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Where we presume that they spent so much on PR and accounts staff that they had to build their first server out of lego? Talk about a 'toy' website! And google were already a sucessful company before they ever felt compelled to make a press release.

Where we presume that they spent so much on PR and accounts staff that they had to build their first server out of lego? Talk about a 'toy' website! And google were already a sucessful company before they ever felt compelled to make a press release.

Good luck. The copyright on sheet music is the same as for other works. If published before 1923, it's in the public domain, between 1922 and 1978, 95 years from publication date, after that, it's life of author + 70 years.

In short, almost none of it can be legally scanned *and distributed*.

For more authoritative info, google on "length of copyright" and "sheet music", or see http://fairuse.stanford.edu/Copyright_and_Fair_Use _Overview/chapter0/0-a.html

Power corrupts, absolute power corrupts absolutely. While most police forces are still subject to civilian control, Customs officials in the US and Canada increasingly do not operate transparently. In the absence of clear civilian control, they and all other police forces inevitably descend into corruption and abuse.

Western police are not immune to this. "Our cops don't do that!"... BS. I don't know why we (westerners) think that we're inherently better human beings than say, Soviet Russian police. Nothing about us makes our societies better, it is our political and economic freedom that has made us better. Define power roles and remove the controls... the "Stanford Prison Experiment" could easily have been a prototype for Abu Ghraib.

When you consider that Customs officials increasingly don't have to answer to anyone, and there is no longer any useful process of complaint or appeal, it is inevitable that they will abuse their power. After all, you could be a terrorist/communist/anarchist/whatever it was 150 years ago.

As for customs guards, the fact that you're a business traveller, earn 10x what they do, and that this is the only context in which they will ever have power over you will surely cause them to abuse their authority. This is human nature.

... ain't she, Jeff? Couldn't have happened to a slimier company.

heh.. a decent try but The Mother of all Demos

http://sloan.stanford.edu/mousesite/1968Demo.html

Would've made the concept of ordering from an online catalog pretty obvious to anyone in attendance, I think. I haven't read the patent details, though

These researchers are doing something similar, they are using a photo-resistor as a single pixel camera, and a video projector for illumination. Take a look at the video (63M), it is a mind blowing demo of the technology.

These researchers are doing something similar, they are using a photo-resistor as a single pixel camera, and a video projector for illumination. Take a look at the video (63M), it is a mind blowing demo of the technology.

I just checked out screenshots, and ... uck. I mean, seriously.

The graphics of 1996/1997 looked like this and this. The graphics of 2003-present look like this and this.

Which does Second life (this and this) look more like to you? :P Yes, user-created content adds additional optimization challenges. But this is just rather pathetic. All issues of models aside, their lighting and shading models are just crummy.

How is it that Linden Labs, raking in millions per year, can be outdone by open-source MMORPGs with a few hundred players on at a time, like Eternal Lands, in terms of graphics quality? And there's probably better examples than that, as EL doesn't even have normal maps yet, needs to lower their ambient levels, and ought to subdivide some polys that are closed to fixed light sources.

...and limited [nuclear] fuel supply...

Is that the sound of a knee jerking or have you actually bothered to check? Here is a reference that indicates that the uranium supply (economically recoverable) would last billions of years though it does not assume exponential growth or anything similar. It does assume breeder reactor technology. In other words we would have to worry more about the Sun burning out first.

So can anyone tell me if these new features would be useful for improving the responsiveness of media applications in Linux?

Well, Stanford University's Media Lab offers the Planet CCRMA Linux distro (based on Fedora Core). One of its features has been custom kernels (two "speeds," even) compiled with Mr. Molnar's real-time patch (which I think is much the same as what is being discussed in this article). Planet CCRMA terms it a "low latency" fix and it's important in certain types of audio production where you want to record a "live" track in sync with a track that's already been laid down. Too much lag in the system (just a few milliseconds) can make the whole deal unworkable when trying to do "sound with sound" recording (musicians do this a bunch). I can tell you from personal experience that Audacity's usefulness goes down a couple of notches without it. :)

You can read more about the patched kernel here, down the page:

http://ccrma.stanford.edu/planetccrma/software/ins talltwosix.html

Hopefully, this will mean that the Media Lab folks at Stanford won't have to bother to maintain the custom kernels in the near future.

* * * * *

Although golf was originally restricted to wealthy, overweight Protestants, today it's open to anybody who owns hideous clothing.
--Dave Barry

I'm not a particle physicist, but from what I can see, it's saying that the problem is that some of the electrons would have to be moving faster than the speed of light.

I also understand that if you take a specified ammount of one of those desnse artificial elements, you can exert a force upon it, and it is part of the aparatus that helps us travel (in a vehicle) faster than light.

Not that I have any proof or anything, but this is what some of those alien conspiracy-thoerists believe. Here's a link to Billy Meier, one of the contactees. I think I actually have a copy of some of the analysis on the metal samples on a green DVD here.

Also, I've been paying attention to Gravity Probe B and Gravity Probe B, which I think is a closer step -- noticing strange things about gravity.

Yes, I do want to get off this planet as soon as possible.

If you've ever tried to multitrack using Audacity and ended up with mush, you'll know why this is great news. It will sound in sync while you're recording to the first track, but upon playback the 30 ms (or longer) delay wreaks havoc.

Planet CCRMA http://ccrma.stanford.edu/planetccrma/software/ a Fedora Core distro that uses the realtime preemption patch by Ingo Molnar to achieve low-latency. DeMuDi is Debian customized for audio production by the Agnula project http://demudi.agnula.org/ and uses JACK. I'm curious to see what this development will have on these and like-minded audio production Linux distros.

I think it helps if you play with sound/media-centric Linux distros:

http://www.studio-to-go.com/
http://demudi.agnula.org/
http://ccrma.stanford.edu/planetccrma/software/

One of us, is not a audio professional. So let me make this easier for - it is not me.

Avoid non-specialized Linux distros such as Ubuntu. The average person knows fuck-all about Linux/Unix stuff, the experience will be very bitter at best. I know of a musician that broke in tears, poor thing.

Having said that - I've heard there is a distro called:

http://www.ubuntustudio.com/

Good Luck

Music is a weird thing.. a couple of milliseconds difference is enough to change the perception of a note.

http://ccrma.stanford.edu/planetccrma/software/ has offered a real-time kernel for as long as the project has been around, for the above reasons - and if you're trying to record 8 tracks of audio at 24b/96kHz you'll quickly realize that the kernel has to be able to handle all of that data precisely, or your drum kit recording is going to sound awful.

And when we see fearless regenerative howling hyper-muscular mice with giant human brains, then we know our world is lost.

Also, I wonder what Fatmouse thinks of all this? Some mice get all the good mutations...

Look at the number of Tflops per active cpu by OS.
I took (TFlop/active cpu)*1000 to get a readable number --
or Gflops/cpu
Windows is .948
Mac is .51
Linux is 1.21
And GPU is 65!

The source:
http://fah-web.stanford.edu/cgi-bin/main.py?qtype= osstats

The average Linux user proably has a decent AMD Athlon,
The average Windoze user has a P4 Dell.
Athlons just crunch the math better.

They have spent some time thinking about this, look at their site for some papers written on the subject. Dawson Engler has even more of them on his homepage. Or to put it bluntly, RTFR (Read The Fine Research).

They have spent some time thinking about this, look at their site for some papers written on the subject. Dawson Engler has even more of them on his homepage. Or to put it bluntly, RTFR (Read The Fine Research).

Knuth used to have this great offer where he'd send you a check for pi or e or something if you managed to find a bug in his code.

He still does this. He began writing checks for $2.56 (one hexadecimal dollar, in his words) to people who found errors in his books. They are a coveted prize in computer science circles. http://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~knuth/faq.html

What you consider to be fair use doesn't matter, as it turns out you are not emperor and do not make the laws. That is most certainly NOT fair use. Fair use info can be found here: http://fairuse.stanford.edu/Copyright_and_Fair_Use _Overview/chapter9/index.html. It's somewhat complex but what it comes down to is fair use allows you to use parts of a copyrighted work without permission for the purposes of commentary, criticism, parody and such. It does not allow you to make as many copies of something as you want just because you feel like it. That's infringement.

From the Google whitepaper (initial description of the Google system by the founders)

"We chose our system name, Google, because it is a common spelling of googol, or 10^100 and fits well with our goal of building very large-scale search engines."

Source page

Link to the Google Name Origin. Quick clarification - the "check" referred to above was a search check, not an investor's check.

Keith Devlin addresses your concerns. His recent book "Math Instinct" looks at the conundrum of mathematics being easier in practice than in theory.

I haven't read it but I have read his "Math Gene" book looking at innate abilities for mathematics.

TRUE FACTS FROM THE MATH INSTINCT When a dog runs along a beach and then jumps into the water to retrieve a ball thrown diagonally into a lake, it instinctively solves a problem that humans need calculus to solve. Lobsters have a built-in positioning system that is the equal of the hugely expensive and mathematically rich high-tech Global Positioning System (GPS) human travelers use today. Within a couple of days of being born, human babies know the numbers 1, 2, 3, and can distinguish between a correct addition or subtraction such as 1 + 2 = 3 and an incorrect one such as 3 - 1 = 1.

I occasionally listen to the Stanford Entrepreneurial thought leaders podcast, and Tom Byers mentioned in his presentation on 18 Jan 06 in his section on cashflow (min-36:38), the very high cost of traditional Venture Capitalist funding.

My understanding of typical Open Source projects is they're typically undertaken by smaller companies with a distributed team, sometimes with many staff working from home, and often have little corporate resources.

Why should a small company in this situation risk taking on 'expensive' VC funding over bootstrapping? (i.e trying to get money up front from a customer etc); And how do you make the actual cost of VC affordable for smaller companies and projects?

You cannot technically DRM protect content in a way which will allow legal fair use for the purchaser of the product.....period.

This is probably true, but the example you gave is not a good one. Being able to play content on multiple different players is not fair use. See for example:

http://fairuse.stanford.edu/Copyright_and_Fair_Use _Overview/chapter9/9-a.html

"In its most general sense, a fair use is any copying of copyrighted material done for a limited and 'transformative' purpose such as to comment upon, criticize or parody a copyrighted work. Such uses can be done without permission from the copyright owner."

You see the kind of thing that is covered by fair use: being able to "comment upon, criticize or parody a copyrighted work". It means things that are educational and/or political.

It certainly does not mean having more fun with the copyrighted work than the owner wanted to allow you! If he says you can only play it on a certain device, that is his right. That is fully protected by copyright. You do not have a fair use right to expand on that just for your own enjoyment and pleasure.

So ironically you have made a correct statement but for totally incorrect reasons. The real problem with DRM is that it makes excerpting for commentary, criticism and scholarly or political analysis extremely difficult. If a teacher wants to play a few bars from a pop song and demonstrate that the melody or rhythm is based on tribal or classical influences, he may be thwarted by DRM. If someone wants to capture a frame of a movie and use it for parody purposes, DRM could make that difficult. These are protected, fair uses and DRM gets in the way.

But being able to play content in different ways than the copyright owner wanted you to? No way is that fair use. He has every right to be able to charge you extra for that right, just as with other ways of enjoying his work.

The one that directly impacts me can be seen here: http://news-service.stanford.edu/news/2003/june11/ hepb.html The article has, atleast to me, a layman's description of the process. Although this article only talks about using this method to regulate the Hepatitis B virus, other publications from various researchers have shown progress with AIDS and Hepatitis C.

I would guess you've got to be at least as old as this guy, so I'd say your at least in your 80's.

That's not necessarily true. It is a relatively new field of computer science, and thus there's not all that much info out there yet. But once you understand the basic concepts of general purpose GPU programming anyone can do it.

What's most likely is that the guys at Stanford started pushing the hardware to the limit, and in ways the driver developers might not have anticipated. Probably what they ran up against was bugs in the driver, and the help came from ATI in terms of ways to work around the bugs. Evidence backs this up from Folding@Home's GPU FAQ:

[You must use] Catalyst driver version 6.5 or version 6.10, but not any other versions: 6.6 and 6.7 will work, but at a major performance hit; 6.8 and 6.9 will not work at all.

Your next question might be, if that's true then why use ATI (who are known for poor driver quality)... it might simply be a matter of that's the hardware they had to test with, so that's what they needed to use.

At any rate, it's definitely possible to get started doing GPU programming without vendor support.

There's even some API's out there to help... The Brook C API (for doing multiprocessor programming) has a GPU version out called BrookGPU: http://graphics.stanford.edu/projects/brookgpu/ind ex.html

There's even a fairly large community of people using Nvidia's own Cg library for doing general purpose stuff.

There's also GPUSort (source code available to look at), which is a high performance sorting example that uses the GPU to do the sorting, and it trounces the fastest CPUs: http://gamma.cs.unc.edu/GPUSORT/results.html

And last but not least there's the GPGPU site that is a great resource for all sorts of general purpose computing the GPUs: http://www.gpgpu.org/

Even if you found and fixed every bug (haha), feature requests will continue to come in as people use the software. As soon as bugs/feature request quit coming in most software is essientially dead b/c that means people have quit using it.

Yeah, because no one uses TeX anymore.
"If you do succeed in finding a previously undiscovered bug in the programs for either TeX or METAFONT, I shall gladly pay you a reward of $327.68. Corrections to errors in The TeXbook or The METAFONTbook are worth $2.56, as in all my other books."
http://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~uno/abcde.html #texbk

A paper on cross-site tracking is available here, along with two preventative extensions called SafeHistory and SafeCache.

To help safeguard from scripting attacks, I also use NoScript extension.

The CookieSafe extension will block and help you manage cookies better than Firefox's built-in manager. ...other interesting privacy tools are...
Stealther (prevents recording of history and blocks ReferentHeader)
Tor anonymizer + Foxyproxy extension
ImgLikeOpera can switch image prefs with ease
Flashblock (stops flash animations from running until you click them)

and probably much more

The thing which really made me cringe in Wargames was the fact that he realistically dials in, starts a countdown timer running which you see tick off time, and then logs off, but the countdown timer continues to count down.

Is it so hard to believe that the WOPR was using screen as its default shell? man screen

I did some searches. I found one reference to Racter, remember that one?? It said that it was a follow on from earlier work done with Eliza and Freud. Here's a couple links,
1st: screenshots of Racter in operation (strolling down memory lane to ~1984)
2nd: Eliza (supposed to pre-date Racter
3rd: Racter Wikipedia page
4th: Racter FAQ (read controversy on wiki first)
5th: Example conversations with Racter, Eliza, and Perry (All diff AIs of their time)

The United States government has established rough guidelines for determining the nature and amount of work that may be "borrowed" without explicit written consent. These are called "fair use" laws, because they try to establish whether certain uses of original material are reasonable. The laws themselves are vague and complicated. Below we have condensed them into some rubrics you can apply to help determine the fairness of any given usage.

• The nature of your use.

  If you have merely copied something, it is unlikely to be considered fair use. But if the material has been transformed in an original way through interpretation, analysis, etc., it is more likely to be considered "fair use."

• The amount you've used.

  The more you've "borrowed," the less likely it is to be considered fair use. What percentage of your work is "borrowed" material? What percentage of the original did you use? The lower the better.

• The effect of your use on the original

  If you are creating a work that competes with the original in its own market, and may do the original author economic harm, any substantial borrowing is unlikely to be considered fair use. The more the content of your work or its target audience differs from that of the original, the better.

A better reference on Fair Use is available from Stanford University.

Thank you, Bill Clinton.

For the rest of you-
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socially_responsible_ investing

and some brief googling led to...
http://seas.stanford.edu/fund/funds.html

but this also jogged my memory of an investment firm called "Working Assets" many years ago. The name now graces a wireless company with a credit card (purportedly socially responsible).
http://www.workingassets.com/

and the folks behind the original investment company I recalled started this:
http://www.visioncapitalinvestment.com/who.htm
while the stanford link (above) mentions the original firm now goes by 'Citizen' here:
http://www.efund.com/

Seems to me that any investment company worth it's marketing department would have 'socially responisble' investment options.

Google is our friend!

This article doesn't distinguish between grad and undergrad (and is a bit dated), but it I think it is interesting: http://news-service.stanford.edu/news/2003/march12 /judicial-312.html

At Stanford University, he finished his BSEE in 2.5 years and graduated #1 in his class, as the Henry Ford Scholar.

http://www.talklikeapirate.com/translator.html

and

http://www.syddware.com/cgi-bin/pirate.pl

and

http://nifty.stanford.edu/2004/TalkLikeAPirate/pir ate2.html

and

http://www.talklikeapirateday.com/translate/

It be better t' be a troll than t' be a bad human.

but as long as your applications just slay their performance in cold blood and cause them to run at nearly nuclear explosion temperatures (renicing the process will help against the first issue sometimes, but not the latter), you are just losing possible helpers.

My home server is on 24/7/365 and runs F@H. Gkrelm reports my temps. at 52.0, 27.0, and 51.5

It's reniced to 10 so that means it is actually running at a nice value of 19 ....

And I took that top reading while posting to /. in Firefox 1.5.0.7 and downloading a torrent of *some_linux_iso* via Azureus (java) while logged in on a Gnome 2.10.1 desktop on that machine. I use only this machine for the internet. My XP box never goes near the WWW at all.
Maybe you are running a Microsoft OS ?

Why anyone would run F@H on a laptop is beyond me anyway, it needs to run constantly to get the best results for the project. As another poster mentioned, there is a time limit for results, so you're wasting your time and energy if you keep interrupting it. Those results that are late will be disregarded.

but as long as your applications just slay their performance in cold blood and cause them to run at nearly nuclear explosion temperatures (renicing the process will help against the first issue sometimes, but not the latter), you are just losing possible helpers.

My home server is on 24/7/365 and runs F@H. Gkrelm reports my temps. at 52.0, 27.0, and 51.5

It's reniced to 10 so that means it is actually running at a nice value of 19 ....

And I took that top reading while posting to /. in Firefox 1.5.0.7 and downloading a torrent of *some_linux_iso* via Azureus (java) while logged in on a Gnome 2.10.1 desktop on that machine. I use only this machine for the internet. My XP box never goes near the WWW at all.
Maybe you are running a Microsoft OS ?

Why anyone would run F@H on a laptop is beyond me anyway, it needs to run constantly to get the best results for the project. As another poster mentioned, there is a time limit for results, so you're wasting your time and energy if you keep interrupting it. Those results that are late will be disregarded.

but as long as your applications just slay their performance in cold blood and cause them to run at nearly nuclear explosion temperatures (renicing the process will help against the first issue sometimes, but not the latter), you are just losing possible helpers.

My home server is on 24/7/365 and runs F@H. Gkrelm reports my temps. at 52.0, 27.0, and 51.5

It's reniced to 10 so that means it is actually running at a nice value of 19 ....

And I took that top reading while posting to /. in Firefox 1.5.0.7 and downloading a torrent of *some_linux_iso* via Azureus (java) while logged in on a Gnome 2.10.1 desktop on that machine. I use only this machine for the internet. My XP box never goes near the WWW at all.
Maybe you are running a Microsoft OS ?

Why anyone would run F@H on a laptop is beyond me anyway, it needs to run constantly to get the best results for the project. As another poster mentioned, there is a time limit for results, so you're wasting your time and energy if you keep interrupting it. Those results that are late will be disregarded.

...our fire trucks are bigger than yours too. American Fire Truck. England fire truck. We have raised air-conditioned cabs that you can stand up in, Q-Sirens, Air Horns, and 1500GPM pumps.

One minimalistic "sleep" or "delay" into your mainloop, and whoop's , you're going to get more work done than you have ever before. Until then, nothing will fold on my machines over here.

The problem is that this won't work well for Folding@Home. It doesn't work like distributed.net where one can just assign some part of the keyspace to one client and have it work on that. The work units returned are used to generate new work units. That's why they have such "tight" deadlines. See their FAQ for details.

So for Folding@Home, you'll most likely end up past the deadline (unless you got a VERY spiffy laptop), and not helping all that much (although your work will be used for double-checking afaik).

However for other projects, distributed.net style, it would work out nicely, and I belive BOINC already has an option for this (the new F@H client might aswell, I can't remember, all my folding is done on my linux box now, and I haven't touched it in ages).

Who "owns" the results? What will happen to them? Unlike other distributed computing projects, Folding@home is run by an academic institution (specifically the Pande Group, at Stanford University's Chemistry Department), which is a nonprofit institution dedicated to science research and education. We will not sell the data or make any money off of it.

Moreover, we will make the data available for others to use. In particular, the results from Folding@home will be made available on several levels. Most importantly, analysis of the simulations will be submitted to scientific journals for publication, and these journal articles will be posted on the web page after publication. Next, after publication of these scientific articles which analyze the data, the raw data of the folding runs will be available for everyone, including other researchers, here on this web site.

From the folding@home FAQ.

Uh, you aren't allowing Sony to use your spare cycles, you're allowing Folding@Home (or more broadly, Stanford University's Pande Group) to use your spare cycles. And they are a non-profit organization who releases their findings for free. So, yes, you as part of the public can access the information you helped discover for free.

Even if Sony WAS a scientific conglomerate trying to find a cure, would you really want to put a hamper on reducing millions of deaths just because you don't want them to earn money? Please avoid discarding your common sense in favor of bashing a corporation you don't like. Oh, wait, this is Slashdot.

Actually, the Pande Group (who runs Folding@home) is a nonprofit set up in conjuction with Stanford University's Chemistry department. They do not make any money from the data they collect. See http://folding.stanford.edu/faq.html#project.own for more information.

Have you read anything about Folding@home before you started criticizing it? It is run by a public university, not a privately-held organization. The university will not profit from the research. If you can't bother to learn about the project, at least read it's FAQ.

Have you read anything about Folding@home before you started criticizing it? It is run by a public university, not a privately-held organization. The university will not profit from the research. If you can't bother to learn about the project, at least read it's FAQ.

These two firefox extensions can help block some of those style attacks

http://www.safecache.com/
and
http://www.safehistory.com/

They do this by segmenting your cache and history so that each page only has access to each individual history.

this page has more info about the method they use,
http://crypto.stanford.edu/sameorigin/
and this is a *PDF* on the subject

http://crypto.stanford.edu/sameorigin/sameorigin.p df **PDF WARNING!**

These two firefox extensions can help block some of those style attacks

http://www.safecache.com/
and
http://www.safehistory.com/

They do this by segmenting your cache and history so that each page only has access to each individual history.

this page has more info about the method they use,
http://crypto.stanford.edu/sameorigin/
and this is a *PDF* on the subject

http://crypto.stanford.edu/sameorigin/sameorigin.p df **PDF WARNING!**