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Beware, there are pictures of MUTANT plants here. Watch out for the triffids.

http://trilogyrelease.bungie.org

As for which game had the "better" story, I'd rather not get involved in some kind of offtopic debate/flamewar about it.

If you want to compare the story content without playing the games, you can view the Marathon terminal texts on Bungie.org's Marathon fansite, and Halo cinematics and (currently incomplete) transcripts on their Halo site.

AFAIK, Greg hasn't been seen on the Internet since Double Aught Software went under.

Alex Seropian is working on Stubbs The Zombie, and has time for interviews, but apparently didn't have much to do with actually writing the story for Marathon, Halo or Stubbs.

IIRC, Matt Soell is the main mind behind Stubbs' story. Two select examples of his writing style can be found here (first thing to come off the top of my head). He's also widely (heretically) believed to be the Bungie Webmaster of January 2003 and earlier.

Home page at Purdue: http://www.cerias.purdue.edu/homes/spaf/.

Oh, and you could still be right about PITAC being stacked. Not to impugn any of the participants, but there seems to be a remarkably odd representation of industry there.

In a committee setting, the effect tends to manifest in what is not said when reporting its consensus position. The PITAC report makes interesting reading with this in mind. It's an excellent introductory overview to information security, and I have no reason to fault any of its observations. For example:

In fact, many IT system designs continue to incorporate characteristics that make these systems vulnerable to attack. In some instances, system designs may be pushing the state of the art, so their vulnerabilities may not be understood until they are deployed. In other instances, vulnerabilities may be designed into systems because the developers lack technical knowledge or fail to execute best practices.

In the absence of significant demand for cyber security, IT vendors have mostly chosen to add new features for which customers are willing to pay. (Ironically, the addition of new features and added complexity often leads to the introduction of more security vulnerabilities.)

But it does not suggest that there are immediate, practical steps that organizations can take to reduce security risk. It doesn't classify sources of security risk. It doesn't observe that some organizations are found to be much more secure than others, it doesn't inquire into why that might be, and it doesn't identify specific platforms or strategies that, if encouraged, would be expected to lead to a more secure information infrastructure.

In my view, these would have been useful and appropriate themes to cover in a report of this nature. I consider their absence a significant and remarkable shortcoming of the report. But from a committee perspective, asking for more research funding is so much safer. Then we don't get into the sorts of direct questions that might create discomfort for some of the industry members. A knowledgeable reader can make this inference, and so to that extent the report has maintained integrity. Unfortunately, the report was not intended for a knowledgeable audience.

They do not directly mention Trusted Computing, but it looks like every expert they cite is in fact a Trusted Computing advocate. Hell, David Spafford was the author of the fairly famous WHY_TCPA and TCPA_REBUTTAL papers. I have to do some more Googling, but I think pretty much the entire committee has Trusted Computing ties.

You might want to check your DNS entries as apparently you're using a different "google" than I am. For starters '"David Spafford" TCPA' returns 0 hits of Google. Secondly, it's Eugene Spafford that took part in, and is cited in the report. Googling for Eugene Spafford and TCPA gives a few hits, but nothing about him writing any papers on TCPA. Confused, I went to his homepage and looked up his list of publications. Lo and behold, not a single mention of TCPA in any of his numerous books, journal articles or conference papers. He did write "Practical UNIX security" available from O'Reilly.

I'm sure if you continue to completely make stuff up you can find all manner of other connections to trusted computing. On the other hand if you care to join the rest of us in reality you might find that the report really has nothing to do with TCPA at all.

Jedidiah.

Unless you can prove that EA expected them to work 80 hour weeks with no overtime ( assuming they weren't salary ... if so this point is moot )

Couple of problems there. For one, being salaried does NOT mean that you have to work ridiculous hours without compensation. All it means is that your work hours are unplanned and untracked. Businesses still can and do get in VERY hot water for "encouraging" their employees to work extreme hours without paying them sufficient compensation to warrant the time spent.

Now as I understand it, California does have a law on the books that requites programmers to be employed as exempt. However, this exemption requires that they make at least $85,000/yr. As I understand it, most of the EA programmers do not make quite that much, so they would have a strong case for mistreatment.

These people stayed at work of their own accord. Sure, they probably thought they were going to get fired if they didn't - maybe the atmosphere of the environment led them to believe this, or maybe it was simply the popular perception of game programmers having to work 80 hour weeks to prove their merit

Simply convincing a judge that EA was putting pressure on the employees to work long hours should be sufficient. Granted, I am not a lawyer, but my understanding is that you don't need a "smoking gun" to prove the working environment. Unfortunately for EA, some of the accounts seem to suggest that such a smoking gun exists.

A few links for further research:

http://www.purdue.edu/hr/LeadingEdition/LEdi_704_e xempt_nonexempt.htm
http://www.fairmeasures.com/overtime.html#hours (Note the 72 hour work-week in CA. 80 hrs would violate that.)
http://www.ahipubs.com/ubb/Forum1/HTML/010030.html
http://www.signonsandiego.com/uniontrib/20040822/n ews_1b22ot.html

"The fact is the non-comma sentence does not have one difinitive meaning, and you are just telling us what it means through your assumed meaning."

Actually it does. When one uses a modifying phrase, one must use commas to alter the phrase it modifies. Otherwise it modifies the closest phrase.

Witness:

• Anna commented on Patrick's running quickly.
• Anna commented quickly on Patrick's running.
• Anna commented, on Patrick's running, quickly.

The sentences above have a single meaning each. The prefered solution is to put the modifing phrase next to the modified phrase.

There is more information about dangling modifiers available on the Web.

I believe the project you're thinking of was called "Emancipated Pixels". You can find it on Google now. I worked on a similar project at Purdue : http://www.cs.purdue.edu/homes/aliaga/mrt.htm

I have also used GraphViz and I find it very useful. I've used GraphViz in research to create a DAG of simulated computer intrusion paths in this paper: PDF. I think it's a fun piece of software to play around with, and I've also used it in some visualizations for my senior design project (though I forgot what for) and to produce an image detailing the source tree for my game project. If I ever have extra time (which probably won't happen for the rest of my life) I'd be interested in hacking GraphViz to add a couple features I'd like to see.

screenshot

Obligatory Dilbert cartoon. I'd link to the original, but can't find it.

I troubleshot this problem before, but I don't have the links handy. The short version is that it's a bug in the program itself, where it asks for too-general of a font, which causes buffer overflows. When requesting a font in X there's a whole bunch of dashes and asterisks such as -*-fixed-medium-r-normal--15-*-*-*-c-90-iso8859-1 . Each of these asterisks is an "I don't care" value. "I don't care what foundry it's from." "I don't care about its resolution." Or say -*-fixed-medium-r-normal--15-*-*-*-c-90-* which also says "I don't care about its encoding."

The encoding part is what you're getting around. When you have a proper LANG setting, like "en_US" the libraries you're using will recognize this and provide you with a nice beefy font. You'll often get a font which is not a nice, normal 8-bit font. It could be all wacky with like thousands of freaking characters, for, like, doing stuff outside of the Latin language set. Crazy.

When proper international fonts were being developed and the developers started to test applications, they realized that there were a ton of applications with this problem. They simply requested a font where they didn't specify encoding, and they couldn't deal with certain encodings that were returned, and they'd segfault. Therefore, making international-capable fonts standard was put off for many months while developers were encouraged to fix their applications. Unfortunately, Acrobat Reader is one of the stragglers. The recommended solution I've seen is to rename acroread and add a script in its place which sets the LANG variable and then runs the renamed executable.

My father invented and patented this idea; the US patent, granted in 1981, was originally filed in 1975. He never got a dime out of it, and the patents, in Canada, Australia, Israel, and the US, have all expired. I guess he was ahead of his time. More information here.

My father invented and patented this idea; the US patent, granted in 1981, was originally filed in 1975. He never got a dime out of it, and the patents, in Canada, Australia, Israel, and the US, have all expired. I guess he was ahead of his time. More information here.

I may be particularly dense, but I've concluded that Eclipse isn't the answer (otherwise, why was Penumbra developed ? (careful, thats pdf)

• It takes way too long to start itself up
• Add just an extra plugin or 2 and see how quickly you get lost
• try writing a non-trivial plugin (hope you don't have carpal tunnel, you'll be typing a lot of java and xml)
• stick it in front of a non-tech user (as the parent was developing for), and you'll get looks of amazement all right...followed by looks of anger, confusion, and anxiety

While I appreciate IBM's contribution to FOSS, and its an OK Java IDE, morphing it into a general purpose UI for general users is probably expecting too much.

I'd start with a set of simple web pages, and maybe upgrade to either VB, python/tkinter, or Perl/Tk (maybe wxPython if you must have that fancy chrome) only if you can't convey the functionality in some simple HTML + CSS + JavaScript.

A typesafe language is no replacement for secure programming knowledge, several vendors offer classes in that realm:

http://www.liveammo.com/LiveAmmo_Secure_Programmin g_Training.htm

and

http://www.cerias.purdue.edu/secprog

And another congratulations, submitter, for your senseless butchering of the poor comma.

Comma usage.

Now, you're establishing ridiculously narrow criteria for judging the value of the space program: the parent has ruled out all scientific knowledge (so we can't talk about the Genesis Rock brought back by Apollo 15, or the excellent solar observations made on Skylab, or the advances in astronomy due to Hubble, or the contributions of the Mars Rovers), and you've just ruled out spin-offs from technologies developed for the express purpose furthering the space program as well as those technologies themselves (bye bye integrated circuits, farewell satellites).

What you're looking for are things based on the results of pure scientific experiments conducted in space, but neither the science itself, or the technology used to conduct those experiments, is acceptable. Tricky. But not impossible.

There's a smokestack pollution monitor, waste recycling/conversion technology, and a near infrared fire detector, for example. If you want more, there's always Google.

You may want to tweak this joke a little. You know a cockroach is an insect, right? How many legs does an insect have?

Understanding "Cricket The Game" and "Cricket The Rules", require seperate skills in my opinion.

Understanding cricket the game essentially requires the ability to take a day or so out of your life, and thrust your posterior upon a seat or grassy hill, accopmanied by surplus amounts of Pims/beer/wine/meths dependant on preference, and vast quantities of suitable picnic type food stuffs.

Then for the next day or so, the etiquitte appears to consist of eating, talking, pointing and the occasional applause (a simple case of joining in with the majority). There are some exceptions, for instance if you are participating in the viewing of an England International, there is the need to put up with the rather loud, and repetetive cries of the English "Barmy Army". These are an intriguing group of people, with the ability to chant the exact same lyrics for an amount of time that seems at odds with the general populaces tedium threshhold.

In terms of the rules of cricket, it has best been put as follows:-

Cricket is played between two teams who each get a chance to bat and bowl.

When they bat a batsman is in until he's out. When he's out the next batsman comes in until he's out.

When all the batsmen are out, the team is all out, apart from one batsman who is not out.

The team that were fielding then go into bat until they are all out and it is a case of the team who scored the most being the winner.

Or for a more exacting reference please see here.

Though to be honest the only real way to learn is to watch a game on TV and listen to the commentators, in between their twittering about the wildlife on show, they occasionally explain some of the action that is occuring on the field.

That sure beats Verizon's current best offering at my home. But seriously, I could only get 16.8 kbps on dialup until I called them over 10 times and they finally fixed the lines. Now I can get 45 - 50 kbps with random cut outs. High speed is only available for me via satelite.

Try this Grows everywhere, under almost every condition, everybody will love you, you will be very popular. Good for your health as well.

Well, since I no longer work for the university, and you don't believe me anyway, the only person who could confirm it is my boss. And quite frankly, I don't feel like handing out his contact info just because some schmuck on Slashdot thinks I'm full of shit about what projects I worked on while employed at Purdue. So go ahead, don't believe me. It's not like I'll lose any sleep over it.

Tell you what I'll do, however. Here's a link to a WordML document. It doesn't use any DRM at all - it's just a plain old WordML document, in a file format that anyone can read or write. I think you'll find the content quite familiar - it's the mindless blather you passed off as a post. Take a look and see how much binary there really is in there. Please, point it out to us - since you're such an expert.

As opposed to a dancing idiot?

Look no further.
http://www.psych.purdue.edu/~garcia/photogallery/s psp2004/Dancing%20fools.JPG

Write I before E
Except after C
Or when it sounds like an A
As in "neighbor" and "weigh"

Yeah, I know there are better things to do than criticize article headlines.

I used it just recently with the car stereo I installed. ;)

I'm not really so sure..

The PSP will win, unfortunately. It is the better machine. There really is no contest. The screen rocks.

The Game Gear was also clearly the better machine. Its screen rocked too. It didn't help. The problem is that what is "better" for a video game console may not be better for handhelds, since "better" comes with portability costs. So far Nintendo's been the only company to ever realize this, and this is the reason they've owned the market for so long.

The movie playing rocks.

I'm not so sure this is really going to help it though. Since UMD movies appear to not be happening anymore, the movie playing is limited to what you can stuff on a memory stick. It seems kind of hard to find a memory stick big enough to comfortably hold a movie for less than the $100 range. This might help the PSP into a super-high-end gadget-addict niche, but probably won't help in the general market-- and on the offchance the general market decides they like this feature, it doesn't mean the PSP will be able to benefit from it. Nintendo has an aftermarket movie and mp3 player they'll be releasing in Japan soon, and they can release it in America if it's to their benefit. It fits into a GBASP or the GBA slot of a DS, and it uses SD cards instead of memory sticks, which seem to run at about half the price.

The only thing you say I really object to though is this:

Super Nintendo 64 DS has graphics slightly worse than the N64 version.

This is just plain wrong. The DS doesn't have the graphics of the PSP, but the N64 just isn't any comparison to the DS at all. Mario 64x4 far outdoes the 64 version, plus the framerate is much better, and this is just a touched-up port-- the DS has much more to offer...

This is Migraine.mp3

Actually, it was the school's stupidity. They gave her a bike with NO BRAKES. Granted, she should have tested it beforehand but still, it was not all her fault. http://news.uns.purdue.edu/html3month/2004/040825. Police.accident.html

What you have hit upon is a concept in Political Science known as the Carceral (spelling may be off). Discueed at length by philosopher Michel Foucault (pronounced Foo-co) The basic concept is that, because you are always subject to monitoring and can not know when you are being watched, you will always behave like you're being watched.

The idea was first set forth as a method of perfectly controlling a factory. The premise was that a manager or observer would sit at some central station observing employees who he could see but who could not see him. As the employees could be under scrutiny at any given time, they had no choice but to assume that they were always under scrutiny.

The Carceral is a prison, not for the mind, but of the mind. Have you ever stopped at a red light when there was no one for miles? That's the classic example of the Carceral in action.

We see this all around us, every hour of every day. The RIAA uses it to deter file traders. The Federal Government uses it to deter tax cheats. Walmart uses it to prevent shoplifting.

The online world is a different place, however. Security and scrutiny are something the individual has as much power to prevent as the observer has to employ. Use of sophisticated encryption systems is within the grasp of many users. Moreover, the huge volume of traffic does make monitoring even a meaningful portion hugely difficult.

Remember, the challenge is not to monitor all the traffic on the Internet, but to monitor enough that people will assume that you can monitor it all. Just as the RIAA can't sue every file trader, the Feds can't monitor every bit and byte that flows over the wires. That said, the RIAA can monitor enough to make you think twice about loading up a P2P client, and the Feds might be able to monitor enough to make terrorist organizations choose a less convenient, less efficient, and less sophisticated method of communication. That in and of itself is a victory.

The consequences for the rest of us will be just another casualty in this war on terror. Chalk it up there with free speech, privacy, and equal protection under the law.

It was Indiana. The reference you cite is talking about a hoax; Indiana actually did present a bill.

The device is a clear glass canister about the height of two coffee mugs stacked on top of one another. Inside the canister is a liquid called deuterated acetone.

[...]

The researchers expose the clear canister of liquid to pulses of neutrons every five milliseconds, or thousandths of a second, causing tiny cavities to form. At the same time, the liquid is bombarded with a specific frequency of ultrasound, which causes the cavities to form into bubbles that are about 60 nanometers - or billionths of a meter - in diameter. The bubbles then expand to a much larger size, about 6,000 microns, or millionths of a meter - large enough to be seen with the unaided eye.

[...]

Within nanoseconds these large bubbles contract with tremendous force, returning to roughly their original size, and release flashes of light in a well-known phenomenon known as sonoluminescence.

[...]

At that point, deuterium atoms fuse together, the same way hydrogen atoms fuse in stars, releasing neutrons and energy in the process. The process also releases a type of radiation called gamma rays and a radioactive material called tritium, all of which have been recorded and measured by the team.

As of 9 am on December 14, a FAQ detailing the Harvard pilot program...

Don't you mean an FAQ?

Seriously though, I can't help but wonder if projects such as this will help or hurt the overall literacy of the populace. It seems to me that the ability to extract excerpts quickly without having to peruse the context could lead to a less educated society. Some of the most interesting facts I have learned have been things I've accidentally run across in a book while looking for something else.

Don't get me wrong, I fully support the idea of having quick access to any information that might be needed. I am simply speculating that some other steps might need to be taken to ensure that future generations still benefit from the subtleties of knowledge that come from reading a book.

Just a thought.

-Daniel

I recommend looking into the SINAPSE Project (http://www.sinapse.org). SINAPSE is a free, open-source student community tool (we like to call it a nexus, not a portal). It's written in PHP (on SourceForge - http://sourceforge.net/projects/sinapse), and it's a strict CMS system (no open editing - each app has controlled input and output). It's Developed at University of Oklahoma (go Sooners!) and run by students there.

You can see it in action at OU (The Sooner Information Network - http://sin.ou.edu), Baylor (Baylor Information Network - http://bin.baylor.edu), Purdue (HAIL - http://hail.purdue.edu), Southern Miss (The Varsity - http://thevarsity.usm.edu), California University of Pennsylvania (CalYou - http://calyou.cup.edu), SW OK State U (LIFE - http://life.swosu.edu), and Eastern VA Medical School (http://student.evms.edu)). There's also a similar site at William and Mary (SIN - http://sin.wm.edu) that's not running SINAPSE, but should be.

SINAPSE Consulting (http://www.sinapseconsulting.com) also makes some for-pay add-ons like LegiSlate which allows SGA's to do their Legislative processes online (voting, tracking, attendance, etc.) It's in action at OU (http://congress.ou.edu), OK State (http://www.osusga.com), Central Arkansas (http://uca.mysga.com), and very soon at Rhode Island, Illinois Institute of Tech, and U Texas - Arlington (and possibly Miami).

I know that the grad program is much more extensive. If you want to do security research, Purdue is definitely the place to persue it.

If I remember correctly, there's a project going on here at Purdue with deuterated acetone called "sonofusion" or something...why dont we just nickname that "coldfusion"? *searches for a story about it on public server* http://news.uns.purdue.edu/html4ever/2004/040302.T aleyarkhan.fusion.html The following joke is circulating at the Cold Fusion Institute: Why do you never see neutrons, tritium, and heat all in the same experiment? Nobody can make that many mistakes.

You guys really need to read the referenced URL! It's some really interesting history on WW2 atomic bomb chemistry and Sodium Borohydride

Where the hell are my mod points. Karma says I should have some. Please mod parent UP!

Sodium Borohydride was used by the signal corps during WW2 for filling antenna lofting balloons.

I'm not a chemistry buff, but this lecture from a Perdue chemistry prof describes the discovery of sodium borohydride, the compound used to generate hydrogen for this thing.

http://news.uns.purdue.edu/UNS/html4ever/2004/0410 11.Delp.forensics.html

Link linked.

I played with OCaml for a good length of time, considering whether to make it my next language for everyday use. I should also preface things by mentioning that I'm into graphics and rendering; I need fairly heavy duty numeric performance. I've also been thinking a lot about what would be my perfect language, so this has been on my mind of late - I've been reading up on Programming Language Theory papers and texts and contemplating drafting my own language spec and trying to bootstrap a compiler.

OCaml annoys me slightly because it seems so tantalizingly close to what I'm looking for but falls just short. For one, I wish it had better support for generative programing. Sure, for template like stuff you can immitate that to some extent through the polymorphism, but because it has to be generic, it still doesn't work out performance-wise. Look at the kind of stuff they can do with Blitz++. And I know there's Camlp4 and MetaOCaml, but they're really too kludgy for my taste, though still better than the insanity that is C++ template metaprogramming. (Ick!) The model that I really like is the macro systems in Lisp or Scheme. That would require a Lisp-like syntax to work, but I'm cool with that.

The other thing that bugs me a bit is that the compiler seems fairly simple in regards to optimization passes. When I've looked at assembly output from it, even with all optimizations turned on, I was surprised to see that it doesn't seem to do common subexpression elimination or strength reduction, like a common C compiler could do for you. I realize that OCaml is more functional, which constrains the compiler a bit, but there are compilers for other functional languages that manage to do flow graph analysis and optimization. (e.g. Stalin for Scheme) This lack is dissapointing in a higher level, more declarative style language like OCaml.

Finally, one other thing is that while the foreign-function interface to C is better than many other functional languages, I wish it were still better. With OCaml, it seems like you'd still need a small library in C as a shim to interface between the two languages. It would be nice if you could simply declare a function's signature, mark it as an external C function and link the library in. To deal with garbage collection, I'd borrow something like the "pin" construction from C#. I think C# and the .Net framework have a really nice model for FFI.

Of course, if you don't need such heavy duty performance, OCaml's still a great system and a fair sight better than many other functional language systems. But it's not a panacea for everything.

One more thing: if you use (X)Emacs, be sure to have a look at Tuareg Mode.

... and the ever popular Etch-a-Sketch.

Soko

Another Mirror

On my univ bandwidth:) The Link Enjoy Mohan Yeah...I am up too:p

Isn't Perdue where George Goble teaches?

We use a hand-built refrigerator unit he built to keep sodas at a cool 32 degrees F in our EE lounge.

Isn't Perdue where George Goble teaches?

He's an engineering and BBQ legend that had to remove his site about lighting and enhancing flames with liquid oxygen.

Oh yeah, I almost forgot that open source education thingie is probably a good idea. I'd have to buy a Linux for Dummies book and then look for the "if you are still too dense..." part.

Subpixel rendering takes into account the physical position of the red, green, and blue subpixels of an LCD display, and can therefore provide up to 3X the horizontal resolution of a typical display (with distortion, of course)

Here's a nice writeup

I've got two monitors at work, where I do web development. I keep whatever I'm working on open in one monitor, and I've got Firefox running with the finished product open on the other. It's pretty handy to see what exactly you've done instead of just a preview in Design Mode in Dreamweaver or whatever. Also, I'm using Firefox's GMail notifier, so I don't have to dedicate an entire monitor to e-mail.
At school , I do things a bit differently. In Flash, Photoshop, Director, etc. I generally try to have one screen dedicated to the visual stuff and another screen for code and/or toolbars. The bigger the screen, the higher the resolution, the better. It's all about cramming as much of what I'm working on into the screens as possible.
At home, I get along with just one 17" CRT. Blah.

My bad - here's the link: here

Here's a mirror of the video. Not sure how fast it'll be.

general:
http://www.hort.purdue.edu/newcrop/duke_energy/Jat ropha_curcas.html
potential environmental ("alien invader") hazard evaluation:
http://www.hear.org/pier/species/jatropha_curcas.h tm
Source for seeds:
http://www.tropilab.com/jatropha-cur.html

I see. So if someone makes a mistake, that means it is okay for someone else to do so? If you don't know what 'conspiracy' means, how does it help you to know that it involves 'conspiring'? Dictionaries are not the place for contextual learning. Laziness on the part of m-w.com does not excuse laziness on the part of someone else.

here

Do not define a word by mere repetition.

Water is a watery substance.
Running is when a person runs.
A conspiracy is when people conspire.

See the problem here? Or does your faith in m-w.com overrule your common sense?