Slashdot Mirror

Yep, check through the videos here, it's a douser!

http://www.esm.psu.edu/Faculty/Gray/movies.html

My own research has proven that the taller the beer holding apparatus, the more likely the over-indulgence. This is doubly true if the devil is following you around with a ginormous, multi-funneled, beer bong and keeps asking you, 'You gonna do it, man? You gonna do it? Don't be a sissy. You know you want to.'

OK, I don't want to start a holly war here - it is pure coincidence that the example is form Apple.

Here there are two clips called Knowledge Navigator (just below the middle of the page). I think those illustrate very well what the parent means.

And I agree this is the way to go, not 3D. Did anyone follow the link to Tactile3D. The screenshot gallery made me seasick. It's all too cumbersome and confusing. I can't picture my mother using this.

You can find corpuses of human faces taken with different emotions displayed.

Once you've either collected them yourself or downloaded them, you need to use a process called eigenanalysis which is basically fancy talk for analyzing a large dataset with multiple classes (emotions) using matrix decomposition.

I've actually worked on many projects involving this and the result is an eigenface (or eigenmask) that allows you to transform the space that the original image is in and classify it using any of a number of algoirthms that use euclidean distance.

I know I left out a lot but there are many papers out there that you can find on citeseer and white papers floating around out there that provide a lot of reading material on this.

There are also strategies which require tagging certain features as points on the face (like corners of eyes, corners of mouth, center of eye, etc) and then using the relative distances between all these points to determine what classification you would give a new face. The problem with this is that it requires a lot of hand work to prepare the training set.

Hope this helps anyone who wants to learn more about the actual process used to accomplish this recognition.

You interpret the term reason to literal.

Words mean things. In science, we try to define words as precisely as possible. And one thing we try very hard to avoid is the pathetic fallacy. You can learn more about it here and here.

I think saying cellular processes occur because they "want" evolution fits this definition.

Actually, the problem of devising this sort of a market (buyers appear at various times and don't want to wait, supply is unlimited) is pretty interesting and not impossible. The field of online mechanism design (where online means participants show up at various times) is quite popular these days, although I can't say I know too much about it...
However, it took about twenty seconds to see that there's already a paper that discusses a market virtually identical to this one (in theoretical terms). See: Incentive-Compatible Online Auctions for Digital Goods (2002), Ziv Bar-Yossef, Kirsten Hildrum, Felix Wu .

Their analysis: We first show that no deterministic online auction is competitive relative to the optimal fixed price revenue.
Hmm... doesn't sound like Apple needs to run out and implement an online auction market for itunes quite yet...

Yep, the story article is of rather low quality. As I state in my earlier post, they neglect quite a bit of good CS work, and instead cite such CS heavyweights as "Physical Review E".

Except for Yuval Shavitt the authors barely even register in DBLP (a database of CS bibliographies). Not big players in the CS community, and obviously not fully aware of the existing work.

Forgot the name of the tech, but it looked promising when used for PKI.

Indeed, I'd love to see mainstream implementations of hash visualization (best I could do searching... I thought I had bookmarked some other links, but guess not.)

Apologies for A/C. This is probably a little less than a full 3D model construction. Having seen a real-time demo of a "morphable model" the almost certainly use priors on face shape.

"First, the applications capture a user's face with a camera and detect the position of key features of the face, including the eyes, nose and mouth, using image recognition technology."

this can be done real time quite effectively right now:

http://citeseer.ist.psu.edu/rd/95418640%2C476373%2 C1%2C0.25%2CDownload/http%3AqSqqSqwww.merl.comqSqp eopleqSqviolaqSqresearchqSqpublicationsqSqICCV01-V iola-Jones.pdf

"By matching the 2D positions of these key features to a computer graphic image using a 3D face model, the applications estimate what direction the user is facing and the 3D positions of the face's 500 features."

Having seen a real-time morphable model demo from Toshba at ICCV2003 this is probably a similar approach to this:

http://gravis.cs.unibas.ch/Sigg99.html

(my PhD thesis includes this area - not on my site yet, but I have a paper on MM fitting at )
http://www.robots.ox.ac.uk/~jamie/paterson03.html

Cheers.

Nuance's (formerly Scansoft) Omnipage

and then a number of smaller players like SimpleOCR

In the open source world, some places to start looking are:

GOCR

and GNU's OCRAD

Both Nuance and Abbyy offer an SDK for OCR integration at a code level which might suit depending on your budget. Certainly the price (probably between $500 and $5000 for a license) represent a good deal if you look at the costs and time it would take to write anything that does serious OCR work yourself.

BTW, if anyone out there knows of any good document layout analysis code available to have a look at, I would be particularly interested. I am looking into document layout analysis for a personal project and although there is a fair bit of academic research available at Citeseer, I actually haven't found much in the way of good sample code that I can use as a starting point for some of my own ideas.

I wrote my own (in c no less, no cgic even, not recommended for anyone not doing it purely for fun).

It features database independence (through an abstraction layer), it is designed to let the webserver do the authenticatication rather than handling it internally (because I use kerberos and sometimes cosign or shibboleth), and it is completely theme-able (all html and css is read in via templates, kinda like slashcode but less ugly :P

It also features robust group based authorization controls for all functions, that combined with the "authentication system agnostic" design is something I have never found elsewhere (and thus why I felt the need to write my own)

I will someday release the source, once I get around to cleaning it up and making it presentable.

My weblog
My Department's weblog (same software)

Finkployd

July 28, 1962 -- Mariner I space probe. A bug in the flight software for the Mariner 1 causes the rocket to divert from its intended path on launch. Mission control destroys the rocket over the Atlantic Ocean. The investigation into the accident discovers that a formula written on paper in pencil was improperly transcribed into computer code, causing the computer to miscalculate the rocket's trajectory.

1982 -- Soviet gas pipeline. Operatives working for the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency allegedly (.pdf) plant a bug in a Canadian computer system purchased to control the trans-Siberian gas pipeline. The Soviets had obtained the system as part of a wide-ranging effort to covertly purchase or steal sensitive U.S. technology. The CIA reportedly found out about the program and decided to make it backfire with equipment that would pass Soviet inspection and then fail once in operation. The resulting event is reportedly the largest non-nuclear explosion in the planet's history.

1985-1987 -- Therac-25 medical accelerator. A radiation therapy device malfunctions and delivers lethal radiation doses at several medical facilities. Based upon a previous design, the Therac-25 was an "improved" therapy system that could deliver two different kinds of radiation: either a low-power electron beam (beta particles) or X-rays. The Therac-25's X-rays were generated by smashing high-power electrons into a metal target positioned between the electron gun and the patient. A second "improvement" was the replacement of the older Therac-20's electromechanical safety interlocks with software control, a decision made because software was perceived to be more reliable.

What engineers didn't know was that both the 20 and the 25 were built upon an operating system that had been kludged together by a programmer with no formal training. Because of a subtle bug called a "race condition," a quick-fingered typist could accidentally configure the Therac-25 so the electron beam would fire in high-power mode but with the metal X-ray target out of position. At least five patients die; others are seriously injured.

1988 -- Buffer overflow in Berkeley Unix finger daemon. The first internet worm (the so-called Morris Worm) infects between 2,000 and 6,000 computers in less than a day by taking advantage of a buffer overflow. The specific code is a function in the standard input/output library routine called gets() designed to get a line of text over the network. Unfortunately, gets() has no provision to limit its input, and an overly large input allows the worm to take over any machine to which it can connect.

Programmers respond by attempting to stamp out the gets() function in working code, but they refuse to remove it from the C programming language's standard input/output library, where it remains to this day.

1988-1996 -- Kerberos Random Number Generator. The authors of the Kerberos security system neglect to properly "seed" the program's random number generator with a truly random seed. As a result, for eight years it is possible to trivially break into any computer that relies on Kerberos for authentication. It is unknown if this bug was ever actually exploited.

January 15, 1990 -- ATT Network Outage. A bug in a new release of the software that controls ATT's #4ESS long distance switches causes these mammoth computers to crash when they receive a specif

PostgreSQL (note the play on words, "post" gres comes after "in" gres) descends from the follow-up project which extended relational concepts into an early "object-relational" system. Stonebreaker lays out his goals for the Postgres project in this 1986 paper.

So, Ingres is based on an older design that PostgreSQL. It has also spent 20 years in the corporate world being changed, upgraded, and improved, so evaluating it based on its lineage is like evaluating Oracle 10g based on your knowledge of Oracle 1.0. Interesting historical note: one of Oracle's first substantial competitors (and an early market leader) was a company called "Relational Technologies" that sold a cutting edge relational database named... Ingres.

What if you want to really make that ERP system shine? You know, take it to 11. A degree in CS will help you understand stuff like this . Just a random ERP paper I pulled from CiteSeer that looked like it had a fair amount of CS related math. In grand Slashdot form, I didn't read it.

I'm all but completely positive modern JVMs return unused memory to the host operating system.

The interplay between JVMs and virtual memory managers is being actively investigated. Read the paper Garbage Collection without Paging. The researchers are achieving huge performance boosts.

Don't confuse the Greenhouse Effect (good) with Global Warming (bad).

Instead of arguing ideology and theory, why don't you do some research and read some papers to back up your claims: Java Operating Systems: Design and Implementation.

Since Google is a free service, the only way this project could give them a commercial advantage would be by selling ads on Google Print pages--which they aren't doing.

Three points:

1. You sure that Google isn't using an affiliate link for the "Buy This Book" links? You sure that they aren't getting other revenue from the vendors? I'm not saying that they are, but I wouldn't be surprised.

2. I think even if there was no direct benefit you'd have a hard time arguing that Google didn't obtain even an indirect advantage from the venture. It gives them more poise, it increases the areas where they have a foothold.

3. Finally, and perhaps most importantly, if Google isn't selling ads on Google Print... what's this?

I think that is a bug in their website. if you go to one of the mirrors http://carroll.aset.psu.edu/pub/openoffice/contrib /MacOSX/ you will see that this is an english version 1.9.130. Note that OO.o is not yet stable in OS 10, this is still a development version. Personally, I have not had any problems using it, but I do find it to be slower compared to other platforms. The lack of integrated Carbon/Cocoa/etc steers me away. OSX is supposed to be pretty IMAO! Nonetheless, kudos to the OO.o team on a significant accomplishment.

The cold reduction operation induces very high strains (work hardening) into the sheet; thus, the sheet not only becomes thinner, but also becomes much harder, less ductile, and very difficult to form. However, after the cold-reduced product is annealed (heated to high temperatures), it becomes very soft and formable. In fact, the combination of cold reduction and annealing lead to a refinement of the steel that provides very desirable and unique forming properties for subsequent use by the customer.

Continuations are not from Smalltalk

Do you mean this Tango, or something else?

Yeah, I was reading that a couple weeks ago. Lesson I got out of it (might be wrong, but if it is, it's wrong in a good way): all linear recursion, deep down, boils down to "copying" some recursive "data structure"; scare quotes because you get to pick your own "fake" constructors, destructors and type predicates. Thus, linear recursion boils down to "copying" a "list," and iteration (i.e. tail recusion) boils down to "reversing" a "list."

Well, there's a bit more to it than that. I suppose that might be the message of the first five pages which describe the different morphisms available for lists (and for another view of what you're describing, I recommend Mitch Wand's Continuation-Based Program Transformation Strategies), but the real meat of the paper is the laws that they derive regarding those morphisms that work for any algebraic data type (I still need to read Bananas In Space, which I believe extends their work to exponential data types). It's one of those papers that's both really interesting and really uninteresting at the same time.

Still a pretty damn important technique that one should master in functional languages--recognizing the "shape" of a loop (is it a map? a left or right fold? an unfold?), and implementing the looping logic as a higher-order function separately from its specific uses.

Learn the squiggol, it shall set you free (or rub your eyes and curse the development of category theory...)

But all the examples in the article aren't tested in practise. Maybe the escape analysis the author describes works as advertised. But without actually testing and analysing real code produced and without actual benchmarks the article doesn't proof a thing

The author is giving you a high-level, greatly edited view of some of the major optimization techniques in use today. The original academic/technical papers on which that is based demonstrate/measure their techniques on various benchmarks.

One thing the author seems to forget is that you would at least need a fallback mechanism when a method is overridden in a subclass

This is well-known. Code-patching, on-stack replacement, pre-existence etc are used in production jits to recover from that kind of thing. This paper has a decent summary of current approaches:

This looks very similar to the implementation technique used for the Squeak programming language (not the Smalltalk Squeak). Squeak is a preprocessor for C that makes it very easy to use this technique.

http://citeseer.ist.psu.edu/cardelli85squeak.html

Doug Moen

Quite an interesting read if you're into that sort of thing...they got much better performance than FFS - the paper says it could use 70% of the disk's bandwidth for writing, compared to 5-10% in FFS, and was only worse than FFS in sequentially reading a file that had been written randomly.

I think there was a follow-up paper improving that, too, but I can't find it.

Quite an interesting read if you're into that sort of thing...they got much better performance than FFS - the paper says it could use 70% of the disk's bandwidth for writing, compared to 5-10% in FFS, and was only worse than FFS in sequentially reading a file that had been written randomly.

I think there was a follow-up paper improving that, too, but I can't find it.

Magazine are for the weak, get CiteSeer, and a library subscription to a University library.

http://citeseer.ist.psu.edu/ousterhout88beating.ht ml
http://citeseer.ist.psu.edu/hartman93zebra.html

Whatever you say boss.

http://citeseer.ist.psu.edu/ousterhout88beating.ht ml
http://citeseer.ist.psu.edu/hartman93zebra.html

Whatever you say boss.

Try this example, for a radiation therapy machine. You might also try this paper on formal specification of TCP/IP and parts of C.

The problem isn't that specification itself is bad. It's that most "specifications" are written by people who don't know what they're doing, and end up being vague and wishy-washy.

I don't think you know how it is used in CompSci...

From dictionary.com:
2. (From philosophy) An explicit
formal specification of how to represent the objects, concepts
and other entities that are assumed to exist in some area of
interest and the relationships that hold among them

Feel free to check out citeseer for more ontology information.

The CNet "ontology" is more of a topic graph though.

• Utah State University
• New Mexico State University
• Washington University at St Louis
• University of Texas
• University of Colorado
• Arizona State University
• Pennsylvania State University

I think we need billions of dollars of investment in upgrading our antimatter production facilities. The space elevator only gets you into orbit, antimatter can get you to nearby stars.

There's Rocks and Racks.

I hope that is an electron micrograph you have there. Otherwise I am going to cut down on my enthusiasm for Titan exploration.

Cue James Cameron.

Image here.

Text:

Methane clathrate deposits in the ocean floor have been found to be inhabited by polychaete worms of the species Hesiocaeca methanicola. The worms colonize the ice-methane solid and appear to survive by gleaning bacteria that in turn metabolize the clathrate. In 1997, Charles Fisher, professor of biology at Penn State, discovered this remarkable creature living on mounds of methane ice under half a mile of ocean on the floor of the Gulf of Mexico.

PostgreSQL will hopefully some day have Postgres-R integrated into it; a distributed lazy replication update scheme. (Multicast to ensure ordered group communication to derive seriazability, v. 2pc) This should allow it to scale out to a couple hundred if not couple thousand boxen quite easily with rather stunning performance.

Some more info here

Way of the future kiddies, look sharp.
Myren

PostgreSQL will hopefully some day have Postgres-R integrated into it; a distributed lazy replication update scheme. (Multicast to ensure ordered group communication to derive seriazability, v. 2pc) This should allow it to scale out to a couple hundred if not couple thousand boxen quite easily with rather stunning performance.

Some more info here

Way of the future kiddies, look sharp.
Myren

There is quite a difference between Penn and Penn State. Penn us an Ivy League school. She is from Penn.

Totally wrong.

There is no "limit" to how much moisture the air can "hold." Water vapor and air are infinitely miscible, just like alcohol and water. The relative humidity can be far higher than 100% in certain situations.

i know its hopeless..but,

his work these days centers around efficiencies of access gained by putting the dram and processing elements on the same die. partially removing the serialization associated with the standard synchronous memory interface. The architecture also plans on using MTA-style threads to hide latency and increase concurrency.

citeseer

I'm a meteorologist (or a meaty urologist - I can never remember). It's tough to believe there is any scientific discipline better suited for computer manipulation than the weather. For years, even before the advent of today's high speed computing, data was collected in a very systematic way, making it easier to compile and compare. Because I know there are so many reading this with the ability to advance the art, let me point you to a few data sources. Each of the files at this site contains all the world's weather observations for a since hour. Here's how to translate that. Here's forecast info from the GFS model, a time series for single points covering a full week's weather. Here's the same for the shorter range NAM model. The Weather Service even developed this free "Swiss Army Knife" program to read them called BUFKIT. BUFKIT has saved my sorry butt on more than one occasion. Here are MOS forecasts (dynamic model forecasts 'massaged' to take into account local climatology). The NWS is just scratching the surface, but it's getting better all the time. I look at my relationship with NWS as a partnership, not a competition.

I'm a meteorologist (or a meaty urologist - I can never remember). It's tough to believe there is any scientific discipline better suited for computer manipulation than the weather. For years, even before the advent of today's high speed computing, data was collected in a very systematic way, making it easier to compile and compare. Because I know there are so many reading this with the ability to advance the art, let me point you to a few data sources. Each of the files at this site contains all the world's weather observations for a since hour. Here's how to translate that. Here's forecast info from the GFS model, a time series for single points covering a full week's weather. Here's the same for the shorter range NAM model. The Weather Service even developed this free "Swiss Army Knife" program to read them called BUFKIT. BUFKIT has saved my sorry butt on more than one occasion. Here are MOS forecasts (dynamic model forecasts 'massaged' to take into account local climatology). The NWS is just scratching the surface, but it's getting better all the time. I look at my relationship with NWS as a partnership, not a competition.

I'ved used Solaris and SunOS, and know the differences.

See this snipit from the Solaris Transiton Guide where they explain how to install the SunOS/BSD compat packages, and how to use the new Solaris commands http://docs.sun.com/app/docs/doc/805-6331/6j5vgg6a i?a=view

Or see the notes at the bottom of this page http://www.math.psu.edu/guide/node104.html

This is common knowledge(and shared feeling) by anyone that ever had anything to do with Bell Labs.

Some of it even made headlines eons ago, most links seem to be dead by now, but I found a slashdot article about it, title could not be more explicit:

Thompson Critical of Linux, poor ESR was so taken aback that had to go ask for a "clarification" from Ken.

Hell, go read 9fans, not one week goes by without someone expressing how much they 'love' Linux(or Lunix, as it's known there).

Oh, oh, and here is another quote taken directly from the Plan 9 fortunes file:

Linux: written by amateurs for amateurs. - D. Presotto

And of course the classic:

This is not LINUX! This is Plan 9. There are rules. -boyd/walter

No. Anthropomorphization is an insidiously dangerous thing. Object DO NOT want to fall to the ground. They merely do. To impart, even metaphorically, the idea that inanimate objects have a will subtly taints the thought processes of even the most advanced thinkers, and it is absolutely disasterous to those who have not yet learned the entire suite of critical thinking skills, namely, children.

Saying that something happens because it "wants" to is a cop out which releases you from the responsibility of CORRECTLY explaining what's actually going on. If nobody knows why something is the way it is, then that should be admitted, rather than explaining away the phenomenon by saying that it "wants" to happen.

For a much more eloquent explanation of why anthropomorphization (also known appropriately as The Pathetic Fallacy) is so dangerous, see Alistair B. Fraser's page on Bad Science. (I don't agree with Fraser on everything, but I do on this.)

The whole paper can be downloaded from here.

Why don't we outsource our military to the PRC? It would be cheaper and we'd reach the logical conclusion quicker that way.