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I used to assume that Knuth simply acknowledged that CS had gotten too big to be summarized by a single introductory text. But it turns out that he's still working on it, even as the size of the project continues to grow. ("Volume 4" will actually be 4 volumes!) There's some weird obsession here, possibly characterized by Knuth's abandonment of email and certainly connected with his early retirement.

It's also strange that Knuth still insists providing code for a pseudo machine. I'm a CS flunkout, so my opinion isn't worth much, but this does seem to be a thoroughly obsolete idea. Especially when you consider how many effort Knuth expends redesigning the machine!

I used to assume that Knuth simply acknowledged that CS had gotten too big to be summarized by a single introductory text. But it turns out that he's still working on it, even as the size of the project continues to grow. ("Volume 4" will actually be 4 volumes!) There's some weird obsession here, possibly characterized by Knuth's abandonment of email and certainly connected with his early retirement.

It's also strange that Knuth still insists providing code for a pseudo machine. I'm a CS flunkout, so my opinion isn't worth much, but this does seem to be a thoroughly obsolete idea. Especially when you consider how many effort Knuth expends redesigning the machine!

Secrets out. The book are so slow because of Don's Star Wars commitments:

• Sith Lord
• Maths Guy

• Uncanny!

It's been a while. Dr. Knuth already finished pre-fascicle 4. Get it here. It's far from done (well, according to his plan).

It's been a while. Dr. Knuth already finished pre-fascicle 4. Get it here. It's far from done (well, according to his plan).

The books homepage, http://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~knuth/taocp.ht ml offers the fascicle for download for free. http://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~knuth/fasc1.ps .gz You can still get $2.56 for each bug found, I believe.

Mirrors:
http://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu.nyud.net:8090/~ knuth/taocp.html
http://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu.nyud.net:8090/~ knuth/fasc1.ps.gz

The books homepage, http://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~knuth/taocp.ht ml offers the fascicle for download for free. http://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~knuth/fasc1.ps .gz You can still get $2.56 for each bug found, I believe.

Mirrors:
http://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu.nyud.net:8090/~ knuth/taocp.html
http://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu.nyud.net:8090/~ knuth/fasc1.ps.gz

But I think your sentiment is spot on. Well, for the most part. I think this has the capability of being more secure, but it has the flaw of its users expecting it to be perfectly secure, which would actually make it less secure (see also Why Things Bite Back, by Edward Tenner).

Just like at least one reason Linux is more secure is that it is less used, fingerprint scanners will be unlikely to be a target for the next few years. If they become the primary means of verification, whether they become more secure than the current system depends on how much their shortcomings are acknowledged. (Naturally, most /. readers already know about the various ways to circumvent these systems.)

It's not just canned questions and answers; it has an inference engine. It can do "if A is B and B is C, then A is C". But only if all the right predicates match perfectly.

Lenat was claming it would somehow become intelligent in a few more years. That was a decade ago. Today, Cyc is regarded as the definitive demonstration that that idea won't work.

Here's a critique of Cyc from 1994.

Given that similar policies have gone(hint: "trusted friends" is really an euphemism for something else related to where Orkut came from) on in other places in that area of the States, why is this surprising? At least somebody accurately hits the nail on the head on this kind of issue - where else do you get such arrogance that results in good code being sacrificed for California style political games, where you win by excluding the most people while presenting the best facade to the public of what you do.
Sure, there is more than a shred of validity of checking code, but when you use politics instead of quality to determine what goes in, it's not a meritocracy anymore, it's not even about the code. At that point, things like the Xorg/XFree86 split and the various BSD splits happen. Not minor code forks, but major splits.

To preempt you nuts who think nothing can be forced, fine. You just mindlessly confuse theory and practice as being the same in any situation regardless of politics, especially if it deals with places too exclusionary for their own good.

http://cse.stanford.edu/class/sophomore-college/pr ojects-00/risc/risccisc/

CISC vs RISC

The only reason Linux doesn't have thousands of viruses written for it is because nobody runs it. Same with macs.

This meme refuses to die. It sounds credible that more usage would lead to a more attractive target for malware but ignores other factors like:

• monoculture
• ActiveX
• Microsoft's decision to "integrate" their web browser into Windows

An excellent article refuting this meme, which doesn't even mention ActiveX, can be found here:

Windows XP has a better security infrastructure than any UNIX knock off.

Here's my opinion, with references to support it.

Only a criminal monopoly(1), with no consideration of their customer's interests, could embed into their web browser "application" (2) the security sink-hole of ActiveX vulnerabilities(3) to achieve vendor lock-in(4). This has resulted in the mess that is "security" in Microsoft(R) Windows(R) today.

References:

1. Criminal is strong language but Microsoft has a judgement against them regarding unlawful monopoly conduct: http://www.microsoft-antitrust.gov/
2. To everyone but Microsoft, Internet Explorer is an application called a "web browser". MicroSoft testified in their anti-trust trial that IE is not an application but an integrated part of their Microsoft(R) Windows(R) operating system and there is no way to allow users to not have it installed. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/special_report/1998/04/ 98/microsoft/275248.stm
3. Concern over ActiveX vulnerabilities have been in the media for over 6 years. The issue has gotten more attention migrating from IT trade press to mainstream media and in that time we've gone from viruses (which have not gone away) to Phishing and Spyware infestations:
   • Feb 19, 1998 IT trade press article: http://digitalcity.com.com/A+question+of+safety/20 09-1001_3-208208.html
   • Nov 9 2004 Mainstream Media article: http://www.usatoday.com/money/industries/technolog y/2004-11-09-firefox-sidebar_x.htm
4. 36 page academic paper in PDF format. Network Effects and Microsoft: http://www.stanford.edu/~tbres/Microsoft/Network_T heory_and_Microsoft.pdf

• Start simple -- do a 2D game, either a simple arcade game or a conversion of a board game.
• Build it incrementally -- game programming actually spans many areas, so don't get frustrated if your first creation isn't a graphical wonder with advanced sound and cutting-edge AI.
• Since you're new to programming and want to do cross-platform, choose your environment carefully. Python and Java are probably good choices, and both will probably serve you well in a college CS program. Java also offers the possibility of targeting things like web delivery or cellphones if you want to keep growing your project.
• Set achievable milestones -- things that seem impossibly large can be done quicker than you'd think by breaking them into smaller, independently testable units.

Good luck and have fun.

This is being done elsewhere too. I don't know who was first, or what the differences are, but check out The Stanford CityBlock Project.

EA Pacific have created a brand new storyline, [..] that have all been inspired by the technologies and ideologies of today's tumultuous world.

A few headlines about the US government accusing the chinese government of planning to use hackers for cyberwarfare is hardly inspiration for a story depicting "real world" events. The people who designed the plot behind C&C Generals did nothing but regurgitate US news headlines to make the plot of this game. C&C Generals' China forces makes money by hackers who sit on mobile laptops by breaking into financial institutions. It's about as assinine if the game designers decided to make an Iraqi force instead, who has "weapons of mass destruction". I can understand why China is pissed.

In addition, when clicking on some of the US units that you wish to command in the game, they say phrases like "Preserving Freedom" and "Doing the right thing". Through the press, the US government has made what is truly a religious war, a war about fighting for freedom. Bush has said time and time again about how these terrorists "hate freedom" and "what america stands for."

I, for one, was quite offended by those aspects of the game.
Especially being that the target audience is young people who probably don't follow the real-world events in-depth, the story is really a work of pure fiction, coated to be based on "real world events". Whether or not the game has had any effect on shaping the opinions on world "events", of its young players, the messages "doing the right thing" being played over and over again has to make you wonder.

http://www-smirc.stanford.edu/tom.html. He taught an intro seminar called "Things about Stuff" that basically dealt with the stories behind EE inventions.

Anyone here who's a scientist ever try to use "google scholar"? Unfortunately, it's not very good. What I'd like to see (as an Astrophysicist) is some way to do a search that combined results from difficult-to-navigate scientific sites, such as NASA's ADS abstract service, the Spires HEP database, and the arXiv.org preprint database. Finding what you need on these individual sites is often a pain, and to be able to search a compilation of them would sure be nice for me...

If you really want to get away from video games you should also check out GPGPU. Its a site dedicated to general processing on GPUs. There is also a lot of research done in this area, such as a DB run on a graphics card as well as a lot computational geometry problems. Also, Stanford has developed a more straightforward C-like language to do GPGPU. Pretty cool stuff.

DX9 and other pieces of graphics code are useful for other type of aplications as well:
http://www.gpgpu.org/
http://graphics.stanford.edu/projects/brookgpu/sta rt.html

I run Folding@Home whenever I can. It is for a worthwhile cause, so does that count?

The WWW Roshambot utilizes an Artificial Intelligence algorithm in order to determine the optimal move for each round. It does NOT cheat (i.e. it does not use your move on the current round to determine it's move for the current round), nor is it random (except on the first move).

Think older. Douglas Engelbart's OnLine System.

Gravity Probe B (previously discussed on Slashdot here and here.) was also affected according to their latest bulletin.

On the particular part you quoted, check out the writings by John Taylor Gatto (a New York State Teacher of the Year) on all the things schools and prisons share in common, and how much damage conventional age segregated schooling with a fixed curriculum and standardized testing does to developing minds. You can find a book he wrote online here: The Underground History of American Education.

By the way, I agree with you some on the sweeping generalization on feminism (which in some variants is more liberational) but I think his point still stands -- that reconstructing the nature of work is to my (perhaps incomplete) understanding not typically an aspect of mainstream feminism -- especially when that was written (1985?) -- just deciding who does the work or who supervises it or who benefits from it monetarily or otherwise. But as a piece of rhetoric, I still think that paragraph is compelling in showing how people refuse to think systematically about what work needs to be done in society and how best to do it from various points of view.

E.F. Schumacher made similar points in his essay on Buddhist Economics if you want to read an author who is more well known.

Parallel processing is nothing new but this chip sounds like Professor Dally's custom stream processor, the Merrimac He lectured congress on the need of a vector/streaming processor supercomputer because the current supercomputers are inefficient. His Stanford website. Description of cell sounds just like his processor. Even the drawings. The only differene is the location of memory. He makes the point that memory should accessed fast and installed on the chip. That's whats different between the two.

To this speech, often thought to have been written by Bill 'The Borg' Gates, but actually by Charles J. Sykes.

Still, you can't block every hole in security. Sometimes you just have to hope, right?

Yes, you can. No you don't. Software is just an applied form of discrete mathematics. "Beware of bugs in the above code; I have only proved it correct, not tried it," as Donald Knuth once said. It is possible to present a formal proof of correctness for any algorithm. It is nearly impossible and certainly impractical when you have a big mess of spaghetti code like with most of software that is utter crap, but it is possible nonetheless when you know what are you doing and design appropriately, with very clean, small and isolated parts of your system responsible for enforcing its security policies. Take a look at such operating systems as KeyKOS and EROS. E.g. read Verifying Operating System Security paper by J. S. Shapiro and S. Weber: "This paper presents a proof of correctness of the EROS operating system architecture with respect to confinement." Read some essays by Norman Hardy, especially those on Capability Theory. This is hardly a new idea, see GNOSIS: A Prototype Operating System for the 1990s paper by Bill Frantz, Norm Hardy, Jay Jonekait and Charlie Landau, written more than 25 years ago. The bottom line is: it is certainly possible to have a 100% secure system, but developers don't bother because users don't care.

He released TeX in Pascal formatted with technique.

Psst, the google toolbar already donates your free CPU cycles.

As everyone knows hamster power is just about ISO standard by now. Why would they reinvent the hamster wheel yet again?

http://crypto.stanford.edu/DRM2002/darknet5.doc

Of course, p2p right now is often thought of as a single file - an ISO, an mpg, an mp3, a zip file). I see nugget has posted in this thread - the peer-to-peer programs which he currently helps maintain use p2p to do operation distribution, not file distribution. As does Folding@Home (which studies protein/gene problems in a distributed manner) and SETI. GPU is interesting in this respect as you are the one deciding what operations to perform - from adding 1 and 1, to calculating pi, to whatever. I really like Freenet - it is a very versatile protocol so that web pages, Usenet type forums, and even (small) file trading are all possible. I've even seen people play chess games over frost. And as a bonus, there is the option of (some degree of) anonymity on Freenet, so that is an added bonus.

I really would love to see someone with no money to host such thing create something as complex as Slashdot, with moderation system and all, and do it over p2p, maybe on something like Freenet, or maybe something else. The same with things like Wikipedia. Nowadays, the little guy is punished by high bandwidth costs if what he made is popular. With p2p this is not a problem any more.

well, you can take that up with milton friedman, champion of neoliberalism. it's his example.

ultimately, i think you're stretching the concept of property rights a bit!

An example of a REAL free market, win-win situation is if I have a house for sale for $100K

yes, that is a "real win-win situation"... but, again it doesn't include externalities since, by definition, externalities have no direct effect on price. did you read the wikipedia article?

Sorry -- the Folding@Home link is http://folding.stanford.edu/faq.html.

Email (let's drop the hyphen)
"I have been a happy man ever since January 1, 1990, when I no longer had an email address. I'd used email since about 1975, and it seems to me that 15 years of email is plenty for one lifetime."

In fact, among most critics of any major art form (literature, music, painting, etc.) the current consensus seems to be that in order to make truly innovative art you have to deliberately inherit and alter what your artistic forefathers have done. Harold Bloom's The Anxiety of Influence is the standard text on the subject.

If you think that was bad, check this out - the first mouse.(!)

Douglas Englebart first demoed a mouse in 1968. The original had a horizontal wheel and a vertical wheel, and you had to tip it so as to only move one wheel at a time.

For those too wrapped up in the Xerox-Parc-invented-everything fantasy, (because it makes them feel better when it's obvious Microsoft invented very little,) Jef Raskin has an excellent and short essay about the early days with the Macintosh.

In 2003 the CEO of BellSouth made over $10 million in salary, bonuses, and stock. But, I'm sure he is only concerned with helping out those poor old people's retirement funds.

All the largest portions of stock are owned by company executives and wealthy investors. But, I'm sure the small time share-holders are a high priority.

In 2001 BellSouth executives released false information to artificially inflate the stock price and then cashed out before the stock plummeted. Surely that will help all those employees with 401(k) plans!

If you think corporate profits are boon to society I have some Enron stock to sell you.

As much as we can get.

The folklore.org site is mentioned in the interview...

There's another site with a lot of excellent content on the making of the Macintosh:

http://library.stanford.edu/mac/

I think the "Technical Writing" part on that site is extremely valuable. It explains how the Inside Macintosh books were written and how that process affected the development of the MacOS APIs.

As far as technical documentation is concerned, the original Inside Macintosh books are still some of the best that I have ever read.

Fair use is a copyright principle based on the belief that the public is entitled to freely use portions of copyrighted materials forpurposes of commentary and criticism.
Ref: Standford University Library Reference page

Time shifting is the recording of television shows to some storage medium to be viewed at a time convenient to the consumer.
Ref: Wikipedia's Entry on Time Shifting

What you refer to as fair use is actually called Time Shifting, and is what was decided by the Betamax court case. Fair use is a completely different concept all together.

Chris Peters (former Microsoft VP) wrote an interesting documented called "Is Your Project Out of Control". It seems to have appeared on the net in various formats.

Look at Candea's papers (http://www.stanford.edu/~candea/papers.html)... he applied that stuff at least to a J2EE online auction app (on JBoss) and a real satellite ground station...

Yeah, it's called a maser, it came before the laser. The ignorance around here is amazing sometimes.

• Crash-only programs crash safely and recover quickly. There is only one way to stop such software -- by crashing it -- and only one way to bring it up -- by initiating recovery. Crash-only systems are built from crash-only components, and the use of transparent component-level retries hides intra-system component crashes from end users. In this paper we advocate a crash-only design for Internet systems, showing that it can lead to more reliable, predictable code and faster, more effective recovery. We present ideas on how to build such crash-only Internet services, taking successful techniques to their logical extreme.

In my opinion the http://folding.stanford.edu/ project is more important and perhaps more interesting than SETI. If you can help, I ask you to contribute with it.

Charles Parnot at Stanford made a grid for his personal project. He's got more than a hundred people donating some spare cycles to his grid which is pretty impressive for a fairly small project. Daniel Côté started an awesome project to get Xgrid working on non-OSX Unix systems. With a bit of work his Xgrid Agent program could be really robust and reliable enough for getting real work done. Like you I'd like to see this technology proliferate so maybe we can start seeing open grids pop up in various computer user communities.

> When they get the Linux client, they'll get 79,000 /.ers.

Well, you don't have to wait.

If you want to contribute to a good project, why not join Slashdot's team over at Folding@Home?

Unlike the IBM project, Folding@Home has its very own Linux console version.

> When they get the Linux client, they'll get 79,000 /.ers.

Well, you don't have to wait.

If you want to contribute to a good project, why not join Slashdot's team over at Folding@Home?

Unlike the IBM project, Folding@Home has its very own Linux console version.