cock-eyed optimist.

First off, let me apologise for trying to answer your question, as that doesn't seem to be the done thing around here.

The paper Advanced Control Flows for Flexible Graphical User Interfaces discusses how to write GUIs that have the same flexibility as web applications (back and forwards motion between states and multiple views of the application). If you have a programming language theory background the technique is continuation-passing style. If that means nothing to you just read the paper :-)

We've had payment here too. We have a central Debit system that works across vending machines, the food court, and the laundry system, its pretty handy. Too bad I'm moving off campus this year. Oh well, at least I'll have unfettered Internet access. ^_^

Well, it would just be only a special case of the Troutman's Laws of Computer Programming (see law #5).

wh00t? Did you say wh00t? (I think WIPO went insane.)

Textbook divide and conquer attack.

They do not have batteries. I'm not exactly sure HOW they work but I haven't seen anyone else explain it either and, you know, this is the net. The answer can't be that difficult.

A web google search didn't turn up much besides this. The Mobil Speedpass is based on Texas Instruments' Registration and Identification System (TIRIS), the first radio-frequency identification (RFID) device used for retail transactions. The system is similar to a remote control but different in that RFIDs transmit a user-specific signal, almost like a wireless PIN number.

But a usenet search turned up a lot, like this post. Ok, a typical device of this type is quite simple in concept. The coil with rod, acts to recieve 100Khz or so RF, which is then rectified to charge a capacitor, to power the rest. There is a small chip in there, which talks to the reader, usually by shorting out the coil for short periods of time, this causes the RF field to change, which can be read by the reader. Another way is for the chip to connect a diode to the coil, this causes the transmitter/reciever to generate a harmonic, at 2* the frequency of the exciting field, this can also be picked up.

As it stands, having the government build roads subsidises car makers. If the government spent as much on building railroad tracks as it does on maintaining highways, owning a couple trains would be as profitable as owning a fleet of trucks... A tax like this reverses the subsidies... It would cover for new roads, as the articles suggest, but could also help pay for environmental measures, as well.

I agree. The US Govt botched Amtrak. They should have taken over the infrastructure and improved it (electrifiying, etc), while creating a more open market to do the actual moving. The government does a good job of running infrastructure but not of serving customers (witness Amtrak delays and horrible service). This is analogous to roads: the government builds and maintains the roads, but private concerns run buses and trucks.

While not my favorite governor of Massachusetts, Michael Dukakis proposed essentially the same thing a while back. Unfortunately nothing ever became of it.

As part of tuition my university subscribes to Lexis-Nexus, and many other similar resources. Yeah, Im sure as hell going to buy the privilege to use this Yahoo! search engine.

Ahh, the many hours of meetings that I've spent folding paper. I did, however, tend to get in trouble for folding paper during middle and high school.

For some serious challenges, try memorizing more complicated models like Kawasaki's rose. (diagram) (makes a nice tip, too. the rose in Origami for the Connoisseur is easier to learn...) Or learn to make modular origami stuff (origami that uses multiple units that are [generally] all the same). (instructions)

A great place to start is Joseph Wu's Origami Page.

The myth that a thousand paper cranes will bring good luck and health is much older than Sadako's story, although she did try to fold 1,000 while she was sick with leukemia. She finished 644 before she died, and her classmates completed the rest. There are two books about her story: Sadoko and the Thousand Paper Cranes and Child of the Paper Crane .

It's also not true that "classical" origami is extremely restrictive. Most of the rules mentioned were added by outsiders. There are many very old designs (such as connected cranes) that require cutting. It is an interesting challenge to follow those kinds of restrictive rules, but they are not really requirments with a long history.

The Origami FYI covers these and many other interesting points.

According to this recent comment (by me), the answer is no. The logo is owned by Sony and Philips (inventors/promotors of CD audio). According to a recent article in German c't magazine, Philips is looking into the violation of the Red Book / IEC 908 standard.

Actually, the PLT Scheme distribution comes with a tool called MrSpidey that does implicit static type analysis on your Scheme programs. It allows recursive types and all that fun stuff. The only problem is it doesn't work well when you use some of PLT Scheme's more advanced features, such as its class system.

Heh, out of control Netscapes. Most of the workstations at my universitys lab have at least three of those going at it. People never realize that the proc is still running even though the window went squish.

bmongar has the best post I've seen on this topic: both correct and succinct. I teach Java at Northeastern University, and I've lived these tradeoffs.

Smalltalk is pure OO, but introductory students aren't sophisticated enough to understand the beauty of immutable numeric singleton objects and other such OO extremes. It is my second choice for a strictly OOP/OOD course in the 2nd year, after Java.

C++ is the best language out there for production of real application software. It is difficult to teach and basically requires that a lot of difficult low-level concepts are pushed into the first year. It is my first choice for a strictly software design course in the 2nd or 3rd year.

Java is the best language for introductory programming and here's why:

• It (like many languages) can be used to teach the fundamental programming structures (eg. selection, iteration, &c.)
  
• It provides cross-platform GUI, IO, and network libraries so lab work can be performed on any machine. (This is huge for students, IMHO.)
  
• It provides a near-complete, elegant OO framework, including reflection, action objects, separation of specification from implementation.
  

That's all you need in the first year. They need to learn abstract thought; a lot of the other posts ignore that fact.

Check out our pedagogical Java toolkit available here. This summer we are moving from toolkit implementation to developing a real good Java curriculum.

PBk

if you're looking to get a technical MBA, come check out Northeastern. i'm an undergrad CS major there, and the program is really strong... our tech MBA program (collaboration btw. college of computer science and college of business) has been rated the best in the country a couple times... besides, boston's a fun city...
-----

Here are some useful links I found while doing my research:

• First, check a similar ask slashdot story
• MP3 Server Box
• An even older related slashdot story
• LCDAT - Linux Compressed Digital Audio Transport
• Linux Central has lots of LCD display modules that are perfect for this.
• Cajun Car Audio Jukebox
• Linux MP3 Players Project Page
• You already know about LIRC but here's the link for those who may not.

The future of the Internet is in what I call "rational programming" derived from a revival of Bertrand Russell's Relation Arithmetic. Rational programming is a classically applicable branch of relation arithmetic's sub theory of quantum software (as opposed to the hardware-oriented technology of quantum computing). By classically applicable I mean it is applies to conventional computing systems -- not just quantum information systems. Rational programming will subsume what Tim Berners Lee calls the semantic web. The basic problem Tim (and just about everyone back through Bertrand Russell) fails to perceive is that logic is irrational. John McCarthy's signature line says it all about this kind of approach: "He who refuses to do arithmetic is doomed to talk nonsense." More on this a bit later, but first some history, because he who fails to learn from history is doomed to repeat its nonsense:

When I invented the precursor to Postscript (an audacious claim that I can back up -- it started as a replacement for NAPLPS which I proposed while Manager of Interactive Architectures for Viewdata Corp of America back in November of 1981 -- the Xerox PARC guys found my approach of what they called a "tokenized Forth" communication protocol to be an intriguing way to encode text and graphics), I was interested in having a Forth virtual machine migrate into silicon (ala Novix) so it could evolve from mere graphics rendering into a distributed Smalltalk VM environment (ala Squeak) as videotex terminal/personal computer capacities increased. But I was _not_ interested in object-oriented programming as the long-term semantics of distributed programming environments. (I still have some of the hardcopy of the communiques with Xerox PARC and others from this period.)

Rather, relational semantics were what I saw as the ultimate direction for distributed programming. I had a bit of a go at Tony Hoare's "communicating sequential processes" paradigm and its Transputer realization because he was, at least, starting with the hard problem of parallelism rather than making like the drunk looking for his keys under the light post the way everyone else seemed to be doing (and still are, save for Mozart, since threads, etc. are always an afterthought). But, because there were other hard problems like abstraction, transactions and persistence that he ignored, I christened his approach "Occam's Chainsaw Massacre" in my communiques (in honor of his distributed programming language "Occam") and dropped it in favor of relational programming, which has inherent parallelism resulting from both dependency and indeterminacy. (BTW: Dr. Hoare seems to have finally come to his senses about this issue.)

Unfortunately, the only researcher doing hardcore work on relational programming (meaning, getting to the root of relational semantics in a way that Codd had failed to do) at the time was Bruce MacLennan, then, of The Naval Postgraduate School, and he just didn't have the glamour of Alan Kay at places like Xerox PARC to attract the attention of guys like Steve Jobs. Bruce had a bit of a blind-spot, too, when it came to transactions and persistence, which I attempted to remedy by bringing David P. Reed's work on distributed transactions for the ARPAnet to him, but although he wrote a white paper on a predicate calculus (close to a relational) implementation of Reed's thesis (MIT/LCS/TR-205), he didn't really "get it", IMHO. Reed and MacLennan abandoned their work for other pursuits (ironically, Reed was chief scientist at Lotus while Notes was being developed but did not contribute his ideas on distributed synchronization to that development despite the fact that we had a mutual acquaintance from my Plato days by the name of Ray Ozzie -- so, I share some of the blame for this failure) even as Steve Jobs botched the embryonic object oriented world by abandoning Smalltalk and giving us, instead, a lineage consisting of Object Pascal on the Lisa/Mac which begat Objective C on Jobs's NeXT which begat Java at Sun via Naughton and Gosling's experience with NeXT.

This brings us to the present -- a world in which Javascript-based technologies like Tibet promise to not only salvage the object oriented aspect of the Internet from the birth defects of Jobs's spawn, but actually provide an advance over Smalltalk in the same lineage as CLOS and Self. But it is also a world in which there is growing confusion over the proper role of "metadata" in the form of XML -- particularly when it comes to speech acts and distributed inference. I would call Tibet "the next major Internet advance" except for the fact that the basic idea for a Tibet-like system has been around and well understood since the early 1980's. When it is finally released, Tibet (or a system like it) will put the Internet back on track. I call that a "recovery", not an "advance".

We are now poised to move forward with type inference based on full blown inference engines, thereby dispensing with the nonterminating arguments over statically vs dynamically typed languages that allowed Steve Jobs's spawn to get its nose in the tent. If you want to declare a "type" in a declarative language, just make another declaration and let the inference engine figure out what it can do with that information prior to run time. See how easy that was? Well, there is more to it than that, but not that much: Assertions have implications and assertions made prior to run time have implications prior to run time. Live with it and don't repeat the mistakes of the past.

The confusion over semantic webs, and the reason Berners Lee et al will fail, is essentially the same as the confusion that has beleaguered all inferential systems such as logic programming and "artificial intelligence" over the years: logic is irrational and the real world demands rationality -- otherwise nothing makes sense. By "rationality" I mean that reasoning must literally incorporate "ratios" -- or, as John McCarthy would put it, doing arithmetic so things make sense. By making sense, I mean there is a sense in which one interprets the sea of assertions that clearly dominates for a particular purpose. With logic not only are you limited to 0 and 1 as effective quantities; you have no adequate theoretic basis from which to derive more accurate quantities with which to make sense by taking ratios and determining which inferences are dominant.

Fuzzy logic and expert systems incorporating probabilities have typically failed because they are not based in the first principles of probability and statistics. As Gauss, the premiere probability theorist put it, "Mathematics is the study of relations." He didn't say, "Mathematics is the study of multisets." There are good reasons that relational databases, and not set manipulation languages, have come to dominate business applications -- and Gauss was aware of these differences when he began to derive his laws of probability. Subsequent axiomatizations of mathematics based on set theory were similarly misguided and have led to the idea that "fuzzy sets" are the way to introduce rationality into programming. Rather than sets, relations are the foundation, not just of mathematics but of rationality in the same sense that Gauss realized when he derived his theory of probability from the study of relations.

Rationality allows for judgment which is recognized as inherently fallible -- but which allows one to procede without exponentiating all possible paths of inference. Judgment also allows various identities to limit sharing of information to that needed -- thereby creating speech acts and a basis for rational measures of credibility associated with those identities. Since credit-rating is a degeneration of credibility, it should come as no shock that the invention of negative numbers, originating as they did with the Arabic invention of double entry account keeping, has its analog in something that might be called "logical debt" with which negative probabilities are associated.

And now we have come to the "quantum" aspect of rational programming. It is precisely the "credibility debt" aspect of rational programming that corresponds, in mathematical detail, to the various equations of quantum mechanics and their negative probability amplitudes. (Von Neumann's quantum logic failed to properly incorporate logical debt which has led to much confusion.) Logical debt is important to distributed programming for the same reason debt is important to financial networks. Logical debt is a way of handling poor synchronization of information flow in the same way that financial debt is a way of handling poor synchronization of cash flow. As in any rational system, there are both limits to credit and limits to credibilty that influence one's judgments and actions, including speech acts.

The object oriented folks may, in a sense, have the last laugh here because when we divide up inference into identities that engage in speech acts, we are reintroducing the notion of objects that hide information via exchange of speech act messages that can be thought of as "setters" (assertions) and "getters" (queries). However, I believe it is only fair to recognize that the excellent intuitions of Johan Dahl and Kristen Nygaard did need the added insights and rigor of philosophers like J. L. Austin and T. Etter.

I found it VERY hard to download this yesterday; the "download" link simply points to a page that views it as an EMBED command. ...Due to the Akamai naming scheme, the /. lameness filter prevents me from directly posting it, so here's a link to a file that contains only a link:

This is a (faster) link to the actual movie (@Akamai via parkwars.com)
Or go to the official site in one click here (can't directly download though)

They don't mention Pong Kombat, which is (as it sounds) a combination of Mortal Komabt and pong. It's only available for windows (as far as i remember), but it's hilarious. Make sure you read the FAQ's on the site.

noah

"Do not taunt Happy Fun Ball."

If you use this standard, the page will work in pretty much any browser, including IE. Now, if you make pages like this [1] or this [2], then it's your own damned fault if it completely breaks in a different browser.

1. My University's main page. Blecch.
2. Somewhere I worked briefly. Actually this page works quite well in the Big Two on Windows, but I can't even imagine what it'd look like in a PDA. In Lynx it looks like this: [LINK] [LINK] [LINK] [LINK] ...

Yes, I am a Raxis.

Well, the LambdaMOO server is available on SourceForge, and has been for some time. Not wanting to start a mini-flame-war about M** stuff, but if you want your virtual text-worlds to have more complexity than "hit orc with sword," MOO with the JHCore database is really just about the bext way to go (although ColdC is also pretty cool these days, if a bit more arcane and undocumented).

--

I have had employers who put me on call and given me a pager and it was invariably a nightmare, worse than you would imagine, worse than you'd believe. I did a writeup about it once and everyone thought it was made up as a joke.

There are two reasonable ways a company can deal with 24/7 service needs:

• Raise the salaries of every person on call (by at least 10k-20k), plus pay them generously for each and every time they're paged - even if it's frivilous. I'm talking the moment that pager goes off the person gets a few hundred bucks, plus at least $100 an hour for any time past the first hour. Since you're seriously disrupting the person's life, you should damn well be compensating them handsomely for it.
• Hire staff to staff the help desk 24/7 and nobody is ever on call and nobody carries a pager or cell phone for the company.

Now, as for how you should react if the company demands to put you on call anyway:

• Make sure you have Caller ID on every phone at home, so you can be "not home" during calls from the office when desired.
• If you don't have a cell phone, refuse utterly to accept one because you're worried about the radiation giving you cancer. If you do have one, refuse utterly to give them the number on the basis that then you'd have to pay for the calls and your bill doesn't show who the incoming calls are from. (Sprint PCS and Voicestream both have this failing in their billing, among others.) If they push the issue, demand that they have to pay your *entire* cell phone bill because you can't separate your calls from theirs, and make sure you have a cell phone with Caller ID so you can (confidentially) just not answer calls from the office. Alternatively, make them pay for a whole new unit. I had one employer give up on trying to put me on call just because it galled them that I was going to make them pay for a new pager even though I already had one, because I wouldn't give them my pager number. (It did go as far as them threatening to fire me and me saying "go ahead" before they backed down.)
• You're forgetful. You leave your pager on your desk all the time because you're not used to carrying it and it's uncomfortable sitting down with it on your belt. "Oops!"
• Turn your pager off whenever you're out of the office and aren't willing to deal with being paged, such as during dinner, sex, etc. If they complain, tell them you're sorry but the pager didn't go off, it must have been out of range. If they demand to know where you were, get very angry because they have no right to scrutinize your private life. Believe me, if you don't get into the habit of turning it off when you're unwilling to deal with it, you will have no private life and you will go around hungry all the time.
• When the pager battery dies, don't notice. When they bring it to your attention, make them provide new batteries. If they don't, go battery shopping on company time and expense the new batteries. I had one employer give up and take the pager back over this.
• Every few months you will accidentally drop the pager/cell-phone in the toilet. "Darn, it fell off the clip again." Or, something heavy will fall on it and break the screen / it will get dropped / the baby tossed it out the car window and you didn't notice. Insist that it has to be replaced with the most expensive brand, because it's vital that they be able to page you with the actual problem description and the most expensive Motorola pager is obviously going to have better reception than brand X, right?
• Mention at work that you've taken up jogging or hiking. If the pager goes off and you answer it but not right away, you were out hiking/jogging and you couldn't get to a phone quickly.

This is a fairly good tech city. I'd say it's developing. The popular opinion is that Ireland's economy is presently booming, partially due to the computer industry. While I don't have hard figures, I know that there are plenty of IT jobs out here.

I'm actually working out here as a student through Northeastern University. I got a job through our work abroad program, and I found a place to live through the online DAFT.ie web site. I happened to find a house with two other guys in the it field.

One of the big things out here is the mobile phone industry. Not only does everyone have mobile phones, they're much less of a hassle than they are in the U.S. You purchase the phone, and then you purchase prepaid cards. You pay about 6p per minute on off-peak hours and weekends. It's pretty sweet. The two major companies are Eircomm and Esat.

Internet access: Hrm. Well, I don't have a connection at home, but I have enough time for that at work. Outside of work, Internet cafe's are my best bet. They cost, on the average, £4 an hour.

It's a busy, but friendly, city. My experience with cities is largely with Boston, where I grew up, so YMMV. It's not the "top o' the morning" stereotype. People work hard, and rest easy. As always, when leaving home, try not to grip expectations tightly.

mp3stereo

Knight Rider MP3 (I know, corny name)

ELMP or here

When I invented the precursor to Postscript (an audacious claim that I can back up -- it started as a replacement for NAPLPS which I proposed while Manager of Interactive Architectures for Viewdata Corp of America back in November of 1981 -- the Xerox PARC guys found my approach of what they called a "tokenized Forth" communication protocol to be an intriguing way to encode text and graphics), I was interested in having a Forth virtual machine migrate into silicon (ala Novix) so it could evolve from mere graphics rendering into a distributed Smalltalk VM environment (ala Squeak) as videotex terminal/personal computer capacities increased. But I was _not_ interested in object-oriented programming as the long-term semantics of distributed programming environments. (I still have some of the hardcopy of the communiques with Xerox PARC and others from this period.)

Rather, relational semantics were what I saw as the ultimate direction for distributed programming. I had a bit of a go at Tony Hoare's "communicating sequential processes" paradigm and its Transputer realization because he was, at least, starting with the hard problem of parallelism rather than making like the drunk looking for his keys under the light post the way everyone else seemed to be doing (and still are, save for Mozart, since threads, etc. are always an afterthought). But, because there were other hard problems like abstraction, transactions and persistence that he ignored, I christened his approach "Occam's Chainsaw Massacre" in my communiques (in honor of his distributed programming language "Occam") and dropped it in favor of relational programming, which has inherent parallelism resulting from both dependency and indeterminacy. (BTW: Dr. Hoare seems to have finally come to his senses about this issue.)

Unfortunately, the only researcher doing hardcore work on relational programming (meaning, getting to the root of relational semantics in a way that Codd had failed to do) at the time was Bruce MacLennan, then, of The Naval Postgraduate School, and he just didn't have the glamour of Alan Kay at places like Xerox PARC to attract the attention of guys like Steve Jobs. Bruce had a bit of a blind-spot, too, when it came to transactions and persistence, which I attempted to remedy by bringing David P. Reed's work on distributed transactions for the ARPAnet to him, but although he wrote a white paper on a predicate calculus (close to a relational) implementation of Reed's thesis (MIT/LCS/TR-205), he didn't really "get it", IMHO. Reed and MacLennan abandoned their work for other pursuits (ironically, Reed was chief scientist at Lotus while Notes was being developed but did not contribute his ideas on distributed synchronization to that development despite the fact that we had a mutual acquaintance from my Plato days by the name of Ray Ozzie -- so, I share some of the blame for this failure) even as Steve Jobs botched the embryonic object oriented world by abandoning Smalltalk and giving us, instead, a lineage consisting of Object Pascal on the Lisa/Mac which begat Objective C on Jobs's NeXT which begat Java at Sun via Naughton and Gosling's experience with NeXT.

This brings us to the present -- a world in which Javascript-based technologies like Tibet promise to not only salvage the object oriented aspect of the Internet from the birth defects of Jobs's spawn, but actually provide an advance over Smalltalk in the same lineage as CLOS and Self. But it is also a world in which there is growing confusion over the proper role of "metadata" in the form of XML -- particularly when it comes to speech acts and distributed inference. I would call Tibet "the next major Internet advance" except for the fact that the basic idea for a Tibet-like system has been around and well understood since the early 1980's. When it is finally released, Tibet (or a system like it) will put the Internet back on track. I call that a "recovery", not an "advance".

We are now poised to move forward with type inference based on full blown inference engines, thereby dispensing with the nonterminating arguments over statically vs dynamically typed languages that allowed Steve Jobs's spawn to get its nose in the tent. If you want to declare a "type" in a declarative language, just make another declaration and let the inference engine figure out what it can do with that information prior to run time. See how easy that was? Well, there is more to it than that, but not that much: Assertions have implications and assertions made prior to run time have implications prior to run time. Live with it and don't repeat the mistakes of the past.

The confusion over semantic webs, and the reason Berners Lee et al will fail, is essentially the same as the confusion that has beleaguered all inferential systems such as logic programming and "artificial intelligence" over the years: logic is irrational and the real world demands rationality -- otherwise nothing makes sense. By "rationality" I mean that reasoning must literally incorporate "ratios" -- or, as John McCarthy would put it, doing arithmetic so things make sense. By making sense, I mean there is a sense in which one interprets the sea of assertions that clearly dominates for a particular purpose. With logic not only are you limited to 0 and 1 as effective quantities; you have no adequate theoretic basis from which to derive more accurate quantities with which to make sense by taking ratios and determining which inferences are dominant.

Fuzzy logic and expert systems incorporating probabilities have typically failed because they are not based in the first principles of probability and statistics. As Gauss, the premiere probability theorist put it, "Mathematics is the study of relations." He didn't say, "Mathematics is the study of multisets." There are good reasons that relational databases, and not set manipulation languages, have come to dominate business applications -- and Gauss was aware of these differences when he began to derive his laws of probability. Subsequent axiomatizations of mathematics based on set theory were similarly misguided and have led to the idea that "fuzzy sets" are the way to introduce rationality into programming. Rather than sets, relations are the foundation, not just of mathematics but of rationality in the same sense that Gauss realized when he derived his theory of probability from the study of relations.

Rationality allows for judgment which is recognized as inherently fallible -- but which allows one to procede without exponentiating all possible paths of inference. Judgment also allows various identities to limit sharing of information to that needed -- thereby creating speech acts and a basis for rational measures of credibility associated with those identities. Since credit-rating is a degeneration of credibility, it should come as no shock that the invention of negative numbers, originating as they did with the Arabic invention of double entry account keeping, has its analog in something that might be called "logical debt" with which negative probabilities are associated.

And now we have come to the "quantum" aspect of rational programming. It is precisely the "credibility debt" aspect of rational programming that corresponds, in mathematical detail, to the various equations of quantum mechanics and their negative probability amplitudes. (Von Neumann's quantum logic failed to properly incorporate logical debt which has led to much confusion.) Logical debt is important to distributed programming for the same reason debt is important to financial networks. Logical debt is a way of handling poor synchronization of information flow in the same way that financial debt is a way of handling poor synchronization of cash flow. As in any rational system, there are both limits to credit and limits to credibilty that influence one's judgments and actions, including speech acts.

The object oriented folks may, in a sense, have the last laugh here because when we divide up inference into identities that engage in speech acts, we are reintroducing the notion of objects that hide information via exchange of speech act messages that can be thought of as "setters" (assertions) and "getters" (queries). However, I believe it is only fair to recognize that the excellent intuitions of Johan Dahl and Kristen Nygaard did need the added insights and rigor of philosophers like J. L. Austin and T. Etter.

Req is no longer used at ccs. We now use rt. req had to be abandoned because it ran only on SunOS, which was not y2k compliant.

What makes you think that Req only works on SunOS? Even the README file mentions that it ran on Ultrix and was reported to have run on numerous other platforms.

noah

Here at the College of Computer Science at Northeastern people have developed a package called Req. It is used by our systems department for tracking requests/problem reports from users. I am only familiar with it from an indirect user's point of view, meaning I've never actually seen the tracking interface in action. With a little bit of digging in the FTP site, though, I've found reference to at least web, Tk, and emacs front ends.

The FTP site is ftp://ftp.ccs.neu.edu/pub/sysadmin/. It doesn't seem like CCS is developing it very actively, but on the plus side it is open source.

noah

Here at the College of Computer Science at Northeastern people have developed a package called Req. It is used by our systems department for tracking requests/problem reports from users. I am only familiar with it from an indirect user's point of view, meaning I've never actually seen the tracking interface in action. With a little bit of digging in the FTP site, though, I've found reference to at least web, Tk, and emacs front ends.

The FTP site is ftp://ftp.ccs.neu.edu/pub/sysadmin/. It doesn't seem like CCS is developing it very actively, but on the plus side it is open source.

noah

How about Pong Kombat?! You can even do fatalities and cool stuff like that.

• Macaulay2 is for algebraic geometry and commutative algebra. (Not too user friendly at the moment)

• Gap is for computational discrete algebra.

• PariGP is good for number theory stuff.

They are all fun to play around with. You just can't get discouraged if you don't understand a lot of the commands (they have some WEIRD functions that probably only a handful of people in the world fully understand).

Nathan Whitehead

That's not really the problems, except that I question the agendas of governments and large corporations. Will they do the right things? Will the turn society into Gataca? Even if I have the most noble purposes for that information to be used wisely, without cash, my good intentions are rubish.

Possibly... if you and others submit to what the large corporations and your government eventually decide. Were you able to ask King George III, Marie Antoinette, or P'u Yi... they'd probably tell you that a government only survives through the will of its people. I don't think corporations are any better protected from that fact.

While I do admit that a corporation could hide such things behind the guise of a humanitarian cause (or legitimate business), they still depend on the funds of the people they serve. All it would take is one whisper of their dirty little secret, and they end up losing. Look at what is happening with tobacco in the US, for example.

The threat to our individual privacy spills into business and government as well. The very things that would make it easier for them to delve into our medical histories or genetic makeup will make it easier for us to find out exactly what "they" are up to. You cannot separate the organization from the individuals within it no matter how hard you try... which means that what affects those individuals will have an effect on the organization as well.

...Headed by Remy Evard, an NU alum. Yay CCS!

...Headed by Remy Evard, an NU alum. Yay CCS!

Those who are interested in building an MP3 player running Linux should take a look at http://www.ccs.neu.edu/home/bchafy/mp3.html, which has lots of similar projects.