Slashdot Mirror

meghan elizabeth writes If the Turing Test can be fooled by common trickery, it's time to consider we need a new standard. The Lovelace Test is designed to be more rigorous, testing for true machine cognition. An intelligent computer passes the Lovelace Test only if it originates a "program" that it was not engineered to produce. The new program—it could be an idea, a novel, a piece of music, anything—can't be a hardware fluke. The machine's designers must not be able to explain how their original code led to this new program. In short, to pass the Lovelace Test a computer has to create something original, all by itself.

Nerval's Lobster writes "The 'Sequoia' Blue Gene/Q supercomputer at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) has topped a new HPC record, helped along by a new 'Time Warp' protocol and benchmark that detects parallelism and automatically improves performance as the system scales out to more cores. Scientists at the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and LLNL said Sequoia topped 504 billion events per second, breaking the previous record of 12.2 billion events per second set in 2009. The scientists believe that such performance enables them to reach so-called "planetary"-scale calculations, enough to factor in all 7 billion people in the world, or the billions of hosts found on the Internet. 'We are reaching an interesting transition point where our simulation capability is limited more by our ability to develop, maintain, and validate models of complex systems than by our ability to execute them in a timely manner,' Chris Carothers, director of the Computational Center for Nanotechnology Innovations at RPI, wrote in a statement."

Lank writes "A team of computer scientists from Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute have managed to coordinate nearly 2 million cores to achieve a blistering 504 billion events per second, over 40 times faster than the previous record. This result was achieved on Sequoia, a 120-rack IBM Blue Gene/Q normally used to run classified nuclear simulations. Note: I am a co-author of the coming paper to appear in PADS 2013."

alphadogg writes "Researchers have discovered that relatively little exposure to tablets and other electronics with backlit displays can keep people up at night by messing with their circadian rhythms. The study from the Lighting Research Center at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute showed that a 2-hour exposure to electronic devices with such displays causes suppression of the melatonin hormone and could make it especially tough for teens to fall asleep. The study, funded by Sharp Laboratories of America, simulated usage of such devices among 13 people using special glasses/goggles and light meters"

Quite a few readers are sending in stories about ThruVision's products, slated to be demonstrated in Britain next week, that are claimed to use Terahertz radiation ("T-rays") to detect foreign objects under clothing, without revealing body details, from a distance of 25 meters and while the subject is in motion. T-rays lie on the electromagnetic spectrum between infrared and microwaves, and are the subject of lively research efforts worldwide. ThruVision says it developed its products in cooperation with the European Space Agency.

Quite a few readers are sending in stories about ThruVision's products, slated to be demonstrated in Britain next week, that are claimed to use Terahertz radiation ("T-rays") to detect foreign objects under clothing, without revealing body details, from a distance of 25 meters and while the subject is in motion. T-rays lie on the electromagnetic spectrum between infrared and microwaves, and are the subject of lively research efforts worldwide. ThruVision says it developed its products in cooperation with the European Space Agency.

QuantumCrypto writes "Researchers at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute have created 'the world's first material that reflects virtually no light.' This anti-reflection technology is based on nanomaterial and could lead to the development of more efficient solar cells, brighter LEDs, and 'smarter' light sources. In theory, if a room were to be coated with this material, switching on the lights would only illuminate the items in the room and not the walls, giving a sense of floating free in infinite space."

Roland Piquepaille writes "Just when you finally have grasped the concept of quantum mechanics, it's time to wake up and to see the arrival of a nascent field named quantum biology. This is the scientific study of biological processes in terms of quantum mechanics and it uses today's high-performance computers to precisely model these processes. And this is what researchers at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI) are doing, using powerful computer models to reveal biological mechanisms. Right now, they're working on a "nanoswitch" that might be used for a variety of applications, such as targeted drug delivery to sensors."

Spy der Mann writes "Professor James Lu and other researchers of the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, managed to create three-dimensional chips (coral cache) to optimize the design of future processors and prevent overheating. "Make the interconnect wire shorter, and you cut the delay time," says Lu. "A simple way to make them shorter is to stack the transistors.""

heptapod writes "USA Today is reporting that DARPA has contracted two professors from RPI to develop artificial intelligences that can learn by reading and understanding natural language. Interesting taking DARPA's Grand Challenge into account. Mentioned in the article is Cycorp, Inc. which has been pursuing this goal since 1994!"

Anonymous Coward writes "Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI), Purdue University, Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL), and the Russian Academy of Science (RAS) stating that they have replicated and extended previous experimental results that indicated the occurrence of nuclear fusion using a novel approach for plasma confinement. Interesting stuff, read about it here."

The Only Druid writes "Scientists have confirmed the use of sonic waves to create the necessary compression in plasma to achieve nuclear fusion, far more effectively and cheaply than any other method. Val Kilmer was unavailable for comment."

sunhou writes "A couple of months ago, researchers tested a solar-powered autonomous underwater vehicle (SAUV) at RPI's Darrin Fresh Water Institute. (More pictures and links to info available at the Autonomous Undersea Systems Institute.) Current autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs) need to be taken out of the water often to have their batteries recharged. The goal is to have groups of cooperating SAUVs loaded with sensors and networking equipment deployed on long-term monitoring missions. Watch out Sky-Net, here comes Sea-Net! (See also the recent story about The Argo Project.)"

sunhou writes "A couple of months ago, researchers tested a solar-powered autonomous underwater vehicle (SAUV) at RPI's Darrin Fresh Water Institute. (More pictures and links to info available at the Autonomous Undersea Systems Institute.) Current autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs) need to be taken out of the water often to have their batteries recharged. The goal is to have groups of cooperating SAUVs loaded with sensors and networking equipment deployed on long-term monitoring missions. Watch out Sky-Net, here comes Sea-Net! (See also the recent story about The Argo Project.)"

Iphtashu Fitz writes "CNet News is reporting that the CIA has been quietly investing in research programs to automatically monitor Internet chat rooms. In a two year agreement with the National Science Foundation, CIA officials were involved with the selection of recipients for research grants to develop automated chat room monitors. Researchers at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute received $157,673 from the CIA and NSF for their proposal of 'a system to be deployed in the background of any chat room as a silent listener for eavesdropping ... The proposed system could aid the intelligence community to discover hidden communities and communication patterns in chat rooms without human intervention.' How soon until all IM conversations are monitored by Big Brother? The abstract of the proposal is available on the NFS website."

foghorn666 writes "Forbes and the Princeton Review have posted their list of America's Most Connected Campuses, which measures the technological capabilities of the country's 357 top colleges and universities. They're looking at infrastructure stuff like whether wireless networks are available, if you can register for classes online, and so on - not really curriculum. But the results are interesting, and the winner not a huge surprise: Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute."

Andreas writes "Professor Schubert says he has found a way to raise the efficiency of LEDs to 99%. From an article on Advanced Technology: "Until now, all lighting systems, especially incandescent bulbs, generated more heat than light. But our 99-percent efficient reflectors for LEDs makes them the first candidate for light-bulb replacement that generates more light than heat," said Schubert."

Poligraf asks: "All of slashdotters spend a lot of time in front of monitors. What are you doing to preserve your eyes? My issue seems to be not a declining vision, but fatigue after certain amount of time in front of the computer. It becomes so bad that I need occasionally to leave the room with computer and sit or lie down to relax for 5 to 10 minutes. What do you think of a full spectrum lights? Certain scientists swear that it is the best thing since sliced bread, others viciously rip their claims apart. Has anyone used these? What is your experience? What other methods can you come up with?\"

srhuston writes "According to a story at the NY Times (first born child req'd, yadda yadda), 'Scientists are again claiming they have made a Sun in a jar, offering perhaps a revolutionary energy source, and this time even some skeptics find the evidence intriguing enough to call for a closer look.' This has been covered here before (First, second, third) but it looks like they claim that the latest round of experiments, using better detectors, 'offer more convincing data that the phenomenon is real'." The scientists involved come from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Purdue University, Oak Ridge National Laboratory, and the Russian Academy of Science; here's their press release.

jsight writes with his review of Rob McGregor's Practical C++, published by QUE. He writes "Some books attempt to do one thing really well, and others attempt a little of everything. This book is clearly an example of the latter, in full force. Weighing in at a hefty 900 pages, you would expect this book to be crammed with chapters and details on every aspect of the STL and basic C++. In the following review, I am going to cover where it succeeds in doing this, and where it fails." (This book has been out for a few years; what books would make more sense today for a C++ learner's library?) Practical C++ author Rob McGregor pages 900 publisher QUE rating 7/10 reviewer Jess Sightler ISBN 0789721449 summary Provides a practical guidebook to learning C++ Section I -- Programming 101 At first glance, the book appears to be written for people with experience programming, however reading through this section clearly dispels that myth. Here we have a section which goes over everything from for loops to if conditionals while simultaneously using verbose, duplicitous language at every step. Perhaps this was intended as a means of reinforcement, however, it seems most of the effort here would be wasted.

The technical depth is what you would expect for a novice, but without enough hand-holding and examples to make a novice feel comfortable. Making matters worse, there are numerous typos in this section, including quite a few in the examples (making them uncompilable without corrections). Some of these appear to be type-setting errors, however, there are enough to potentially confuse novice developers.

I believe that the combination of weak examples, and significant typographical errors are strong enough to give a novice much difficulty in learning the C++ language.

Having said that, the section should be provide no difficulty for any programmer with a good knowledge of any vaguely similar language (eg, Perl, Java, PHP, etc).

Section II -- Beyond the Basics

Ah, now we're getting down to Brass Tacks... this section goes over everything from Function overloading to Structure and Unions. The section on function members within structures also does an excellent job of preparing the reader for the upcoming introduction of Object Oriented concepts.

The sections on Memory management, both from an allocation standpoint, and from a bit manipulation standpoint are first-rate. Details are perhaps not as strong as they could have been, however the material is very accessible, and clearly described.

Probably my only complaint with this chapter is the overly general section on compiling and debugging programs. However, as this book does attempt to be somewhat compiler/debugger agnostic, this is forgivable. From here, we dive into the real power of C++, Object Orientation.

Section III

From the beginning, this book treats Objects as an extension of the structure syntax taught previously (with the default of Public switched to Private). This, along with the classic Plans vs. Product description of the difference between a Class and an Object are quite clear and robust.

Again, this is a solid chapter, describing the details of getting a system of classes up and running, as well as some sample data structure implementations.

And then finally, the last section is a slightly less than 200 page description of the STL. This section is probably the book's weakest part, as it is just strong enough to give you a taste of what is available, but often not strong enough to grasp the details. It's a good start, but much more attention should have been made to this subject (potentially even at the cost of some of the wasted words on how a 'for' loop works). It makes a decent introduction for someone with very limited STL background, however, there is not enough depth to reach a strong level of understanding here.

Summary Overall, this is a solid book for an existing programmer to pick up C++ concepts. A programmer with a strong knowledge of an existing procedural language (such as C) would have no trouble digesting the concepts of this book. Having said that, the poor typographical issues, and verbose wording often muddle an otherwise good book.

You can purchase Practical C++ from bn.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.

GreenSwirl writes "Full-spectrum light sources often are claimed to promote health, mood and productivity in schools and offices. The Lighting Research Center at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, New York, has published an independent report evaluating full-spectrum light sources. Practically all health claims are debunked and many products are shown to have a less-than-full spectrum. The report was produced as part of the National Lighting Product Information Program, an objective third-party funded by government and utilities."

GreenSwirl writes "Full-spectrum light sources often are claimed to promote health, mood and productivity in schools and offices. The Lighting Research Center at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, New York, has published an independent report evaluating full-spectrum light sources. Practically all health claims are debunked and many products are shown to have a less-than-full spectrum. The report was produced as part of the National Lighting Product Information Program, an objective third-party funded by government and utilities."

GreenSwirl writes "Full-spectrum light sources often are claimed to promote health, mood and productivity in schools and offices. The Lighting Research Center at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, New York, has published an independent report evaluating full-spectrum light sources. Practically all health claims are debunked and many products are shown to have a less-than-full spectrum. The report was produced as part of the National Lighting Product Information Program, an objective third-party funded by government and utilities."

GreenSwirl writes "Full-spectrum light sources often are claimed to promote health, mood and productivity in schools and offices. The Lighting Research Center at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, New York, has published an independent report evaluating full-spectrum light sources. Practically all health claims are debunked and many products are shown to have a less-than-full spectrum. The report was produced as part of the National Lighting Product Information Program, an objective third-party funded by government and utilities."

GreenSwirl writes "Full-spectrum light sources often are claimed to promote health, mood and productivity in schools and offices. The Lighting Research Center at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, New York, has published an independent report evaluating full-spectrum light sources. Practically all health claims are debunked and many products are shown to have a less-than-full spectrum. The report was produced as part of the National Lighting Product Information Program, an objective third-party funded by government and utilities."

Shivkumar Kalyanaraman writes "I am an Associate Professor in the Electrical, Computer and Systems Engineering (ECSE) department at Rensselaer Polytechic Institute (RPI). This post is to inform you that I have recently collected all the videos and audios of my networking classes and put them online, freely available." Read on below; the course materials are also available on CD.

"For those who might prefer a CD-ROM set of the videos, that can also be ordered from this site. I hope this will be a useful reference for those working in the networking industry or interested to learn about or brush up their knowledge of networking, but do not have time to take formal university courses. It could also help complement your regular studies on this topic.

Comments/Errata welcome! If you find this resource useful, please recommend it to your friends and colleagues.

Thanks!
-Shiv
Shivkumar Kalyanaraman
Associate Professor, Dept of ECSE, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI)"

Shivkumar Kalyanaraman writes "I am an Associate Professor in the Electrical, Computer and Systems Engineering (ECSE) department at Rensselaer Polytechic Institute (RPI). This post is to inform you that I have recently collected all the videos and audios of my networking classes and put them online, freely available." Read on below; the course materials are also available on CD.

"For those who might prefer a CD-ROM set of the videos, that can also be ordered from this site. I hope this will be a useful reference for those working in the networking industry or interested to learn about or brush up their knowledge of networking, but do not have time to take formal university courses. It could also help complement your regular studies on this topic.

Comments/Errata welcome! If you find this resource useful, please recommend it to your friends and colleagues.

Thanks!
-Shiv
Shivkumar Kalyanaraman
Associate Professor, Dept of ECSE, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI)"

Shivkumar Kalyanaraman writes "I am an Associate Professor in the Electrical, Computer and Systems Engineering (ECSE) department at Rensselaer Polytechic Institute (RPI). This post is to inform you that I have recently collected all the videos and audios of my networking classes and put them online, freely available." Read on below; the course materials are also available on CD.

"For those who might prefer a CD-ROM set of the videos, that can also be ordered from this site. I hope this will be a useful reference for those working in the networking industry or interested to learn about or brush up their knowledge of networking, but do not have time to take formal university courses. It could also help complement your regular studies on this topic.

Comments/Errata welcome! If you find this resource useful, please recommend it to your friends and colleagues.

Thanks!
-Shiv
Shivkumar Kalyanaraman
Associate Professor, Dept of ECSE, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI)"

TinoMNYY24 writes "Jesse Jordan, owner of chewplastic.com, was on CNN this morning discussing the RIAA settlement. You can read a poorly spelled transcript of the interview. Jesse is one of the two students at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute that were sued by the RIAA."

pazu13 writes "The RIAA is taking action against college "Napster networks". It's suing four network operators, two at Renssalaer Polytechnic Institute, one at Princeton University, and one at Michigan Technological University. Don't know where this is going, but I'm afraid it might get significantly harder for humble college students such as myself to sample an artist's music before going out and buying a disc... my speed across the network is ridiculously faster than when I try to access outside sources."

atari_kid writes "NewScientist.com is running a article about a simple solution to the synchronization problems involved in distributed computing. Gyorgy Korniss and his colleagues at the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute proposed that each computer in a grid synchronize by occasionally checking with a randomly chosen computer in the network instead of centralizing the grid by having a global supervisor."

netdemonboberb asks: "I don't know where else we should turn, because no site will write articles on [this subject] and IBM is denying that their IBM 600 series laptops have flaky batteries. Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute distributed these laptops to freshman students in 1999 and almost everyone I knew in my class had this issue. Ralph Levien's page has suggested it appears to be an issue with the 'Smart Monitoring' circuitry. I'm writing this article to get the issue out in the open so IBM can no longer deny it. These batteries are expensive, and I have had to replace mine 4 times already. Can anyone who reads/maintains slashdot help or provide any advice on getting resolution for this?" I must say that from personal experience, I've wondered if this might be the case as well. I have an IBM Thinkpad 600e laptop and I've already gone through 2 batteries. The laptop is currently inactive as it must be tied to the wall if it is to be used. Has anyone else experienced shorter-than-average battery life using these laptops? Were you able to do anything to improve the battery life?

!splut writes "Thumbing it's nose as science, a Moroccan mule has given birth. Mules, hybrids between horse and donkey, are normally infertile, due to differences between the number and structure of horse and donkey chromosomes. Nevertheless, for reasons not well understood, fertile mules do occur, infrequently, with some 60 documented live births since 1527."

An anonymous reader writes: "Salon is running a story on Microsoft's disclosure of a number of security flaws in WinXP and Windows Media Player, versions 6.4 and 7.1. The story also states that there are 2 critical vulnerabilities in Commerce Server 2000. Will I ever get the bang for my MS buck?"

Greg Chappell asks: "I'm about to undertake a great American tradition of road tripping from Massachusetts to Washington State. I've got a moving company to tote my stuff on my one-way journey, and a handful of friends brave enough to venture by my side. Have any slashdotters recently attempted such a trip? What are the best solutions for on-the-road email, cellular, and Internet access? Where are those attractions, parks, and museums across the US that every road tripper needs to see? What's the best technique for planning such a trip, other than the usual websites? I've got no limits on the places I can visit or the distance I can travel. Any advice you can toss my way would be greatly appreciated!" People interested in this article, might also want to check out the older version of this topic. Also, what travel devices (no, not the laptop, think smaller) should no geek leave home without?

Swannie writes: "There's a story in today's Chicago Tribune about a joint project that Fermi Lab is taking on with Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in New York. The goal is to produce a 3D map of the universe using a really big digital camera, and a really creative way to add "depth" to the image. The article has some decent technical details for a newspaper, including a pretty picture." Update: 03/12 15:44 GMT by M : The blurb is in error. A particular scientist from Rensselaer is mentioned in the article, but Rensselaer isn't part of the project as an institution.

eebly asks: "I'm working with a team at my school to help ensure that some of our new building projects are environmentally friendly. As part of that, we want to include good, energy efficient computers. The new building will be labs, so we can't sacrifice power. We're looking for suggestions on what machines use low amounts of power, techniques to make the machines run with less, and ways to tweak the software to make things like sleep mode get used more effectively."

Lets start things off with a thing of beauty: ChazeFroy notes that Malin Space Science Systems has tons of really excellent images from the Mars Global Surveyor. Now something of evil: TsEA sends us HTML magic: a true guideline for HTML usage. 3 things that prove that The net Will destroy humanity: BlackNova sent us a Magic 8-ball powered by Lego Mindstorms, Cuban sent us the pantscam (which is exactly what it sounds like) and _martini_ noted an online thermostat where you can twiddle the temperature at some guys house. Its only a matter of time before technology fights back: NMerriam sent us the truth about what computers think of us in this weeks Onion. But let us not forget that science has given us many wonderful things, like for example, lunatik17 pointed us at a bit about shooting your lawn with lasers instead of mowing. However, science has also given us gmr2048's story about testicular implants for animals so I guess we're kinda even so far. I suspect the only way to defend ourselves from technology is to understand it, and who better to teach topics like ISDN then sent a great way to have celebreties like Alicia Silverstone. Or Mr. Rogers teaching the RS232 pinout, Tonya Harding explaining a Cisco 700, and best of all, Darva Conger on the configure register of Cisco routers (thanks Ex Machina who got it from Memepool) Ever want to be a female olympic marathon champ? Jaster this years winner believes hornet stomach juice is the secret, so get started! Of course, to much of that stuff could wind you up on sent us the the next Darwin Awards (from Gambit Thirty-Two) Ant sent us a pair of stories about poop! (what does this guy do with his time?) What happens when your space toilet doesn't flush? All I know is I hope that I have some custom printed toilet paper to keep things under control. Finally, many people noted that you should call 1-800-888-3999, and select option 7. No, really.

Anonymous Coward writes: "The MIT/CalTech prank rivalry is legendary. Who else could put a cow on a domed roof? And it inspired the Geek Classic Real Genius. Apparently the folks at RPI are into it as well, as evidenced by the DropSquad. What caught my eye was the commercialization. They're selling mousepads with photos of various objects that have been subjected to 'gravitational modifications'. When this hits MIT, I want a Cow on the Roof coffee mug!"

laborit writes "FNwire has posted an interview with Jeeves of ask.com. Evidently that "unique natural language engine with a proprietary knowledgebase isn't too great for questions like "bees? I don't understand." " Check out the archived pdf of this for more information.

diagnosis writes "MSNBC has an article on Lieutenant Colonel Grossman, an overzealous Army guy, and his new book. The book attempts to blame things like Colombine on games like Doom ("Death simulators"); the article refutes most of Grossman's claims and actually deals with the subject reasonably. I think that, given the coverage negative, reactionary material available on the subject gets, MSNBC's more reasonable view deserves at least as much notice."

Dodger47 writes "Interesting story from HP on their research in nanotechnology. They're using chemicals that line themselves up to form the wires of a circut board instead of using more traditional ways of pressing circuts, and using simple, small molocules to take over the role of transisters. Once again begging the question, "How small can you get? " Good size site, with a lot of interesting information about how you work at the nano level.

Greg Roelofs, author of PNG: The Definitive Guide, has written a feature on the PNG graphic format. The format has many technical advantages, yet it still isn't gaining acceptance. Personally, I just want a real alpha channel on web pages (well, and anti-aliased fonts, but lets cross one bridge at a time), Anyway, read what Greg has to say on the subject of PNG:

I hadn't intended to write anything up so soon, but lately there's been a lot of FUD and some general cluelessness about the Portable Network Graphics (PNG) image format, so here's an update from somebody who knows a tiny bit about it.

First of all, PNG is certainly not dead, although it obviously has not taken the Widely Webbed World completely by storm (which, in the eyes of the esteemed Mr. Veen, amounts to the same thing). For better or for worse, Netscape Navigator and Microsoft Internet Explorer pretty much define what counts as acceptable Web technology, and they only began supporting PNG natively in the autumn of 1997 (versions 4.04 and 4.0, respectively). As various Slashdotters have noted, neither one really supports PNG well yet, at least with respect to alpha transparency and gamma correction, but that's coming; let me return to that issue in a moment.

PNG has been making steady progress, however, particularly in non-Web applications. It has advanced from being a newsworthy ``extra'' to being an expected, standard component of image applications; in other words, a viewer or editor that ships without PNG support is considered deficient by both consumers and the trade press. That's a moderately subtle point--it doesn't necessarily leap right out at you and scream, PNG has arrived, dammit!, but it's nevertheless quite a significant milestone for any new technology. Mundane can be good. (By the way, I maintain the PNG home site and list known PNG-supporting applications of various persuasions on half a dozen pages; stop by if you're in need of something, and please let me know if I've missed any!)

But that's just one data point. Everybody's favorite technical publisher, O'Reilly and Associates, not only includes PNG chapters in a number of its books (including Web Design in a Nutshell and the soon-to-be-released Programming Web Graphics with Perl & GNU Software ), they also agreed to publish an entire 700-page book completely devoted to the Portable Network Graphics format: PNG: The Definitive Guide . It consists of around 300 pages of main text, 100 pages of program listings (both Unix/X and 32-bit Windows, under a BSDish license, freely downloadable soon), 250 pages of specifications, some fairly cool color figures, and assorted odds and ends; I happen to know because I wrote it. :-) (It just went into production on Monday, so it should hit the shelves in a few months, plug plug. I'll be updating the web page with dates and whatnot as soon as I find out myself.)

In addition, PNG has been published as an informational Internet RFC and a a W3C Recommendation (the very first one), and it's now wending its way through the slowly grinding gears of joint ISO/IEC standardization. That will all help ensure its longevity, but it's also fairly boring to most of you, I'm sure.

So getting back to the Web issue, let me briefly summarize PNG's basic capabilities:

• palette-based support (1, 2, 4, 8-bit), like GIF
• grayscale support (1, 2, 4, 8, 16-bit)
• truecolor support (24, 48-bit), like TIFF or (sort of) JPEG
• binary transparency, like GIF (except including grayscale and RGB modes, not just palette-based)
• alpha transparency (256 or 65536 levels of partial transparency), like TIFF
• alpha-palette transparency (that is, palette has RGBA entries, not just RGB), unlike anything else on the planet
• direct support for gamma correction and color correction
• lossless, unpatented compression
• 2D interlacing, somewhat like progressive JPEG
• no animation (but a closely related format called MNG)

The patent issue is largely history, except to shareware and freeware authors, for whom it's still quite real--Unisys lawyers continue their apparent crusade to kill all low-cost GIF-supporting software. What really matters to Web developers, however, is PNG's support for palette images (no, they don't all have to be really fat, 24-bit monsters); its support for alpha transparency even in palette images; its support for gamma and color correction; and the fact that its compression is lossless (which is why 24-bit PNG images are so fat, especially compared to lossy JPEG). In other words, for the same number of bytes as a binary-transparency GIF image, you can have a lovely alpha-palette PNG image that, thanks to gamma correction, will not look too light on Macs or too dark on PCs. The alpha support means it can be anti-aliased or drop-shadowed to look good against any background, not just a single, flat color. Note that MSIE 4.0 already supports gamma correction, and 5.0 is supposed to do full alpha transparency; we'll find out next month, I guess. Mozilla/Netscape 5.0 will also support both alpha and gamma, or else--I'm the nominal ``owner'' of Mozilla's PNG support, and now that the book is done, I intend to do some serious hacking. (Apologies for the 10-month delay!)

Since PNG pushes the envelope on a lot of image-related stuff--alpha transparency (no other Web formats), RGBA-palette images (no other format, period), gamma and color correction (almost no other formats), and even compression/filtering (it has a bunch of free parameters that one can tweak)--many of the current applications are somewhat behind in supporting some of the features. Be patient; things are steadily improving. I won't point fingers at any underperformers here, but I will note that the GIMP is quite strong in compression and 32-bit RGBA and should have fully working gamma code in the next release after 1.0.2; and Fireworks 1.0 is already partway there with RGBA-palette support and should be completely spiffy by version 2.1 or 3.0. (I didn't quite get my feedback in on time for it to affect the 2.0 release. If only they'd had a Linux version to try...)

I'm hopeful the book will help many of the others--it includes a lot of material aimed at helping programmers to improve their code, but also a lot of stuff to help users avoid problems and make the best of what options they've got. And if I have time while I'm working on Mozilla, I plan to release a free, automatic 32-bit to 8-bit (RGBA to RGBA-palette) converter to handle what seems to be the hardest PNG feature to support. Such conversion literally gives you a factor-of-four reduction in file size with essentially no visible loss (no more than normal RGB-to-palette conversion with nice dithering, anyway).

So...that, in a largish nutshell, is the past, present and future status of PNG. As for new competition, well, let's just say that there have been lots and lots and lots of fantastically improved, incredibly stupendous image formats that have come and gone over the years; ``WI'' is merely the latest, and SVG and JPEG2000/JPEG-LS are right around the corner. Anybody remember Johnson-Grace/AOL's ART format? How about Iterated Systems' fractal format (FIF)? Or some of the quadtree-based ones, or SPIHT, or FlashPix, or JPiG, or CMP, or ePIC, or HARC-C? Heck, even JPEG with arithmetic compression is considerably better than standard DCT-Huffman JPEG, but does anybody actually use it? No. Proprietary standards are simply not tolerated very well on the Web. Even free, open standards like PNG (with free, open-source, non-GPL'd reference libraries) have a huge barrier to climb. It took ``standard'' JPEG four years to catch on; it's taken PNG four years to catch on (yes, it's really been that long, and 2.5 years since the W3C Recommendation); and, barring largish miracles--e.g., Netscape and Microsoft cooperating--it will take any other new image format just as long.

There you have it. There's lots more info on the web site, and there are a couple of mailing lists for folks who really want to get gnarly with PNG. Oh, and please buy the book. ;-)

Steve Furlong writes "David Brin, science fiction and science author, has a different take on invasions of privacy. Read article for more info. " Brin's got an interesting take alright-nutshell is rather then try and fight the cameras that are going to go no matter what, make them so ubiqutous that everyone can know-but also reinstate the courtesy inherent in living in a collective sense, like the village of yore. The article is definietly worth a read.

Plutor writes "Applix has ported their office suite to LinuxPPC, and CNN has an article about it. It's always a nice thing to see main-stream press attention-I'd like my next box to be PPC. "

Plutor writes "Remember that futuristic Ion Rocket that NASA fired into space a couple weeks ago? Well apparently when they tried it on Tuesday, it only lasted four and a half minutes before shutting itself off. Scientists are baffled."

PianoMan8 writes "AMD has released thier K6-2's at 366, 380, and 400Mhz. The press release is here. Also, it appears that VIA and ALi will be making chipsets for the K7." Oh man that is cool. The 400MHz K6-2 has a faster core than other K6-2 chips. I can't wait for the K6-3 to come out so I can pop it in my K6-2 machine. Go AMD! Update: Diablo sent us a link to a Tom's Hardware Guide article which discusses these chips in a fair amount of depth.

Ok, we've got a buncha quickies all queued up, so here's my attempt at bringing that number down. First off, Dawn Endico wrote in to tell us that the last batch of the Mozilla Mail & News client has made it into the CVS repository. Next, Bill Rugolsky wrote in to let us know that SENSES and Mitsubishi have released the source code to Indy3D, their OpenGL benchmark test. Send them feedback, guys! Next, for the funny link of the day, Garrett Rooney sent us a link to this story about Steve Jobs meeting an over-eager security guard at MacWorld. Definitley funny =) Finally, on a related note, unity wrote in to tell us that Apple made a profit of US$101 million dollars this quarter ($.65/dilitued share). Wow, things are looking up for Apple!

Rob Clark was the first to write us about a Linux article currently running in The Economist. Much of this is familar info to us, but the graph of user satisfication is interesting, and more important to the overall goal of World Domination (tm) this will be running in the print edition as well. Stefane Fermigier wrote as well, mentioning that this article says that Oracle will be ported to Linux. Anyone know anything more?

Simon Karpen sent us a link to Nick Petreley's Latest InfoWorld Column. It is a moderately cheesy detective story, but I guess since Dvorak just did a stage play, this is normal behavior for mainstream computer press columnists. Petreley is cool: he has written a lot of positive Linux stuff before, so I tend to cut him a lot of slack... Anyway, he talks about something that many of us have gone through- trying to debug some crazy kernel device driver problem. (In this case, its a 3com 3c905b). There's a even a nice happy ending. Oh, and I've decided that my next editorial will be instead be a Performance Piece- I'll dance suspended by chains 6 feet above a stage to protest the suffering I've had with my laptop's sound support and 2.1.99 kernels. Gotta do something to keep up... *grin*.