Slashdot Mirror

Foldiak is cited in Dileep George and Jeff Hawkins's research paper.

It took some searching around, but I managed to find the research page for Dileep George, one of the co-founders and chief engineers. His page has links to source code for his visual recognition system, although I haven't had a chance to evaluate it yet.

He organized a workshop on invariant representations in vision last weekend at Cosyne, one of the major computational neuroscience conferences.

George and Hawkins are also publishing a paper in the proceedings of an upcoming neural network conference. Here's the relevant info:

http://www.stanford.edu/~dil/invariance/Download/G eorgeHawkinsIJCNN05.pdf

A Hierarchical Bayesian Model of Invariant Pattern Recognition in the Visual Cortex

Dileep George and Jeff Hawkins, Stanford University and Redwood Neuroscience Institute
Accepted for publication in the proceedings of the International Joint Conference on Neural Networks. (IJCNN 05)

We describe a hierarchical model of invariant visual pattern recognition in the visual cortex. In this model, the knowledge of how patterns change when objects move is learned and encapsulated in terms of high probability sequences at each level of the hierarchy. Configuration of object parts is captured by the patterns of coincident high probability sequences. This knowledge is then encoded in a highly efficient Bayesian Network structure. The learning algorithm uses a temporal stability criterion to discover object concepts and movement patterns. We show that the architecture and algorithms are biologically plausible. The large scale architecture of the system matches the large scale organization of the cortex and the micro-circuits derived from the local computations match the anatomical data on cortical circuits. The system exhibits invariance across a wide variety of transformations and is robust in the presence of noise. Moreover, the model also offers alternative explanations for various known cortical phenomena.

It took some searching around, but I managed to find the research page for Dileep George, one of the co-founders and chief engineers. His page has links to source code for his visual recognition system, although I haven't had a chance to evaluate it yet.

He organized a workshop on invariant representations in vision last weekend at Cosyne, one of the major computational neuroscience conferences.

George and Hawkins are also publishing a paper in the proceedings of an upcoming neural network conference. Here's the relevant info:

http://www.stanford.edu/~dil/invariance/Download/G eorgeHawkinsIJCNN05.pdf

A Hierarchical Bayesian Model of Invariant Pattern Recognition in the Visual Cortex

Dileep George and Jeff Hawkins, Stanford University and Redwood Neuroscience Institute
Accepted for publication in the proceedings of the International Joint Conference on Neural Networks. (IJCNN 05)

We describe a hierarchical model of invariant visual pattern recognition in the visual cortex. In this model, the knowledge of how patterns change when objects move is learned and encapsulated in terms of high probability sequences at each level of the hierarchy. Configuration of object parts is captured by the patterns of coincident high probability sequences. This knowledge is then encoded in a highly efficient Bayesian Network structure. The learning algorithm uses a temporal stability criterion to discover object concepts and movement patterns. We show that the architecture and algorithms are biologically plausible. The large scale architecture of the system matches the large scale organization of the cortex and the micro-circuits derived from the local computations match the anatomical data on cortical circuits. The system exhibits invariance across a wide variety of transformations and is robust in the presence of noise. Moreover, the model also offers alternative explanations for various known cortical phenomena.

It took some searching around, but I managed to find the research page for Dileep George, one of the co-founders and chief engineers. His page has links to source code for his visual recognition system, although I haven't had a chance to evaluate it yet.

He organized a workshop on invariant representations in vision last weekend at Cosyne, one of the major computational neuroscience conferences.

George and Hawkins are also publishing a paper in the proceedings of an upcoming neural network conference. Here's the relevant info:

http://www.stanford.edu/~dil/invariance/Download/G eorgeHawkinsIJCNN05.pdf

A Hierarchical Bayesian Model of Invariant Pattern Recognition in the Visual Cortex

Dileep George and Jeff Hawkins, Stanford University and Redwood Neuroscience Institute
Accepted for publication in the proceedings of the International Joint Conference on Neural Networks. (IJCNN 05)

We describe a hierarchical model of invariant visual pattern recognition in the visual cortex. In this model, the knowledge of how patterns change when objects move is learned and encapsulated in terms of high probability sequences at each level of the hierarchy. Configuration of object parts is captured by the patterns of coincident high probability sequences. This knowledge is then encoded in a highly efficient Bayesian Network structure. The learning algorithm uses a temporal stability criterion to discover object concepts and movement patterns. We show that the architecture and algorithms are biologically plausible. The large scale architecture of the system matches the large scale organization of the cortex and the micro-circuits derived from the local computations match the anatomical data on cortical circuits. The system exhibits invariance across a wide variety of transformations and is robust in the presence of noise. Moreover, the model also offers alternative explanations for various known cortical phenomena.

Skeptics view of the Buenos Aires conference

Debate of the IPCC executive summary

"Stanford scientist Stephen Schneider has been a leader of the alarmist camp, which has received most of the publicity" Ronald Hilton (Stanford University - 03/18/99

E-mail correspondence between S. Fred Singer and Ben Santer

Industry contributions to the environmental movement

Environmentalism for the 21st Century

The CO2 & Climate Team

is calling a scientist with a contrary view "Mass Murderer" ok under the "ends justify the means rules

Now as a Parthian shot. Below are the primary movers in the anti "Big warming Industry". I cannot find, please point it out if you can find one, a page devoted to "Smear tactics" against the Big GW scientists, though I will admit that Milloy occasionally uses a bit of sarcasm, and Singer is none to friendly towards Schneider, none devote a page to "smear tactics". Lomborg of course, in Danish Stoicism, wouldn't say anything hurtful about anyone.

Patrick Michaels
Bjorn Lomborg
Steve Milloy

Now we move on to Schneider's site.

Schneider Contrarians

Here Schneider devotes 13,245 words to mud slinging and smear tactics (including the exorbitant amount of API funding to Soon and Baliunas that covered 5% of their budget, no mention to where the remainder of the funding comes from.

Skeptics view of the Buenos Aires conference

Debate of the IPCC executive summary

"Stanford scientist Stephen Schneider has been a leader of the alarmist camp, which has received most of the publicity" Ronald Hilton (Stanford University - 03/18/99

E-mail correspondence between S. Fred Singer and Ben Santer

Industry contributions to the environmental movement

Environmentalism for the 21st Century

The CO2 & Climate Team

is calling a scientist with a contrary view "Mass Murderer" ok under the "ends justify the means rules

Now as a Parthian shot. Below are the primary movers in the anti "Big warming Industry". I cannot find, please point it out if you can find one, a page devoted to "Smear tactics" against the Big GW scientists, though I will admit that Milloy occasionally uses a bit of sarcasm, and Singer is none to friendly towards Schneider, none devote a page to "smear tactics". Lomborg of course, in Danish Stoicism, wouldn't say anything hurtful about anyone.

Patrick Michaels
Bjorn Lomborg
Steve Milloy

Now we move on to Schneider's site.

Schneider Contrarians

Here Schneider devotes 13,245 words to mud slinging and smear tactics (including the exorbitant amount of API funding to Soon and Baliunas that covered 5% of their budget, no mention to where the remainder of the funding comes from.

Okay back to Schneider for a moment.

Some more out of context quotes from here: Schnieder quotes

Selected Schneider Quotes

"A cooling trend has set in, perhaps one akin to the Little Ice Age." - Twenty-year-old Schneider quote cited in the Washington Times, June 12, 1992

"Temperatures do not increase in proportion to an atmospheric increase in CO2... Even an eight-fold increase... might warm earth's surface less than two degrees Centigrade, and this is highly unlikely in the next several thousand years." - from paper Schneider co-authored in 1971 cited in Environmental Overkill by Dixy Lee Ray (1993)

"[Global warming linked to emissions of CO2, methane and other gases] is a scientific phenomenon beyond doubt. It's only a question of how much warming there will be." - Quoted by David L. Chandler of the Boston Globe, January 23, 1989

"It is journalistically irresponsible to present both sides [of the global warming theory] as though it were a question of balance. " - Quoted in the Boston Globe, May 31, 1992

"Looking at every bump and wiggle... is a waste of time.. I don't set very much store by looking at the direct evidence." -Quoted in the Washington Times, June 12, 1992

I don't have, but have read, the entire article in the 1992 Boston Globe article. It moderates it somewhat, but far from fully.

Further, Schneider was Al Gore's science advisor, and helped to author Gore's book "Earth in the balance". I'm assuming your a Dem, and that's fine, could care less. But if this guy is running around with Al gore, it shows Political intentions, and makes him far from an un-biased person. He has motivation, likely political, behind his position.

Everything all told, I stand behind my opinion of Schneider's quote, and usage of it, as it stands.

As to the merits of research, I've read some of it, quite frankly, I'm not impressed. Shallow and non-original would be the terms I would use.

From his site on climate science Schneider

I see ~30 articles referenced, of which 2 he is directly credited as a co-author. The majority of which is re-iteration of Mann's work (where we stumble briefly on-topic), if you want a review of Mann's work go to the parent article, there's plenty. But I'll make an offer if you like. Pick a graph, article whichever you choose, and I'll point out the merits, or lack thereof should you desire. Took me about 5 minutes to quickly review the graphs, and see that not one of them isn't a distortion graph designed to look good but when you look at the labels you see that it is not what it appears on the surface. I am familiar with all of these in one iteration or another. Suffice to say they lack the same contrary evidence charts that go with these. The fall perfectly in line with Schneider's opinion of: "So we have to offer up scary scenarios, make simplified, dramatic statements, and make little mention of any doubts we might have." There is direct conflicting graphs developed by the same sources. This contrary data is dropped and only supporting evidence is published. Yes this is a direct challenging statement. Take me up on it should you desire.

"It's the inflation of research beyond its own merits that I object to."

I agree completely 100%, and I invite you to look into it with a scientific eye. Should you need direction I'll be happy to get you started. Most importantly Question it. Part of scientific review is to assume the data is wrong and look to put holes in it. If it you can't find any holes it stands as good. But you have to actively seek holes. If you don't understand something research it. And by that I mean more the methods and presentation, and less the meaning.

Here's a page run by someone called Dileep George who apparently does research with Hawkins: http://www.stanford.edu/~dil/invariance/

Mirror of the Theora videos

I've always wondered why we, as a community, don't beat them at their own game. There is more of us then them, so if only 10% of us would carpet bomb them with fake requests, calling their 800 numbers, whatever they want back, wouldn't that piss them off.

It's a Free Rider problem. Sure, if we all fought the spammers, intelligently, they'd be easily defeated. But part of the key there is intelligently. You'd have to make sure you get the right phone number (or email address, or website, or snail mail address), and not a decoy. And then you'd have to go through a good deal of work. And you'd have to risk, in some cases, being prosecuted.

Who invented the telephone? Was it Alexander Graham Bell or Elisha Gray?

Patents... a topic which I guess slashdotters feel strongly about.

To my surprise, even a DVD recorder can't copy Hollywood produced tapes. This goes back to the 80s with a technique created by Macrovision.

Ironically, I can record anything on TV today (pre-broadcast flag of course.) Yet, I can't do a backup of a cheap old VCR tape, clearly a fair use right.

Since I and you are primarily interested in purely legal fair uses for copying, it's clear that Hollywood has never and will never respect you or I or our fair use rights. DRM has only one end, and that's the removal of our fair use rights to the farthest extent they can over the course of time. Even if they temporarily roll back their restrictions due to consumer backlash or competition, it's only until they can gradually creep them back.

Accepting DRM is allowing Hollywood to decide what's fair use. To them, it's only fair if they can get more money from you. That's my humble opinion.

I have boycotted the RIAA and its labels for years; then I added Windows Media, iPod and Tivo (due to compromise on commercial skipping.) I'll continue to boycott large companies that choose dollars over people, and continue to encourage anything that threatens the power of companies that undermine people's rights.

I believe the logic behind suing Vonage is this--if you are going to be taking on a utility service to consumers but you (i.e., Vonage) still don't want to be regulated by collecting any taxes on 911 nor a telecommunications entity then you will bear the brunt of appearing to be a utility service, providing a utility service but not regulated nor subject to the laws applying to utility services. Therefore, you will be subject to taking responsibility for all actions coming from the use of your service. There is no doubt in the coming age Vonage and other VOIP providers will come under some modified regulations but until then states are going to have no mercy on them when they are being beaten by VOIP providers at each turn.

Qaint. Pretend I don't have any rights so there's nothing to take away. It would be funny if it weren't both pathetic and threatening at the same time. (pathetic because it is so naive, threatening because day by day it becomes more of a reality...)

To turn it back on you (forwards to the rest of the world). Copyright's are exclusive rights of the copyright holder including the right to:

1) To reproduce the work in copies or phonorecords;

2) To prepare derivative works based upon the work;

3) To distribute copies or phonorecords of the work to the public by sale or other transfer of ownership, or by rental, lease, or lending;

4) To perform the work publicly, in the case of literary, musical, dramatic, and choreographic works, pantomimes, and motion pictures and other audiovisual works;

5) To display the copyrighted work publicly, in the case of literary, musical, dramatic, and choreographic works, pantomimes, and pictorial, graphic, or sculptural works, including the individual images of a motion picture or other audiovisual work; and

6) In the case of sound recordings, to perform the work publicly by means of a digital audio transmission.

So, anything not in this list I'm allowed to do no questions asked. In fact, the only way a copyright holder could (possibly) get me to give up further rights would be to get me to agree the work is being rented, leased etc. rather than being sold. (...A dirty trick if pulled off successfully...)

Consumer rights under copyright:

1) First Sale, the right to resell something once you're done using it.

2) Fair use, the right to freely use portions of a work for criticism, parody and the like.

3) Archival, the right to make backup copies of purchased works.

4) Reverse Engineering, the right to take apart and understand a purchased work.

Perhaps you can see why I think pretending these rights don't exist is coercive at best...

BTW has anyone ever considered themselves a 'programming artist'?

I've been saying this forever (read: back when I was a slashdot troll in high school) and one need not even look to philosophy. on the other hand, more modest ontologies seem eminently reasonable. the "semantic" part is hype since it's just data embedded in a social network, but as a mechanism of trust the regularization of data makes a lot of sense. in other words it's a structure that supports standardization, and that depends on social processes more than any facts about objects when they intersect with meaning.

Dilettanten!, Dilettanten! - so werden Die, welche eine Wissenschaft oder Kunst, aus Liebe zu ihr und Freude an ihr, per il loco diletto, treiben, mit Geringschätzung genannt von Denen, die sich des Gewinnes halber darauf gelegt haben; weil sie nur das Geld delektiert, das damit zu verdienen ist. Diese Geringschätzung beruht auf ihrer niederderträchtigen Überzeugung, dass keiner eine Sache ernstlich angreifen werde, wenn ihn nicht Not, Hunger oder sonst welche Gier dazu anspornt. Das Publikum ist desselben Geistes und daher derselben Meinung: hieraus entspringt sein durchgängiger Respekt vor den 'Leuten vom Fach' und sein Misstrauen gegen Dilettanten. In Wahrheit hingegen ist dem Dilettanten die Sache Zweck, dem Manne vom Fach, als solchem, bloß Mittel; nur der aber wird eine Sache mit ganzem Ernste treiben, dem unmittelbar an ihr gelegen ist und der sich aus Liebe zu ihr damit beschäftigt; sie con Amore treibt. Von Solchen, und nicht von den Lohndienern, ist stets das Größte ausgegangen.

[Arthur Schopenhauer, Parerga und Paralipomena: Ueber Gelehrsamkeit und Gelehrte]

From Stanford's Copyright and Fair Use Overview

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.

It goes on to describe what it means by transformative, etc. and even includes examples in later pages of fair use. This doesn't even technically qualify as Timeshifting, as came up with the Sony Betamax case.

No, what you are doing with stripping copyright protection is transforming the work as a whole and transcribing it into another form that is more portable. Think of it like scanning an entire novel into pdf format.

Now, the LHC (Large Hadron Collider), that's a different story. Here the energy density and black hole production cross sections are actually high enough, a black hole production signal could actually be measured.

Sadly, in all cases, the black holes evaporate harmlessly.

Now, the LHC (Large Hadron Collider), that's a different story. Here the energy density and black hole production cross sections are actually high enough, a black hole production signal could actually be measured.

Sadly, in all cases, the black holes evaporate harmlessly.

...can zombies be clustered?

Clustered using a Win32 worm? No.

A botnet node, however, could easily be manipulated to handle distributed computing such as Folding@Home, SETI@Home, or, with Java, Remote Method Invocation (RMI).

A 50k node botnet with each zombie contributing to, say, cracking an encryption could be invaluable to hackers and a multi-billion corporation's worst nightmare.

Better yet, let's just throw thousands of these bags in the ocean and create an underwater city instantaneously!

Excess water would probably yield very poor quality concrete and ocean currents would probably wash the concrete away before it set. Also, the baloons would need to be well anchored or they would float to the surface.

Another technique for this (although not as quick) is to just deploy a metal mesh (think window screen size). Then you apply electricity to the mesh and the minerals in sea water acrete onto the structure. This technique was described in article in the Mother Earth News 25 years ago although it apparently wasn't pursued enough. More recently, this technique has been used to restore coral reefs and one group plans to use it to create an underwater habitat .

There is some research at Standford and a Wikipedia entry . Apparently, there is some confusion about how much energy is needed to produce such structures and a structure similar in size to the inflatable one would probably use around $500 worth of electricty.

Avoid the email, it's just a loss of time. (for the argumentation, take a look at this page )

Stanford has information on OpenLDAP, SASL/GSSAPI and Kerberos at:

http://www.stanford.edu/services/directory/openlda p/configuration

I'm not trying to troll, but I really don't understand the fascination with Knuth and his work. Knuth clearly is an important computer scientist and some of his work has had a big impact, but he wouldn't be my choice for computer science hero.

I don't find "The Art" to be a particularly well written book--the verbal presentation is great, but I consider the selection unfocused and approach questionable. I have rarely come across anything actually useful in one of Knuth's papers. And have a look at his recent publications; is there really anything interesting in there? The one piece of software that I use of which I know that it is related to Knuth, I have a love-hate relationship with: TeX does something very useful and it does it technically well, but as a piece of modern software development or language design, I think it deserves a failing grade.

So, the question is: why are you so fascinated by Knuth? Which of his papers or results are you really fond of? And which of his results are you actually using? What examples of practical impact of Knuth's results can you actually give.

Knuth's http://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~knuth/rice.htm lopen letter to Condi Rice.

Donald Knuth is actually a Christian and has written a book where he analyses chapter 3 verse 16 of every book in the Protestant Christian bible. Each verse is illuminated with beautiful caligraphy.

He also gave some lectures about religion called Things a Computer Scientist Rarely Talks About.

Donald Knuth is actually a Christian and has written a book where he analyses chapter 3 verse 16 of every book in the Protestant Christian bible. Each verse is illuminated with beautiful caligraphy.

He also gave some lectures about religion called Things a Computer Scientist Rarely Talks About.

Sorry to burst your bubble:

Yes, this is how God
____loved the world:
_He Gave his
____Only Child;
____So that all
____People with faith in him
can Escape destruction and
____Live a full life;
now and forever.

On an unrelated note, I love this note on his page about The Art Of Computer Programming:

... And if you do report an error [in TAOCP] via email, please do not include attachments of any kind; your message should be readable on brand-X operating systems for all values of X.

On an unrelated note, I love this note on his page about The Art Of Computer Programming:

... And if you do report an error [in TAOCP] via email, please do not include attachments of any kind; your message should be readable on brand-X operating systems for all values of X.

In other words, he was getting legitimate email, and it was a distraction for that reason.

I'm pretty sure that if the problem was spam, Knuth is one of the few people who'd actually create a system that can, actually, filter spam and spam only.

TeX is already long in the tooth, and will become obsolete soon. His books, on the other hand, are meant to stand the test of time, and he's retired from being a professor to takle Vol 4 full-time. http://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~knuth/retd.htm l Obviously I'm respoding to a die-hard code hacker, but its a bit insulting to dismiss Knuth's books as of "much less practical importance."

The narrator also mentions he's "abandoned email." Interesting detail, especially as I contemplate the 995 messages in my inbox this morning (80% spam, 19% mailing lists), I am starting to wonder why I don't get around to it myself.

He sure has: Knuth versus Email

This is partially a shameless plug, but there is also some incredible things we can do with VR in terms of social science/psychology research.

just image any research where you have to record video/audio and then hire a bunch of psych 1 students to encode what they see for analysis (which is EXREMELY BIASED). now with VR, we can just record the position/orientation of the subject and use statistical methods (i.e. SPSS+MatLab) to crunch numbers (completely unbiased). Where I work, we have come up with some exciting discoveries.

I don't want to write a book here, so check out http://vhil.stanford.edu/

FAH has 187 TFLOPS!
http://vspx27.stanford.edu/cgi-bin/main.py?qtype=o sstats

So are they going to be doing Folding@Home when no one is using it.

And F@H has 187 TeraFLOPS. However, random companies cannot use SETI@Home or Folding@Home for drug research, can they? :P

In this paper, he proposes the Elephant language that can refer to the past in computer programs.

Pretty cool stuff!

Randal also discusses formatting and the nifty "Schwartzian Transform" (Perl's map-sort-map idiom for sorting on almost anything) which was named for him, but not by him.

This is one of the things that's always annoyed me about Perl and its practitioners (well, most programmers, really)...

Given the long history of functional programming (hell, Lisp is closing in on 50 years old), this map/sort/map idiom had to be second nature to any Lisp/Scheme/Haskell/ML/etc. programmer at the time Schwartz wrote about it back in 1996[1]. And the fact that this was such a revelation to the people who read his column that they named the idiom after him just exposes the lack of a diverse programming background for most people. I'm guessing that 50% of the coders out there wouldn't know a map or a fold if it bit them on the ass, and even more wouldn't have a clue as to how to solve something so basic as the missionaries and cannibals problem in a declarative/logical manner (without the help of Dr. Google that is).

Meh... Bitter rant over, I guess...

[1] I could be wrong, I didn't really do much coding before 1995-ish.

And I disagree with your criticism of author-pays. For most academic institutions, a publication at a quality conference or major journal is worth much more than $1500 in research funding - which is what it costs to publish in a Public Library of Science journal. In any case, if you have a paper accepted to a conference, you have to go to present it. If the conference is in another country (and if you're not American, they usually are), it's very likely to cost more than $1500 to pay the conference entry fee, the hotel, the airfare, and so on.

With PCI Express, video cards will finally become true read/write devices and not just write like with AGP. I wouldn't be surprised if the next generation of PCI-E graphics cards start advertising features like "Physics Acellerator" on the consumer cards and "Render Assist" on the pro versions. GPUs would also make killer co-processors for running things like Folding@Home.

with full knowledge that it WILL be useful someday.

That's why you need Literate Programming! A very good book for all the family ;)

There's a good article on their learning process here.

Similarly, most (maybe all?) plants respond very favorably to more CO2, so even if we don't get the warming, those poor African farmers have something to look forward to, as long as we don't fall for that Kyoto crap.

Here are a couple of links which address the question of what global warming could mean for us: one and two

As for what makes global cooling more likely than warming, well, we're probably near the tail end of an inter-glacial period, and probably overdue for a change for the worse. There isn't much hard eveidence either way, and what we do know, we don't really understand very well. I'd say that given the possibility that the Gulf Stream might fail, catastrophically and suddenly, according to one fairly plausible set of theories, another ice age isn't impossible.

Similarly, most (maybe all?) plants respond very favorably to more CO2, so even if we don't get the warming, those poor African farmers have something to look forward to, as long as we don't fall for that Kyoto crap.

Here are a couple of links which address the question of what global warming could mean for us: one and two

As for what makes global cooling more likely than warming, well, we're probably near the tail end of an inter-glacial period, and probably overdue for a change for the worse. There isn't much hard eveidence either way, and what we do know, we don't really understand very well. I'd say that given the possibility that the Gulf Stream might fail, catastrophically and suddenly, according to one fairly plausible set of theories, another ice age isn't impossible.

I don't see why you dismiss the fair use possibility. Fair use is when you know that something is under copyright, or you cannot prove that is is not under copyright. You still make use of it because you determine, based on the criteria in copyright law, that your use is "fair." Fair use doesn't mean that you are ignorant of copyright, it's a judgment that you make with full knowledge of copyright law and its meaning. You could indeed take an mp3 and post it online and claim that your use is fair (based on the famous four factors in the copyright law, see link above). If you are wrong about your judgment, and the use isn't fair, the owner of the copyright can take you to court. That's why fair use is always a risk. You know that the risk is high if you are making copies of a hit song issued by a major recording studio; your risk is low if you are making use of an unnamed, unsigned, undated photograph that appears to be from the early 1900's and came from the library's archive.

I have little sympathy for Tim Paterson. He stole another person's idea (i.e. CPM/86) and tried to make money off of it by selling the product (i.e. QDOS) to Bill Gates. Gates then signed an agreement with IBM to distribute a copy of MSDOS (renamed from QDOS) on each IBM PC. This agreement transformed Microsoft into a multi-billion company.

Gary Kildall missed the boat on this one. His lack of business acumen resulted in him losing the fame and fortune that Gates stole. IBM actually made an offer to Kildall, but Kildall dallied and finally refused the offer.

If history had accorded the fame to Gary Kildall but the riches to Bill Gates, Kildall would likely not have been so bitter and would likely still be alive today. Kildal deserved all the fame, for his ideas (which Paterson stole to build QDOS) became the basis of the modern PC operating system. Indeed, the computer science building at Stanford University should be called the "Kildall Building", not the "Gates Building".

A similar analogy could be made with Linus and Linux. The management of RedHat and other Linux distributors make all the money, and Linus just gets the fame. We all cheer Linus whenever we meet him. Even though Linus is not a billionaire, the warmth of us geeks acknowledging his brilliance is worth a million bucks.

By contrast, Kildall did not even get the fame, i.e. the recognition that he deserved. Ask any Windows/MS-DOS user who Kildall is, and she will scratch her head with ignorance. If I were in Kildall's shoes, I would have been bitter every day of my life and would have probably committed suicide too.

I am not one to believe in god or any afterlife, but if there were a hell, I hope that there is a special version of hell just for "bad" geeks. Both Gates and Paterson belong in it.

Sorry for the tirade, but I myself have been ripped off along the lines of what happened to Kildall. So, I can know how he felt on the day of his death. I hope that none of you is ever ripped off in the same way. The bitterness could kill you.

You may not find it interesting, but it's closely related to Russell's Paradox, which was of serious concern to set-theoreticians. This, in turn, is closely related to Godel's Incompleteness Theorem and also to the Halting Problem, which place fundamental limits on mathematics and computability.

http://www-db.stanford.edu/~backrub/google.html