Slashdot Mirror

It's real. I applied to study it at Southampton University as a fall-back in case I didn't get in doing Software Engineering at UMIST.

who in 1950 said that in 50 years we will be able to programme computers "to make them play the imitation game so well that an average interrogator will not have more than 70 per cent chance of making the right identification after five minutes of questioning" 53 years later we are still so incredible far from this. see this for more details.

http://www.vips.ecs.soton.ac.uk/

It only does rotate/scale/translate (all I need), but it can do any size image on a 32 bit machine. The screendump shows a 43000 by 30000 pixel image. Linux, win32 and mac.

The Head Related Transfer Function is, well, head related -- it depends on the shape of your head. The problem with this approach is that you are limited in having to use an approximate average. While left-right imaging can be still excellent, front-back imaging usually is below par of a discrete system. The effect is more realistic with the specific HRTF of the listener, but obviously that's not practical.

As an aside, you can check out this interesting (if dated) stereo dipole demo with only two speakers right in front of you that have minimal separation between them but can produce the illusion of extreme left-right (make sure to set up according to the readme first or it won't work).

The Head Related Transfer Function is, well, head related -- it depends on the shape of your head. The problem with this approach is that you are limited in having to use an approximate average. While left-right imaging can be still excellent, front-back imaging usually is below par of a discrete system. The effect is more realistic with the specific HRTF of the listener, but obviously that's not practical.

As an aside, you can check out this interesting (if dated) stereo dipole demo with only two speakers right in front of you that have minimal separation between them but can produce the illusion of extreme left-right (make sure to set up according to the readme first or it won't work).

Why does this always come up in AI discussions here?

Penrose's argument has been formalized and fully refuted, see for example here.

As a discipline within artificial intelligence, (multi-)agent systems are about fifteen years old, although they have roots in the distributed artificial intelligence discipline from some years beforehand.

A seminal early paper that gives an overview of the discipline is M. Wooldridge and N.R. Jennings Intelligent Agent: Theory and Practice, The Knowledge Engineering Review, 10 (2), pp. 115-152, 1995. (postscript). Other good sources are the proceedings of the main conference series on agents, AAMAS.

The launching of PLoS Biology -- http://www.plosbiology.org/-- an outcome of Harold Varmus's highly influential 1999 Ebiomed Proposal -- http://www.nih.gov/about/director/ebiomed/ebiomed. htm -- is a very important event for research and researchers, for two reasons:

(1) It is another step forward in providing open access to peer-reviewed research, a major step.

(2) It both demonstrates and will further stimulate the research community's growing consciousness of both the need for open access and the possibility of attaining it.

It is all the more important, therefore, that on this auspicious occasion for the open-access publication strategy (BOAI-2) we not forget or neglect the other, complementary open-access strategy, open-access self-archiving (BOAI-1) --http://www.soros.org/openaccess/read.shtml -- particularly because systematically supplementing BOAI-2 with BOAI-1 has the power to bring us so much more open-access, so much more quickly.

A KEY-STROKE KOAN FOR OUR OPEN-ACCESS TIMES

Here is an extremely conservative calculation that will give you an (I hope unforgettable) intuition for the importance of not neglecting the other road to open access:

If, in addition to signing the PLoS open letter (pledging to boycott toll-access publishers unless they become open-access publishers http://www.plos.org/support/openletter.shtml), not even all the 30,000 PLoS signatories had self-archived not even all their own toll-access articles, nor even the 55% corresponding to the proportion of blue/green (self-archiving-friendly) toll-access journals -- http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Temp/rcoptable. gif-- but only the 18% of signatories corresponding to the proportion of postprint-green journals had self-archived just one of the articles they had published in just one of those toll-access journals, the resulting 5400 articles that had been made openly accessible by this act would still have been 5 times as many as PLoS Biology will publish in 5 years (1200 articles, assuming 20 articles per PLoS issue at $1500 a pop). And at the cost of only a few keystrokes more than what it cost to sign the petition.

Yet all researchers did was sign the PLoS open letter, and then wait, passively, for toll-access journals to turn into open-access journals in response to the petition. And now researchers seem ready to wait yet again, passively, with the popular press now cheering from the sidelines, for more open-access journals like PLoS Biology to be created or converted, one by one.

As we make our estimate less conservative and arbitrary, and scale it up first to 55% of all annual biology articles, and then beyond that, to the many journals that will support self-archiving if asked, I hope the scales will at last begin to drop from the eyes of those who have not yet noticed the tunnel vision and paralysis involved in focusing only on open-access publishing, when it is *open access* that is our target.

And perhaps then we will be less surprised that the 23,500 toll-access publishers did not take our boycott threat seriously -- and, by the same token, that they still have no reason to take the handful of open-access journals created since the beginning of the '90s (of which PLoS Biology is about the 543rd) seriously -- if that's all we're prepared to do to demonstrate our need for and commitment to open access for our research, as we just keep sitting on our hands instead o

SCO stands for Synchronous Connection-Oriented, compare Asynchronous Connectionless (ACL). See this (PDF) paper for a brief discussion of the subject. As I understand it, it's similar to TCP vs. UDP.

The GNOME section icon is out of date: GNOME changed their logo about a year ago. I've done a new topic icon with the new logo if one of the slashdot editors is interested in putting it in.

...that just because you're not using Outlook or Outlook Express, you still may be vulnerable to worms or email viruses?

All it takes is one user to click the attachment who has an LDAP-enabled address book of the entire company, and poof! you're screwed.

The only sensible way to kill these worms is to block them at the mail server. If you block them at the mail server, you don't have to try to train people or keep hundreds of anti-virus clients up-to-date. Do yourself a favor and set up XWall if you have Exchange (this is about the coolest spam-blocker/email filter program I have ever used, BTW) or SpamAssassin/MailScanner if you have Linux/UNIX. This will save you a ton of headaches in the future, and won't require you to worry about hundreds of clients being up-to-date as much as focusing on whether a few email servers are up-to-date. (Block the standard Microsoft "bad executable" list and you should be fine.)

Seriously, in the year 2003, there's no excuse for "But my 400 clients weren't up-to-date!" Block these things at the server, which is something you as the network administrator should have complete control over, and which is where the worms should have been blocked to begin with.

Great morse link here: CGI morse translator/converter.

java morse code translator

follow the link if you are java-in-your-browser-hater anyways, because there is a cgi morse code translator there too (includes audio! ;-)

soon to be slashdotted into oblivion

wait...

slashdot you suck!

i tried to post some cryptic output for the uber-morse geeks to read and i got this:

"Lameness filter encountered. Post aborted!
Reason: Please use fewer 'junk' characters."

oh well, i'm stuck with this titanic message then: ... --- ...

poo ;-(

Yeah, you could do that, or you could just use this translator. Even generates nifty little sound files.

And I swear that the morse code I tried to post really wasn't THAT lame.

A great teacher knows how to challenge his students at just the right level. Hans Bethe, Gold's Cornell colleague, was famous for that.
I suspect Gold's paper is a challenge to his freshman physics students to find the flaws in his logic. It's very clever in that perspective! Or maybe it's an April fool's joke. BTW, a Google search on "Crookes Radiometer" yields fascinating results.

For a detailed explanation see the Dome News.

The article is a popular treatment without equations, but anyone who has completed a course in Modern Physics should be able to write down the equations.

This guy theorizes that testosterone levels drop after marriage

Don't assume -- without good proof -- that all theories you disagree with are total garbage. (-: If you want to be correct, that is. If you're a follower of some religion (or ideology), it seems to be an axiom that researchers disagreeing with The Truth are morons or in a conspiracy. :-)

(And yes, the theory might be total garbage -- but find that out before you have an opinion.)

Not by the way that I really rated Microcosm, it was really quite buggy and was overtaken by HTML, which of course turned out to be the category-killer in the hypertext arena.

To the best of my knowledge, the "g" in 802.11g stands for "g". As you said, they're going through the letters sequentially. It's much the same as the "4" in "Linux 2.4" standing for "4"...the number following "3".

I bet I know the source of your confusion, though. People often use phonetic alphabets to say letters over radios, telephones, or whenever it's difficult to hear. Though it's not listed in that hyperlink, I think the American military uses "gamma" for "g", as do some other people. (It's better than "golf" because it's two syllables.) So you may have heard someone say it was "802.11 gamma" or "802.11g as in gamma".

VIPS is a wonderful image processing library with all sorts of "evil stuff", NIP is a GTK interface to the library which gives you a kind of spreadsheet for images. I'm telling the author about this slashdot item so he can come and pimp it here himself, but in the mean time take a look.

I have personally used it for analysis of medical images, it's nice and versatile, although the built in scripting language is a bit sick (imo).

As has been mentioned elsewhere, if you're going to record LPs on your computer you have to pipe your record player's outputs through a phono preamp. You can use an old stereo with a phono input or a discrete phono preamp.

I've been looking into making a discrete preamp for a while. There are many circuits available on the web, some more complicated and some more simple.

My first try is going to be the second one on this page. Interesting note: It looks like maxim thought it was good enough to copy in their application note.

There's where Tolkien falls down: Endless, endless descriptions, many of them without the appropriate points of reference for modern readers. I can't get into Tolkien; he and I have nothing to say to each other. Personally, I don't care if he invented his own languages for LOTR; Marc Okrand did that for Star Trek, and no one considers him to be a genius of fictional linguistics -- and I'm not sure if I'd read fiction by Noam Chomsky, either, and he's one hell of a linguist and a not-bad writer -- did you ever see that paper he wrote where he tap-danced on B. F. Skinner? Whew!

Personally, speaking to the 'hacker' mentality, if you wanted to broaden your reading horizons a bit away from straight techno-fables (as good as those might be), I'd recommend some speculative fiction that deals with "What if?" type questions, specifically along the lines of alternate history:

For instance, Norman Spinrad's The Iron Dream asks the question "What if Adolf Hitler hadn't been kicked out of art school and had gone on to a career in commercial illustration, then writing, instead?" Likewise, Spinrad's The Mind Game asks "What if a Scientology-like cult took over Hollywood?" ('Trancendentalism' in the book is a very thinly-disguised Scientology clone. In my more tinfoil-hatted moments I can't help but wonder if The Mind Game is part of the reason Spinrad's been virtually blacklisted in North America!)

Also, Yevgeny Zamyatin's classic novel We asks "What if Communism ruled the world?" (This book makes a nice tryptych with 1984 and Brave New World, by the way.)

For a more technological bent, Gibson and Sterling's The Difference Engine asks "What if Babbage's Difference Engine had actually worked?" Another similar technologically-inclined fable, Jack Williamson's The Silicon Dagger asks "What if a gang of hard-core Libertarians had the means to create their version of Utopia in the middle of the United States?" Although it's not a terribly good novel, per se, it's certainly thought-provoking.

Books such as these are different from the usual sort of SF which postulates a scenario and the rules in which that scenario works, because they start with known history or events, and extrapolate, either by asking "What would have happened if X happened (instead)?" or "What would have happened if X had not happened (instead)?" It's also fun to do your own thought-experiments along these lines, once you get the knack. :)

Another benefit of these books is that they're mostly older and can be found at most libraries, ergo, for free. :)

As far as I can tell, Dunwoody's paper is still undergoing peer review.

Here's his (potential) proof.

Badger

This site Hippocampus originally meant "Sea horse" (ship?) I wonder how this came to be known as the horse of the sea....

Hippo in Greek means Horse. Hence Hippopotomus means "River-Horse" and Mesopotamia means "Middle of rivers" actually according to This site Hippocampus originally meant "Sea horse" (ship?) I wonder how this came to be known as the horse of the sea....

Anyone try it? Hows the framerate, thats ALOT of imps, man this scene looks like alot of pain coming his way!

I particularly liked the shotgun someone is holding. Who needs a ring when you have a 20-gauge?

Huh? Many of the software packages I use are configured via plaintext files and perform extremely well, and are very easy to maintain in an enterprise enviroment.

Works very well

Well, instead of spouting off, there are other options:

Check out what the creator has to say on Slashdot.
Ask him a question in email.

Either of these would show that the creator wasn't ready to be slashdotted, and was still a few days from really being ready.

And how was anyone hurt by CDDB being bought out? I use freedb myself, but if I couldn't, big deal. CDDB is not a good comparison for Audioscrobbler anyway. With CDDB, you had to actually spend a few minutes punching in title and track information. With Audioscrobbler, you just install a plugin. Yeah, I'm sure the users of the plugin/service put in tons of uncompensated work.

The possible shutdown of Audioscrobbler is of no consequence at this point. It's similar to how the shutdown of Napster didn't matter in the end. The *idea* is out there. The implementation is a minor detail.

Loosen the tin foil hat and send a few emails before you lay in with this hippy shit. RJ did all the work. He wrote the plugins. He wrote the backend. He's serving up the bandwidth. All the users did was install a plugin. If he closes it, or cashes in, fine. But maybe you could have asked him first.

I would ask of people to check with grassroots startups before posting things on very influential entities like slashdot. RJ was recently bombarded with a huge amount of new users due to the publicity of Audioscrobbler from other blogs and news sites. His hosting service had shut down audioscrobbler.com because of the sudden surge of bandwidth usage. He then relocated the server to his own webspace, but with a slashdot hit, I don't see how it's going to survive. He's looking for cheap webspace for PHP/MySQL. If you can get to it, Here [www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~rwj100/] is the news posting about it. Here is the same posting but google-cached.

Brainfuck.NET

Solar power stinks on two accounts today.

Bjorn Lomborg argues in his much-maligned book that solar power prices are following a kind of inverse Moore's Law, effectively halving in price every N years (I forget what N is), which creates a further disincentive to buy solar now. If it'll cost you $20k for your household array and you'll get the money back in savings from reduced draw off the grid, in say 20 years, but the panels themselves will cost half as much in 5 years, you're better off waiting. And so on.

This seems to be similar to the native ability to understand the gist of Yoda-speak. IMHO, this implies there may be considerable flexability in the parsing of natural languages and plasticity in the language areas of a human brain. But, this idea is not new.

OBtopic: A shuttle

• costs $2.1 billion (new)
  
• weights 16,000 lbs (dry dock, no payload)
  

I just downloaded Audioscrobbler, a Winamp plugin that checks out the music you listen to and recommends similar music. I haven't used it enough to know how well it works yet, but there it is.

I'm not saying the concept of the project is bad. I'm not saying something shouldn't be done. I'm not saying the way things are now is good enough. What I am saying is, why should someone support this project instead of some of the other ideas out there that could be more of a public effort supported by volunteers?

I'm not saying the concept of the project is bad. I'm not saying something shouldn't be done. I'm not saying the way things are now is good enough. What I am saying is, why should someone support this project instead of some of the other ideas out there that could be more of a public effort supported by volunteers?

the question of whether computers use intelligence the same way as humans use intelligence has long been determined through the 'chineese room'.

the point of John Searle's Chinese Room being is to see if 'understanding' is involved in the process of computation. if you can 'process' the symbols of the cards without understanding them (since you're using a wordbook and a programme to do it) - by putting yourself in the place of the computer, you yourself can ask yourself if you required understanding to do it:

Minds Brains and Programmes (The Original Chineese Room):
http://www.bbsonline.org/documents/a/00/00/04/84 /b bs00000484-00/bbs.searle2.html

the complementary question - 'is the human brain
a digital computer' is answered by the same author:

Is the Human Brain a Digital Computer (John Searle):
http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Papers/Py104/ se arle.comp.html

Summary of the Argument:

1. On the standard textbook definition, computation is defined syntactically in terms of symbol manipulation.

2. But syntax and symbols are not defined in terms of physics. Though symbol tokens are always physical tokens, "symbol" and "same symbol" are not defined in terms of physical features. Syntax, in short, is not intrinsic to physics.

3. This has the consequence that computation is not discovered in the physics, it is assigned to it. Certain physical phenomena are assigned or used or programmed or interpreted syntactically. Syntax and symbols are observer relative.

4. It follows that you could not discover that the brain or anything else was intrinsically a digital computer, although you could assign a computational interpretation to it as you could to anything else. The point is not that the claim "The brain is a digital computer" is false. Rather it does not get up to the level of falsehood. It does not have a clear sense. You will have misunderstood my account if you think that I am arguing that it is simply false that the brain is a digital computer. The question "Is the brain a digital computer?" is as ill defined as the questions "Is it an abacus?", "Is it a book?", or "Is it a set of symbols?", "Is it a set of mathematical formulae?"

5. Some physical systems facilitate the computational use much better than others. That is why we build, program, and use them. In such cases we are the homunculus in the system interpreting the physics in both syntactical and semantic terms.

6. But the causal explanations we then give do not cite causal properties different from the physics of the implementation and the intentionality of the homunculus.

7. The standard, though tacit, way out of this is to commit the homunculus fallacy. The humunculus fallacy is endemic to computational models of cognition and cannot be removed by the standard recursive decomposition arguments. They are addressed to a different question.

8. We cannot avoid the foregoing results by supposing that the brain is doing "information processing". The brain, as far as its intrinsic operations are concerned, does no information processing. It is a specific biological organ and its specific neurobiological processes cause specific forms of intentionality. In the brain, intrinsically, there are neurobiological processes and sometimes they cause consciousness. But that is the end of the story.

--

best regards,

john

This comes up over and over, so I wrote an explanation on the web where Google can find it.

It's called How does the clipboard work?.

Why are users banner-blind?

It's just like a big touchpad:
(GOD_DAMN KICK-ASS LOOKING MORSE CODE REMOVED BY FUCKING LAMENESS FILTER! IT'S A LANGUAGE DAMMIT - ADD IT!)

- slide finger left to right
. tap
/ upper right to lower left
It can't be THAT hard to remember, the military uses it :P

A virus scanning solution that provides the kind of functionality that you suggest is already out there... However rather than just stripping all attachments, it virus scans them, but also strips any attachments that attempt to hide the fact that they are really executables eg. britney.jpeg.exe

The system requires a virus scanner to be installed and I think they recommend sophos which is available for linux. Check it out here

Cognitive Scietist John Searle takes up the question:

Is the Brain a Digital Computer

in Earnest:

Let us begin our investigation of this claim by distinquishing three questions:

1. Is the brain a digital computer?
2. Is the mind a computer program?
3. Can the operations of the brain be simulated on a digital computer?

His Conclusion?

VI. Summary of the Argument.

This brief argument has a simple logical structure and I will lay it out:

1. On the standard textbook definition, computation is defined syntactically in terms of symbol manipulation.
2. But syntax and symbols are not defined in terms of physics. Though symbol tokens are always physical tokens, "symbol" and "same symbol" are not defined in terms of physical features. Syntax, in short, is not intrinsic to physics.
3. This has the consequence that computation is not discovered in the physics, it is assigned to it. Certain physical phenomena are assigned or used or programmed or interpreted syntactically. Syntax and symbols are observer relative.
4. It follows that you could not discover that the brain or anything else was intrinsically a digital computer, although you could assign a computational interpretation to it as you could to anything else. The point is not that the claim "The brain is a digital computer" is false. Rather it does not get up to the level of falsehood. It does not have a clear sense. You will have misunderstood my account if you thinkthat I am arguing that it is simply false that the brain is a digital computer. The question "Is the brain a digital computer?" is as ill defined as the questions "Is it an abacus?", "Is it a book?", or "Is it a set of symbols?", "Is it a set of mathematical formulae?"

5. Some physical systems facilitate the computational use much better than others. That is why we build, program, and use them. In such cases we are the homunculus in the system interpreting the physics in both syntactical and semantic terms.
6. But the causal explanations we then give do not cite causal properties different from the physics of the implementation and the intentionality of the homunculus.
7. The standard, though tacit, way out of this is to commit the homunculus fallacy. The humunculus fallacy is endemic to computational models of cognition and cannot be removed by the standard recursive decomposition arguments. They are addressed to a different question.
8. We cannot avoid the foregoing results by supposing that the brain is doing "information processing". The brain, as far as its intrinsic operations are concerned, does no information processing. It is a specific biological organ and its specific neurobiological processes cause specific forms of intentionality. In the brain, intrinsically, there are neurobiological processes and sometimes they cause consciousness. But that is the end of the story.\**

http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Papers/Py104/ se arle.comp.html

Get Mailscanner and set the virus notices to off, and you'll NEVER get another klez/sircam/et al bug/notice to your inbox ever again.

Team it up with SpamAssassin and watch your spam counts plummit!

See also Stevan's page at Southampton (his current home - the Department of Electronic and Computer Science) and some of the projects which he is involved with, particularly the ePrints project, which is building an infrastructure for facilitating the self-archiving of academic papers in the way that Stevan suggests.

(yes, I'm a researcher at Soton)

See also Stevan's page at Southampton (his current home - the Department of Electronic and Computer Science) and some of the projects which he is involved with, particularly the ePrints project, which is building an infrastructure for facilitating the self-archiving of academic papers in the way that Stevan suggests.

(yes, I'm a researcher at Soton)

This Mail Scanner is very good and maintanied very regularly (just see the dates on the link listed). To quote the website: "Protecting over 1 billion e-mails every week, for over 40 million users". It is NOT a virus scanner itself, only a way of scanning mail using a virus scanner such as the one provided by Sophos.

I used to use the network that this mail scanner was attached to and it was very effective at providing pre-emptive detection as it looks for things such as extention masking etc.

I believe it has detected a few virus before the actual virus patterens were released :)

It also has quite an impressive list of sites using the software: here

This Mail Scanner is very good and maintanied very regularly (just see the dates on the link listed). To quote the website: "Protecting over 1 billion e-mails every week, for over 40 million users". It is NOT a virus scanner itself, only a way of scanning mail using a virus scanner such as the one provided by Sophos.

I used to use the network that this mail scanner was attached to and it was very effective at providing pre-emptive detection as it looks for things such as extention masking etc.

I believe it has detected a few virus before the actual virus patterens were released :)

It also has quite an impressive list of sites using the software: here

--| IS THE BRAIN A DIGITAL COMPUTER? |-----

the answer given by a Cognitive Scientist (John Searle) is:

'THE BRAIN, AS FAR AS ITS INTRINSIC OPERATIONS
ARE CONCERNED, DOES NO INFORMATION PROCESSING...

IN THE SENSE OF 'INFORMATION' USED IN
COGNITIVE SCIENCE IT IS SIMPLY FALSE TO SAY
THAT THE BRAIN IS AN INFORMATION PROCESSING
DEVICE.'

http://www.cogsci.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Papers/Py1 04 /searle.comp.html
John Searle, Cognitive Scientist

SUMMARY OF THE ARGUMENT:

This brief argument has a simple logical structure
and I will lay it out:

1. On the standard textbook definition, computation is defined syntactically in terms of symbol manipulation.

2. But syntax and symbols are not defined in terms of physics. Though symbol tokens are always physical tokens, "symbol" and "same symbol" are not defined in terms of physical features. Syntax, in short, is not intrinsic to physics.

3. This has the consequence that computation is not discovered in the physics, it is assigned to it. Certain physical phenomena are assigned or used or programmed or interpreted syntactically. Syntax and symbols are observer relative.

4. It follows that you could not discover that the brain or anything else was intrinsically a digital computer, although you could assign a computational interpretation to it as you could to anything else. The point is not that the claim "The brain is a digital computer" is false. Rather it does not get up to the level of falsehood. It does not have a clear sense. You will have misunderstood my account if you think that I am arguing that it is simply false that the brain is a digital computer. The question "Is the brain a digital computer?" is as ill defined as the questions "Is it an abacus?", "Is it a book?", or "Is it a set of symbols?", "Is it a set of mathematical formulae?"

5. Some physical systems facilitate the computational use much better than others. That is why we build, program, and use them. In such cases we are the homunculus in the system interpreting the physics in both syntactical and semantic terms.

6. But the causal explanations we then give do not cite causal properties different from the physics of the implementation and the intentionality of the homunculus.

7. The standard, though tacit, way out of this is to commit the homunculus fallacy. The humunculus fallacy is endemic to computational models of cognition and cannot be removed by the standard recursive decomposition arguments. They are addressed to a different question.

8. We cannot avoid the foregoing results by supposing that the brain is doing "information processing". THE BRAIN, AS FAR AS ITS INTRINSIC OPERATIONS ARE CONCERNED, DOES NO INFORMATION PROCESSING. It is a specific biological organ and its specific neurobiological processes cause specific forms of intentionality. In the brain, intrinsically, there are neurobiological processes and sometimes they cause consciousness. But that is the end of the story.

John Searle, Cognitive Scientist, 'Is the Brain a Digital Computer'
http://www.cogsci.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/P apers/Py104 /searle.comp.html

--