Slashdot Mirror

For the vitamins part you can use the "budwig cream". It is a recipe with grains (brown rice, wheat...), nuts (almond, hazelnuts...) flaxseed oil, cream-cheese (to make the assimilation of the oil easier, though I don't know if it is to make it easier for the guts or for the tastebuds), honey...
Prepared correctly it has a great vitamins/calories ratio for all the important vitamins.

The only description I could find on the web and in English is here. I have the original recipe in French in a book by Kousmine (a Swiss doctor that treated Cancer and other degenerative disease with nutrition and lifestyle reforms in conjunction with conventional treatments), if you are interested I can translate the relevant part.

National Public Radio's legal magazine show Justice Talking has just released the show in which MPAA attorney Fritz Attaway debates the virtures of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act with Siva Vaidhyanathan, author of Copyrights and Copywrongs: The Rise of Intellectual Property and How it Threatens Creativity. The show was recorded on March 4 in Philadelphia and is available in RealPlayer format and is archived here.

National Public Radio's legal magazine show Justice Talking has just released the show in which MPAA attorney Fritz Attaway debates the virtures of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act with Siva Vaidhyanathan, author of Copyrights and Copywrongs: The Rise of Intellectual Property and How it Threatens Creativity. The show was recorded on March 4 in Philadelphia and is available in RealPlayer format and is archived here.

It's designed as a stroke recognition system (for use with styli) but I'm sure we are all smart enough to see how it can be used on a phone keypad, too.

Only 2 keypresses per letter, and you could probably optimise that quite a bit with some T9-like prediction, too.

It's been discussed here before, too. I'm suprised no-one mentioned it.

A cheap microcontroller and serial communication will get you started. Then it's just a matter of picking up all your LEDs, buttons, etc. from a nice cheap place, like Jameco will get you going. . . gl! --subhuman

A cheap microcontroller and serial communication will get you started. Then it's just a matter of picking up all your LEDs, buttons, etc. from a nice cheap place, like Jameco will get you going. . . gl! --subhuman

Well, here are the two I visit:

NYUHome - My university's interface for webmail/file management/various crap. Gives you an error and an invitation to "upgrade" to a supported browser. Works just fine under OmniWeb as long as it is set to identify as one of the "supported" browsers.

Albert - My university's system for registering for classes, checking grades, and all kinds of important stuff online. Second only in annoyance level to the phone system that does the same thing (Welcome...to...Torch...Tone...) This thing is so crufty that it barfs under anything but sufficiently advanced versions of MSIE/Netscape. It doesn't even admit that it works under IE, but it does.

I wouldn't visit these sites if it were optional, but there you have it.

Meghan

Well, here are the two I visit:

NYUHome - My university's interface for webmail/file management/various crap. Gives you an error and an invitation to "upgrade" to a supported browser. Works just fine under OmniWeb as long as it is set to identify as one of the "supported" browsers.

Albert - My university's system for registering for classes, checking grades, and all kinds of important stuff online. Second only in annoyance level to the phone system that does the same thing (Welcome...to...Torch...Tone...) This thing is so crufty that it barfs under anything but sufficiently advanced versions of MSIE/Netscape. It doesn't even admit that it works under IE, but it does.

I wouldn't visit these sites if it were optional, but there you have it.

Meghan

All Software Engineers should have a look at Correctness by Construction: Better can also be Cheaper from Crosstalk the Journal of Defence Software Engineering. It contrasts the usual C approach with one using a really tight but powerful subset (SPARK) of an already pretty tight language, Ada

* SPARK code was found to have only 10 percent of the residual errors of full Ada; Ada was found to have only 10 percent of the residual errors of code written in C. This is an interesting counter to those who maintain that choice of programming language does not matter, and that critical code can be written correctly in any language : The claim may be true in principle but clearly is not commonly achieved in practice.

This isn't just an anecdote: there are documented facts. The results (for the problem domain of aircraft avionics and large systems) may not be applicable to the normal b2b and gamezware - but then again, they might. Have a look at the stuff in bold later in this post.

It's not a magic bullet : from the same article:

In December 1999 CrossTalk, David Cook provided a well-reasoned historical analysis of programming language development and considered the role languages play in the software development process. The article was valuable because it showed that programming language developments are not sufficient to ensure success; however, it would be dangerous to conclude from this that they are not necessary for success. Cook rightly identifies other issues such as requirements capture, specifications, and verification and validation (V&V) that need to be addressed.

But the real kicker, one that should cause everyone to sit up and take notice, is this:

• Code quality improved by a factor of 10 over industry norms for DO-178B Level A software.
• Productivity improved by a factor of four over previous comparable programs.
• Development costs were half that typical for non safety-critical code
• With re-use and process maturity, there was a further productivity improvement of four on the C27J airlifter program.

One more thing: the SPARK and similar RAVENSCAR ( pdf, HTML version here) subsets of Ada-95 are just that : (proper)subsets that just omit certain language constructs. Write to the profile, and the code is compileable by any Ada-95 compiler, like the downloadable Free GNU version GNAT 3.14p (though commercial users might want the latest-and-greatest non-free version 3.15a. And the ORK (Open Ravenscar Kernel) is, as the name implies, an Open Source Kernel for reliable real-time embedded systems.

Better, Cheaper, Faster, Open-Source with Free-as-in-Beer downloadable compilers. IMHO worth at least investigating, even if you decide Microsoft's latest language-du-jour is more appropriate for your situation. YMMV, and COBOL, C++, Assembler, C#, Java or even VB might be better in your case. But worth a look.

Now, the problem is that the "exclusive rights" copyright uses -- such as the right to control reproduction -- are very problematic on the internet for two reasons:

1. Raising the cost of information goods from $0 to a few dollars (or tens of dollars) is a massive increase, which will prevent many people from accessing important (or enjoyable) information. This is not the case when copyright adds a few dollars to the cost of a book, and it certainly impededs the "progress of science and useful arts"
2. As you probably understand, but your representatives don't, so-called "digital rights management" technology is ridiculous. Aside from denying users many valuable activities that would be deemed "fair use", it is, on some level, theoretically impossible to make DRM secure. You don't prevent access to cleartext music, film or writing by placing an encrypted copy in everyone's home, and then have their media gadgetry decrypt it.

   That wouldn't be such a problem, except the massive costs of this extremely poor security model will be passed on to the public.

Now, as for alternatives, they come in two flavours -- there are the bottom-up, decentralised ones, such as the Street Performer Protocol (a variant of which Stephen King used very succesfully, even if it wasn't always reported correctly). Other bottom-up models include Ian Clarke's "fairshare", gift economies, or tipping systems. None of these alternatives require government support, and have been slow to take off (many people blame the lack of safe, easy micropayment facilities), but no doubt there's a lot government could do to encourage them.

There are also government-supported alternatives, in which funds are raised through voluntary tax credits, or taxation (which could be levies on hardware or internet usage, or general revenue) and allocated to artists in a decentralised fashion, by the public. An example of this kind of model is described in Steven Shavell and Tanguy van Ypersele, Rewards versus Intellectual Property Rights, Journal of Law and Economics, October 2001.

I'm just finishing a paper on applying publicly funded reward models to copyright on the net -- it's not quite ready for public release yet, but email me if you'd like a copy.

Also, you can find more interesting sources at this wiki, and I'm just in the process of setting up these mailing lists for discussion of these models.

Now, the problem is that the "exclusive rights" copyright uses -- such as the right to control reproduction -- are very problematic on the internet for two reasons:

1. Raising the cost of information goods from $0 to a few dollars (or tens of dollars) is a massive increase, which will prevent many people from accessing important (or enjoyable) information. This is not the case when copyright adds a few dollars to the cost of a book, and it certainly impededs the "progress of science and useful arts"
2. As you probably understand, but your representatives don't, so-called "digital rights management" technology is ridiculous. Aside from denying users many valuable activities that would be deemed "fair use", it is, on some level, theoretically impossible to make DRM secure. You don't prevent access to cleartext music, film or writing by placing an encrypted copy in everyone's home, and then have their media gadgetry decrypt it.

   That wouldn't be such a problem, except the massive costs of this extremely poor security model will be passed on to the public.

Now, as for alternatives, they come in two flavours -- there are the bottom-up, decentralised ones, such as the Street Performer Protocol (a variant of which Stephen King used very succesfully, even if it wasn't always reported correctly). Other bottom-up models include Ian Clarke's "fairshare", gift economies, or tipping systems. None of these alternatives require government support, and have been slow to take off (many people blame the lack of safe, easy micropayment facilities), but no doubt there's a lot government could do to encourage them.

There are also government-supported alternatives, in which funds are raised through voluntary tax credits, or taxation (which could be levies on hardware or internet usage, or general revenue) and allocated to artists in a decentralised fashion, by the public. An example of this kind of model is described in Steven Shavell and Tanguy van Ypersele, Rewards versus Intellectual Property Rights, Journal of Law and Economics, October 2001.

I'm just finishing a paper on applying publicly funded reward models to copyright on the net -- it's not quite ready for public release yet, but email me if you'd like a copy.

Also, you can find more interesting sources at this wiki, and I'm just in the process of setting up these mailing lists for discussion of these models.

Someone hit me with a clue-by-four if I'm talking out of my arse or if not, tell me what decent compiled languages exist out there =)

No, you're not talking anally, it's a good question.Try Ada-95, or one of its proper subsets if you want embedded systems.

Rather than give lots of religious arguments, unverified opinions and hot air, here's some resources and quotes:

From Crosstalk (March 2002) :

There is now compelling evidence that development methods that focus on bug prevention rather than bug detection can both raise quality and save time and money. A recent, large avionics project reported a four-fold productivity and 10-fold quality improvement by adopting such methods. A key ingredient of correctness by construction is the use of unambiguous programming languages that allow rigorous analysis very early in the development process.

SPARK code was found to have only 10 percent of the residual errors of full Ada; Ada was found to have only 10 percent of the residual errors of code written in C. This is an interesting counter to those who maintain that choice of programming language does not matter, and that critical code can be written correctly in any language: The claim may be true in principle but clearly is not commonly achieved in practice. (emphasis added by me)

Parenthetically, I get a little miffed when I see so much unsupported balderdash being purveyed in Ye Greatte Language Warres. Try looking at the experiments people, you know, data, numbers etc? The Scientific method? But I digress, back to the stuff useful to you.

Another Crosstalk article, proving fairly conclusively that a working Ada programs's easier to write than a working C program, at least in some problem domains (high performance, real-time).

Ada for C and C++ programmers shows you how to do what you want, if you know C.

The LRM - Language Reference Manual, ISO-8652 (yes, it's an ISO standard). This version is the one with annotations.

Oh yes, there's an open-source compiler, GNAT available for free download. Like GCC, it's industrial-strength.

Finally, I'll echo my own experiences with the C++ STL: namely, that implementations differ markedly, portability is not a possibility, and performing surgery deep in their bowels is like unravelling rancid spaghetti. But YMMV I guess. Code Warrior 7 and MVC++5 were not compatible for anything other than trivial examples.

Observers were a bit flummoxed by the timing of CertCo's suit. It would seem that the company could get substantially more cash out of PayPal once PayPal had substanially more cash -- that is, after the company's IPO. But the suit has definitely put the kibosh on PayPal's stock offering, at least for the moment.

As senior vice president e-commerce at Chase Manhattan Bank, June headed up wholesale e-commerce initiatives for one of Chase's largest business sectors and led investment activities on a number of strategic e-commerce investments. June played an instrumental role in creating Spectrum, a for-profit joint venture between Wells Fargo, First Union and Chase focused on electronic bill payment and presentment (EBPP).

PayPal began depositing customer balances into FDIC-insured bank accounts. The company had asked for an opinion from the FDIC on whether it could pass the insurance protection on to its customers. In its advisory letter, the FDIC said the insurance protections--up to $100,000 per customer per bank--would extend to PayPal customers, even when PayPal deposited the funds for them, PayPal said.

Jakob is just pissed because unlike Ken, he never won an Oscar

Go NYU - Ang Lee, Joel Coen, Martin Scorcese, Spike Lee, and Ken Perlin (!).

<snide>among others, of course</snide>

Binaries distributions of GNAT 3.14p, the free, open-souce GNU Ada compiler are available for Windows, Solaris, Linux, and OS/2 at ftp://ftp.cs.nyu.edu/pub/gnat/3.14p/ There are also different free bindings for doing Windows GUI apps. Look at the included Gnu Visual Debugger (GVD) as an example of a Windows app built using GTKAda.

Tron was devised and implemented by Computer Graphics Professor Ken Perlin, whose CGI techniques won him an OSCAR that year.

The solution to the spamming problem isn't yet more clueless government intervention but the use of mechanisms to allow free market forces to work. Legal solutions always have unintended, negative consequences. Technological solutions are needed for what is at heart a technical problem.

The best approaches currently being developed involve the use of micropayment systems for the equivalent of email postage. If it costs spammers a cent, or even a tenth of a cent, per email, their return on investment drops dramatically. The major hurdle that must be cleared by these systems is that mail user agents and/or mail transfer agents must be configured to support them.

See Other Online Payment Initiatives for pointers to additional information.

Ubiquitous Computing

Ubiquitous computing names the third wave in computing, just now beginning. First were mainframes, each shared by lots of people. Now we are in the personal computing era, person and machine staring uneasily at each other across the desktop. Next comes ubiquitous computing, or the age of calm technology, when technology recedes into the background of our lives. Alan Kay of Apple calls this "Third Paradigm" computing.

Mark Weiser is the father of ubiquitous computing; his web page contains links to many papers on the topic.

Two recent papers express elements of the ubiquitous computing philosophy: "Open House" (also in a MS Word version) , and "Designing Calm Technology".

What Ubiquitous Computing Isn't

Ubiquitous computing is roughly the opposite of virtual reality. Where virtual reality puts people inside a computer-generated world, ubiquitous computing forces the computer to live out here in the world with people. Virtual reality is primarily a horse power problem; ubiquitous computing is a very difficult integration of human factors, computer science, engineering, and social sciences.

Early work in Ubiquitous Computing The initial incarnation of ubiquitous computing was in the form of "tabs", "pads", and "boards" built at Xerox PARC, 1988-1994. Several papers describe this work, and there are web pages for the Tabs and for the Boards (which are a commercial product now):

Ubicomp helped kick off the recent boom in mobile computing research, although it is not the same thing as mobile computing, nor a superset nor a subset.

Ubiquitous Computing has roots in many aspects of computing. In its current form, it was first articulated by Mark Weiser in 1988 at the Computer Science Lab at Xerox PARC. He describes it like this:

Early Work in Ubiquitous Computing

Ubiquitous Computing #1

Inspired by the social scientists, philosophers, and anthropologists at PARC, we have been trying to take a radical look at what computing and networking ought to be like. We believe that people live through their practices and tacit knowledge so that the most powerful things are those that are effectively invisible in use. This is a challenge that affects all of computer science. Our preliminary approach: Activate the world. Provide hundreds of wireless computing devices per person per office, of all scales (from 1" displays to wall sized). This has required new work in operating systems, user interfaces, networks, wireless, displays, and many other areas. We call our work "ubiquitous computing". This is different from PDA's, dynabooks, or information at your fingertips. It is invisible, everywhere computing that does not live on a personal device of any sort, but is in the woodwork everywhere.

Ubiquitous Computing #2

For thirty years most interface design, and most computer design, has been headed down the path of the "dramatic" machine. Its highest ideal is to make a computer so exciting, so wonderful, so interesting, that we never want to be without it. A less-traveled path I call the "invisible"; its highest ideal is to make a computer so imbedded, so fitting, so natural, that we use it without even thinking about it. (I have also called this notion "Ubiquitous Computing", and have placed its origins in post-modernism.) I believe that in the next twenty years the second path will come to dominate. But this will not be easy; very little of our current systems infrastructure will survive. We have been building versions of the infrastructure-to-come at PARC for the past four years, in the form of inch-, foot-, and yard-sized computers we call Tabs, Pads, and Boards. Our prototypes have sometimes succeeded, but more often failed to be invisible. From what we have learned, we are now explorting some new directions for ubicomp, including the famous "dangling string" display.

========

"Dedicated to the memory of Mark Weiser and Alan Turing"

-Don

Here, mesmerize yourself looking at some four dimensional shapes, courtesy of the elite Ken Perlin.

(Note: This page is much more fun while under the influence of hallucinogenics.)

As happens too often, this proposal concentrates entirely too much on distributed computation, and pretty much ignores the problem of distributed storage. They're quite different problems, each requiring its own solution, even though it's intuitively obvious that any true "Internet Scale Operating System" would have to deal with both.

If you're interested in this "other half of the problem" here are some links:

• Farsite (Microsoft; focus on many nodes, not long distances, but still relevant)
• OceanStore (UC Berkeley)
• CFS (MIT)
• Publius (ATT/NYU)
• Intermezzo

There are many more. The bibliographies for the above will mention many earlier systems, while a quick Google search for these project names will show more recent ones.

Katz does seem always to be anticipating his audience, gauging what they wish to hear from him, apparently still with some success. All the bitterness seems to be from people who once took his word as sincere.

As much as we appreciate the "news alert" that Schwarzenegger's career is over, we need to know what happened to Katz's plans to present a Q & A with Junis. Failure to "follow-up" his most notorious story is the nail in Katz's coffin as a "real" journalist.

The Times story linked above says, in part, that "Junis had agreed to take part in a public question-and- answer session on Slashdot.org soon, once things settle down a bit in Afghanistan." Haven't things settled down yet?

"He's already made his way to some sex sites, and wishes he had a printer. Ah, the indomitable human spirit." -- Check out this j-school weblog to see how Katz measures up to other reporters on the liberation of Kabul.

Another Java assembler is the Java Bytecode Assembler

To make it even better, there is a Jasmin backend to GCC, so any language that GCC supports can be compiled into Java bytecode!!

Take a note of help from Ken Perlin. And the recent post about Tron should make him happy.

Quick background info on him. He has worked on texture mapping for quite some time now. Created such things as "Perlin Noise." Here is a good example. He also got an oscar for this work.

I hope this all helps you visualize the hypercube now. :)

Take a note of help from Ken Perlin. And the recent post about Tron should make him happy.

Quick background info on him. He has worked on texture mapping for quite some time now. Created such things as "Perlin Noise." Here is a good example. He also got an oscar for this work.

I hope this all helps you visualize the hypercube now. :)

Take a note of help from Ken Perlin. And the recent post about Tron should make him happy.

Quick background info on him. He has worked on texture mapping for quite some time now. Created such things as "Perlin Noise." Here is a good example. He also got an oscar for this work.

I hope this all helps you visualize the hypercube now. :)

Take a note of help from Ken Perlin. And the recent post about Tron should make him happy.

Quick background info on him. He has worked on texture mapping for quite some time now. Created such things as "Perlin Noise." Here is a good example. He also got an oscar for this work.

I hope this all helps you visualize the hypercube now. :)

For those too busy fawning over OOP here is some help:

http://www.embedded.com/1999/9908/9908feat1.htm

And if you're a bit too enamored with the C++ new operator try this:

http://www.scs.cs.nyu.edu/~dm/c++-new.html

And to see how STL guy A. Stepanov feels about OOP proponents see this:

http://www.stlport.org/resources/StepanovUSA.html

Although I have met quite a few talented (and effective) practicioners of OOP, much more often I run into hyper-political, resume-stacking, rabid and incompetent advocates of OOP. Mostly, they never finish what they start.

Who cares what Grady Booch and his two quack partners say anyway? I mean besides the rabid advocates...

I happen to like a web page that compares Margret Sanger's ideaology with the Aryan ideology. It doesn't say she should be(have been) hanged for crimes against humanity (because she didn't personally commit any).

Wow. Before now, I wasn't sure what a libruhl Freeper sounded like. Here's a link, in case anyone is wondering why this fucking clown thinks someone who was persecuted and prosecuted for spreading information about preventing STDs and unwanted pregnancies is the moral equivalent of a Nazi sympathizer.

If you have a problem with Nazi supporters in the US, you need to look to the right and not to the left. It sure as hell wasn't wobblies, unionists, and labor activists who bankrolled that monster. Think bankers and industrialists, and particularly think the Bushes.

Yet more reason for everyone to use Quikwriting.

It's faster once you learn it. I'm not sure whether it also is laden with patents, though.

One alternative is Ken Perlin's QuikWriting, which has been discussed on slashdot and covered by Wired.

"Quikwriting is significantly faster and less stressful to use than Graffiti, and lets you write very quickly without ever picking your stylus up off the surface, although it has the disadvantage that you need to learn a special alphabet. For further info, you can preview a Technote in either PDF or PostScript, which was published at the ACM UIST'98 conference."

Another alternative that builds on Perlin's QuikWriting work, is Francois Guimbretiere's and Terry Winograd's FlowMenus, published at UIST'00.

"We present a new kind of marking menu that was developed for use with a pen device on display surfaces such as large, high resolution, wall-mounted displays. It integrates capabilities of previously separate mechanisms such as marking menus and Quikwriting, and facilitates the entry of multiple commands. While using this menu, the pen never has to leave the active surface so that consecutive menu selections, data entry (text and parameters) and direct manipulation tasks can be integrated fluidly."

I'm currently designing and programming a user interface on the Palm for a remote control application. So I've implemented "Finger Pies", which are simply pie menus that you can use with your finger!

To paraphrase Ben Shneiderman: Finger Pies work well for implementing direct manipulation user interfaces on handheld personal touch screen devices, in which the application provides meaningful, engaging, tightly coupled feedback on the screen, in response to your gesture. By integrating immediate gratification over time, the user enjoys the satisfaction of direct engagement in an immersive experience, and achieves the cognitive resonance of continuous gratification. [My apologies to Ben for the tongue in cheek impression.]

Finger Pies are not meant to replace character input systems like Graffiti, but they are extremely useful and reliable for many applications of handheld input devices, because they're easy enough to use with your finger instead of a pen.

Finger pies are good for reliably selecting between two, four or eight options at a time (which can be nested as pop up submenus), and they're much more robust and resistant to noise than gesture recognition.

One problem with gesture recognition in general, is that it doesn't allow for "reselection" or in-flight refinement and error correction. That is, once you've made a mistake in a gesture, there's no way to change or cancel it, so you will often get characters that you don't mean, and you have to stop what you're doing and erase the mistake.

Pie menus allow you to cancel or change the selection at any time before you commit to the selection, so you can easily browse the menus. So pie menus are most appropriate when there aren't too many items, the items don't change dynamically over time, and when you need to minimize the error rate and selection time.

Most gesture recognition systems are not "self revealing" like pie menus, which can pop up a "map" showing the directions. So pie menus are much easier to learn than gesture recognition, and more appropriate for novice users. Best of all, they naturally train users to "mouse ahead" and select without looking, so they have a smooth, gentle learning curve.

Another advantage of pie menus is that they're not patented or restricted, and there are several freely available open source implementations.

-Don

Penny Lane: "This song was written about the roundabout in liverpool where John and Paul grew up. Half of the song is fact, half is fiction, but most of it is nostalgia. John was starting to write about personal places, and Paul really took this one and ran. "I wrote that the barber had photographs of every head he'd had the pleasure of knowing. Actually, he just had photos of different hair styles. But all the people do stop and say hello." say Paul. Also, "finger pie" is actually an old obscenity in Liverpool. The girls would never thnk of saying the word. It was used in the song as a fun joke for the lads back home. Months after, waitresses in Liverpool had to put up with lads asking for "fish and finger pie." There is also a phallic reference to the "fireman who keeps his fire engine clean." Penny Lane has become a Beatles landmark, and like Blue Jay Way, has it's problems with stolen signs, which are now nicely bolted down. Penny Lane was recorded on December 29, 1966 and released as a single with Strawberry Fields.The song also has a promotional video." -http://members.aol.com/Sumacca/songs.html

One alternative is Ken Perlin's QuikWriting, which has been discussed on slashdot and covered by Wired.

"Quikwriting is significantly faster and less stressful to use than Graffiti, and lets you write very quickly without ever picking your stylus up off the surface, although it has the disadvantage that you need to learn a special alphabet. For further info, you can preview a Technote in either PDF or PostScript, which was published at the ACM UIST'98 conference."

Another alternative that builds on Perlin's QuikWriting work, is Francois Guimbretiere's and Terry Winograd's FlowMenus, published at UIST'00.

"We present a new kind of marking menu that was developed for use with a pen device on display surfaces such as large, high resolution, wall-mounted displays. It integrates capabilities of previously separate mechanisms such as marking menus and Quikwriting, and facilitates the entry of multiple commands. While using this menu, the pen never has to leave the active surface so that consecutive menu selections, data entry (text and parameters) and direct manipulation tasks can be integrated fluidly."

I'm currently designing and programming a user interface on the Palm for a remote control application. So I've implemented "Finger Pies", which are simply pie menus that you can use with your finger!

To paraphrase Ben Shneiderman: Finger Pies work well for implementing direct manipulation user interfaces on handheld personal touch screen devices, in which the application provides meaningful, engaging, tightly coupled feedback on the screen, in response to your gesture. By integrating immediate gratification over time, the user enjoys the satisfaction of direct engagement in an immersive experience, and achieves the cognitive resonance of continuous gratification. [My apologies to Ben for the tongue in cheek impression.]

Finger Pies are not meant to replace character input systems like Graffiti, but they are extremely useful and reliable for many applications of handheld input devices, because they're easy enough to use with your finger instead of a pen.

Finger pies are good for reliably selecting between two, four or eight options at a time (which can be nested as pop up submenus), and they're much more robust and resistant to noise than gesture recognition.

One problem with gesture recognition in general, is that it doesn't allow for "reselection" or in-flight refinement and error correction. That is, once you've made a mistake in a gesture, there's no way to change or cancel it, so you will often get characters that you don't mean, and you have to stop what you're doing and erase the mistake.

Pie menus allow you to cancel or change the selection at any time before you commit to the selection, so you can easily browse the menus. So pie menus are most appropriate when there aren't too many items, the items don't change dynamically over time, and when you need to minimize the error rate and selection time.

Most gesture recognition systems are not "self revealing" like pie menus, which can pop up a "map" showing the directions. So pie menus are much easier to learn than gesture recognition, and more appropriate for novice users. Best of all, they naturally train users to "mouse ahead" and select without looking, so they have a smooth, gentle learning curve.

Another advantage of pie menus is that they're not patented or restricted, and there are several freely available open source implementations.

-Don

Penny Lane: "This song was written about the roundabout in liverpool where John and Paul grew up. Half of the song is fact, half is fiction, but most of it is nostalgia. John was starting to write about personal places, and Paul really took this one and ran. "I wrote that the barber had photographs of every head he'd had the pleasure of knowing. Actually, he just had photos of different hair styles. But all the people do stop and say hello." say Paul. Also, "finger pie" is actually an old obscenity in Liverpool. The girls would never thnk of saying the word. It was used in the song as a fun joke for the lads back home. Months after, waitresses in Liverpool had to put up with lads asking for "fish and finger pie." There is also a phallic reference to the "fireman who keeps his fire engine clean." Penny Lane has become a Beatles landmark, and like Blue Jay Way, has it's problems with stolen signs, which are now nicely bolted down. Penny Lane was recorded on December 29, 1966 and released as a single with Strawberry Fields.The song also has a promotional video." -http://members.aol.com/Sumacca/songs.html

One alternative is Ken Perlin's QuikWriting, which has been discussed on slashdot and covered by Wired.

"Quikwriting is significantly faster and less stressful to use than Graffiti, and lets you write very quickly without ever picking your stylus up off the surface, although it has the disadvantage that you need to learn a special alphabet. For further info, you can preview a Technote in either PDF or PostScript, which was published at the ACM UIST'98 conference."

Another alternative that builds on Perlin's QuikWriting work, is Francois Guimbretiere's and Terry Winograd's FlowMenus, published at UIST'00.

"We present a new kind of marking menu that was developed for use with a pen device on display surfaces such as large, high resolution, wall-mounted displays. It integrates capabilities of previously separate mechanisms such as marking menus and Quikwriting, and facilitates the entry of multiple commands. While using this menu, the pen never has to leave the active surface so that consecutive menu selections, data entry (text and parameters) and direct manipulation tasks can be integrated fluidly."

I'm currently designing and programming a user interface on the Palm for a remote control application. So I've implemented "Finger Pies", which are simply pie menus that you can use with your finger!

To paraphrase Ben Shneiderman: Finger Pies work well for implementing direct manipulation user interfaces on handheld personal touch screen devices, in which the application provides meaningful, engaging, tightly coupled feedback on the screen, in response to your gesture. By integrating immediate gratification over time, the user enjoys the satisfaction of direct engagement in an immersive experience, and achieves the cognitive resonance of continuous gratification. [My apologies to Ben for the tongue in cheek impression.]

Finger Pies are not meant to replace character input systems like Graffiti, but they are extremely useful and reliable for many applications of handheld input devices, because they're easy enough to use with your finger instead of a pen.

Finger pies are good for reliably selecting between two, four or eight options at a time (which can be nested as pop up submenus), and they're much more robust and resistant to noise than gesture recognition.

One problem with gesture recognition in general, is that it doesn't allow for "reselection" or in-flight refinement and error correction. That is, once you've made a mistake in a gesture, there's no way to change or cancel it, so you will often get characters that you don't mean, and you have to stop what you're doing and erase the mistake.

Pie menus allow you to cancel or change the selection at any time before you commit to the selection, so you can easily browse the menus. So pie menus are most appropriate when there aren't too many items, the items don't change dynamically over time, and when you need to minimize the error rate and selection time.

Most gesture recognition systems are not "self revealing" like pie menus, which can pop up a "map" showing the directions. So pie menus are much easier to learn than gesture recognition, and more appropriate for novice users. Best of all, they naturally train users to "mouse ahead" and select without looking, so they have a smooth, gentle learning curve.

Another advantage of pie menus is that they're not patented or restricted, and there are several freely available open source implementations.

-Don

Penny Lane: "This song was written about the roundabout in liverpool where John and Paul grew up. Half of the song is fact, half is fiction, but most of it is nostalgia. John was starting to write about personal places, and Paul really took this one and ran. "I wrote that the barber had photographs of every head he'd had the pleasure of knowing. Actually, he just had photos of different hair styles. But all the people do stop and say hello." say Paul. Also, "finger pie" is actually an old obscenity in Liverpool. The girls would never thnk of saying the word. It was used in the song as a fun joke for the lads back home. Months after, waitresses in Liverpool had to put up with lads asking for "fish and finger pie." There is also a phallic reference to the "fireman who keeps his fire engine clean." Penny Lane has become a Beatles landmark, and like Blue Jay Way, has it's problems with stolen signs, which are now nicely bolted down. Penny Lane was recorded on December 29, 1966 and released as a single with Strawberry Fields.The song also has a promotional video." -http://members.aol.com/Sumacca/songs.html

One alternative is Ken Perlin's QuikWriting, which has been discussed on slashdot and covered by Wired.

"Quikwriting is significantly faster and less stressful to use than Graffiti, and lets you write very quickly without ever picking your stylus up off the surface, although it has the disadvantage that you need to learn a special alphabet. For further info, you can preview a Technote in either PDF or PostScript, which was published at the ACM UIST'98 conference."

Another alternative that builds on Perlin's QuikWriting work, is Francois Guimbretiere's and Terry Winograd's FlowMenus, published at UIST'00.

"We present a new kind of marking menu that was developed for use with a pen device on display surfaces such as large, high resolution, wall-mounted displays. It integrates capabilities of previously separate mechanisms such as marking menus and Quikwriting, and facilitates the entry of multiple commands. While using this menu, the pen never has to leave the active surface so that consecutive menu selections, data entry (text and parameters) and direct manipulation tasks can be integrated fluidly."

I'm currently designing and programming a user interface on the Palm for a remote control application. So I've implemented "Finger Pies", which are simply pie menus that you can use with your finger!

To paraphrase Ben Shneiderman: Finger Pies work well for implementing direct manipulation user interfaces on handheld personal touch screen devices, in which the application provides meaningful, engaging, tightly coupled feedback on the screen, in response to your gesture. By integrating immediate gratification over time, the user enjoys the satisfaction of direct engagement in an immersive experience, and achieves the cognitive resonance of continuous gratification. [My apologies to Ben for the tongue in cheek impression.]

Finger Pies are not meant to replace character input systems like Graffiti, but they are extremely useful and reliable for many applications of handheld input devices, because they're easy enough to use with your finger instead of a pen.

Finger pies are good for reliably selecting between two, four or eight options at a time (which can be nested as pop up submenus), and they're much more robust and resistant to noise than gesture recognition.

One problem with gesture recognition in general, is that it doesn't allow for "reselection" or in-flight refinement and error correction. That is, once you've made a mistake in a gesture, there's no way to change or cancel it, so you will often get characters that you don't mean, and you have to stop what you're doing and erase the mistake.

Pie menus allow you to cancel or change the selection at any time before you commit to the selection, so you can easily browse the menus. So pie menus are most appropriate when there aren't too many items, the items don't change dynamically over time, and when you need to minimize the error rate and selection time.

Most gesture recognition systems are not "self revealing" like pie menus, which can pop up a "map" showing the directions. So pie menus are much easier to learn than gesture recognition, and more appropriate for novice users. Best of all, they naturally train users to "mouse ahead" and select without looking, so they have a smooth, gentle learning curve.

Another advantage of pie menus is that they're not patented or restricted, and there are several freely available open source implementations.

-Don

Penny Lane: "This song was written about the roundabout in liverpool where John and Paul grew up. Half of the song is fact, half is fiction, but most of it is nostalgia. John was starting to write about personal places, and Paul really took this one and ran. "I wrote that the barber had photographs of every head he'd had the pleasure of knowing. Actually, he just had photos of different hair styles. But all the people do stop and say hello." say Paul. Also, "finger pie" is actually an old obscenity in Liverpool. The girls would never thnk of saying the word. It was used in the song as a fun joke for the lads back home. Months after, waitresses in Liverpool had to put up with lads asking for "fish and finger pie." There is also a phallic reference to the "fireman who keeps his fire engine clean." Penny Lane has become a Beatles landmark, and like Blue Jay Way, has it's problems with stolen signs, which are now nicely bolted down. Penny Lane was recorded on December 29, 1966 and released as a single with Strawberry Fields.The song also has a promotional video." -http://members.aol.com/Sumacca/songs.html

However, LCD projectors can not do active stereo. The projector displays the left eye view and the right eye view sequentially, and the active glasses (which must be somehow synchronized to the projector) block the right and left eyes sequentially. So at any given time, one eye is viwing an image, and the other sees pure black. If the refresh rate is too low, then the stereo starts to become flickery. And uncomfortable to the eyes. You can view stereo with a 60Hz display, but for most people, five minutes is about all they can stand. At 96Hz, one can view stereo comfortably for quite a while. 120 hz is even nicer.

From what I understand, LCD panels can't achieve these speeds (something to do with the energy requirements, and especially the cooling requirements, going up exponentially with Hz) One can use CRT projectors, or DLP projectors (I saw such a CAVE at EVL in Chicago, birthplace of the original CAVE)

With passive stereo, LCD's can be used - basically you just shine 2 projectors fitted with polarized filters at each screen, spend about a week aligning everything, and you're ready to go (special lenses may be needed so that alignment can actually succeed)

Now, there actually are some other options - the least interesting one is anaglyphic stereo (red/blue glasses). We'll let that one slide.

However, many new auto-stereoscopic technologies (glasses-less) are being developed.

There is lenticular - based on the same principle as those doodads you used to get in cereal boxes, where the picture would change when you rotated the thing. Now those things only had 2 images, and you had to rotate it 30 degrees to change the image. But you can make 'em so fine that each eye sees a different image. Put a display behind it, and you have autostereo. see here

One of the funkiest methods I've heard of being tried is to use pupil tracking. To understand this, you need to know that the eye is a very low resolution 'camera' for the most part. However, in the dead center of the retina, there is an extremely dense set of receptors called the fovea. It covers only about 1-2 degrees of arc, and this is where your eye picks up pretty much all of the detail.

Now, if you use pupil tracking (which can be done without the viewer having to wear any special equipment), then you can determine the region of the screen each eye's fovea is covering, and draw the corresponding image there. I haven't found an online reference to this yet, but I think it's a cool, if not a little difficult, solution to autostereo.

-matt

So true.

Henrik Ibsen's Enemy of the People (synopsis here) should be required reading for all.

Sums up the cloning debate, the stem cell debate, and damn near any other "technology vs. popular ignorance" debate to a "T".

Come to think of it, I take back what I said about it being required reading. Our politicians have clearly read and understood this play and its message. And that's what frightens me for the future. Technology-minded geeks should read it, and beware. No politician should be allowed within a hundred miles of this text.

Physics is based on observation and on mathematics. And anyone without overweening ego issues can have the courage to admit that mathematics is particular and specific to our cognitive, embodied perception.

Platonic ideals are as likely as Great Sky Gods, or GUTs. There are no Natural Laws, but instead narrative descriptions of the world. These stories use metaphor and analogy, and their popularity waxes and wanes along with the lives and influence of their storytellers. Blend Kuhn (anti) and Kuhn (pro) and Foucault with a dash of Popper. And don't skimp on the hermeneutics.

Where Mathematics Comes From: How the Embodied Mind Brings Mathematics into Being

Cryptfs is fully functional, though it was indented mostly as a proof of concept. The point is that such file systems are not hard to build, should someone want to maintain one. Here's an undergraduate programming assignment in which the students build a fully-functional cryptographic file system as an NFS loopback server.

This is marginally off-topic, but I thought y'all might enjoy this photo I took in Hong Kong. It's of an advertisement that I saw on the streets and in the subways:

http://mrl.nyu.edu/~hertzman/pics/china01/hk-linux ad.html

Aaron

also, in the name of simplicity i think we should keep things as they are: established and shorter than the proposed change.

...to C.M. Kornbluth's "Little Black Bag" all the time.

His basic premise was prophetic as well. Maybe I should go back and read him again.

(Them's goooood drugs.)

Its lucky that nothing like that would ever happen in the land of the free.

ps. I hate responding to so called trolls, but this one has been modded up twice

No no no! We're talking time, not distance! And no fair using the sun, we're talking about earth!

The closest fusion event was May 11, 1998, in the Shakti-1 experiment done by India. There's a little peer review problem, so there's some debate. In truth, there is a consipracy to prevent fusion -- a consipiracy that I should note that has been accepted by 161 world leaders.

This ought to be on the front page. This is an excellent book, I wish it'd encourage more people to start writing some beautiful Ada code. It's a shame so many open source projects are done in C/C++ when Ada lends itself so well to large projects.

You can get the free (and awesome) Gnat Ada compiler here:

ftp://cs.nyu.edu/pub/gnat

Read up and start writing some great code!

mean to add to the media saturation but here is a link to some hi-res photos of the downtown area. Looks like some sort of bizarre sci fi movie.

I want to make a linked list in Java. Ooops, no pointers, sorry.

As Procrasti mentioned, every variable in the Java language not of primitive type (int, etc.) acts as a pointer. Just because you don't see a * doesn't mean it isn't a pointer.

I want to pass a variable to a function and have it modify it, oops, no pointers.

So pass a reference. If you're passing an object, don't clone() the object before you pass it. If you're passing a primitive, wrap it in an object (i.e. int foo; ... Integer bar = new Integer(foo);).

I want to write a program that takes as little memory as possible, or reuse memory, or optimize it to use common options of the processor, oops, no memory management, no assembler.

Reuse memory by calling System.gc(). Write assembly language either with Jasmin (an assembler for JVM bytecode) or JNI (a way to link in unsafe native code).

Technically you could [write a JVM in the Java language], of course. But you'd have your JVM running on a JVM

Not necessarily. GCJ can compile Java language source code into a native binary using G++'s engine.

Damnit, I want a programming language that gives me access to the freeking carry flag! =). I've done math routines a lot, and the code is literally 10x faster when you can optimize it by hand in assembly.

Then design a language that does such a thing. GCC is free software; you can start from that. And if you don't like the quality of optimizations that GCC does on your code, contribute a better optimizer.

My first guess it that these aussies have impressed clueless execs with ordinary tech.

My second guess is that maybe someone finally got around to applying foveation in a way that works really well.

Perhaps these aussies are hooking up test audiences to eye-tracking devices, and recording their average gaze during a film so that they can get even higher compression by throwing out what's outside most peoples field of view?

*shrug*

On a side note, any coffee shop that wants to kick Starbuck's ass ought to buy a cheap DSL line/Cable modem and hang a 802.11b base station and give away free bandwidth for the cost of a $4.95 mocha carmel frappa latte skim half-caf double-decaf cappachino.

who would argue that ASM was the most portable of any language, and he could cross-compile his project (with millions of lines of code) onto any new CPU

It's not as far-fetched as you may think. "Portable assembly" refers to mnemonic languages that represent a bytecode that can be recompiled into a CPU's native bytecode. For example, Jasmin is an assembler for JVM bytecode. The new Amiga OS comes with a virtual machine and an assembler for its bytecode. Heck, even x86 bytecode is beginning to be thought of as somewhat high-level; Transmeta's Crusoe processor dynamically recompiles ("Code-Morphs") x86 code into its own asm.

SeaLaunch does that. Works fine.

There are places isolated enough for nuclear rocket launch. In 1979, Israel and South Africa tested an atomic bomb in the isolated area between Africa and Antarctica. The only reason anybody found out was that one of the old Vela nuclear test ban treaty satellites picked it up.