Slashdot Mirror

These guyswere given a class A space but were nice enough to give some back.

Spread the word. MIT is full of greedy space-hoarding geeks!

He still beats Tracey Ullman, though.

Isnt this what Lawrence Lessig was talking about in his big code is law rant?

Its makes sense, that if some piece of software is going to make legally binding judgements against you, that you should at least get to see the source code.
If not, then how the hell do you really know what the law is...

Must have been a while since you checked. Try going here (Stanford Folding@Home download page).

Have you seen Agnula, the GNU/Linux audio distribution that's in development?

Or Planet CCRMA?

I think if you do the numbers, you'll find that that isn't true. In any case, it is completely irrelevant to global warming: people don't eat fossils, they eat carbon recently removed from the atmosphere. And each human being actually holds a few kilograms of carbon, carbon that isn't in the atmosphere.

And soot is a greater factor in atmospheric greenhouse effects than CO2,

No, it isn't; it may be the second-leading cause.

And, again, it's irrelevant to global warming. Soot, while harmful in many ways, disappears quickly from the atmosphere. If anything, it gives us a safety cushion--something we can reduce with emergency measures over a few years. CO2 hangs around much, much longer.

So lets ALL cut out the "Save the world" singing, eh?

I have a better suggestion: use your head. Besides, don't you think the world is worth saving?

The folding@home project has similar goals and also has clients for Linux and Mac OS X. The UD project only has a client for windows. Folding@home

First. Extrapolation. So, corrected.

As you can probably guess from the way I expressed myself in the last line, I understand very well that the 'goal' isn't the most interesting part, but the way there and what can be learned about distr. computing.

HOWEVER, I mean that it makes more sense doing something for which the goal is _also_ of interest.

Such examples include but are not limited to folding and generating genomes.

First. Extrapolation. So, corrected.

As you can probably guess from the way I expressed myself in the last line, I understand very well that the 'goal' isn't the most interesting part, but the way there and what can be learned about distr. computing.

HOWEVER, I mean that it makes more sense doing something for which the goal is _also_ of interest.

Such examples include but are not limited to folding and generating genomes.

Yes, and don't forget genome@home. You might consider joining the Wicked Old Atheists even :-)

While this is an admirable achievement, I found another distributed computing project which I think is more worthwhile -- namely, Folding @Home, which is a distributed protein-folding simulation effort. This is the kind of research that will end up curing things like Alzheimer's, and I think it's a better use of your processing time than brute-forcing encryption keys (or even SETI, or Primenet). I encourage everyone to participate in F@H instead, as I think it will provide a greater benefit to us all in the long run.

Of course, some on /. may need to be reminded that they are indeed free to run whatever distributed computing software they feel like; I am merely requesting that they run this one.

There are some great professional tools for music on linux. Try here. They offer some software, I think under the GPL.

Just use this perl script as a proxy server making a small modification to ~s/Linux/GNU\/Linux/g.
There. Problem solved.

That's the kind of sh*t that pisses me off, I don't pay taxes to have the government simply hand that money to a corp.

Actually, that's exactly what you do. Of course you could delude yourself into thinking that your particular share of the money was going into Condoleezza Rice's pocket, or perhaps Colin Powell's paycheck instead.

Of course, your money is probably going to TRW, Lockheed Martin, or Boeing, or perhaps all 3.

Remember, it might be neat to think about Bill Gate's money, or how much cash Microsoft has, but really. Call me when Microsoft gets awarded a multibillion dollar contract that has the potential to blow up or get shot down.

I've never seen Windows crash quite like that.

I think their ideas are dated back to April of this year. Now the question is: can their stuff be interpreted as pretty much being the same (therefore prior "art"?) as the Amazon patents? Or do I just not know what the hell I'm talking about at 7AM on a monday?

What the hell is a maser? Microwave Amplification by Stimulation Emission of Radiation.

What does it emit? Photons. Actually, if you don't know which particle some phenomenon emits, answering "photons" gives you the best chance to be right.

Am I the only one reading CNN that isn't an astrophysisist? Probably. This is Slashdot. Those of us who do not hold a degree in astrophysics could, if we wanted to, but then again we don't and couldn't care less, but that has never kept our mouths shut about anything, has it? Just assume every post starts with a virtual IANAA, except were noticed otherwise.

Ah, but that brings us to the agendas of both organizations like the Washington Times and of FAIR.

Actually, if you have to resort to the ad hominem dodge right off the bat, you've already lost.

FAIR is not high on my list of "objective" organizations. Now maybe the Washington Times isn't either.

You certainly weren't offering any such provisos when you quoted them to support your position.

...well, I'll take a conservative editorial slant and exercise my judgement with it over the liberal slant from nearly every other news organization and groups like FAIR.

Except, of course, that the myth that most of the media have a liberal slant has itself been thoroughly debunked. [You will, no doubt, dismiss all this evidence out of hand as coming from "liberal" sources, a neatly circular argument. Exercising judgment, indeed.]

Perhaps alternative distributed computing projects have gotten slashdotters attention lately...

In the mean time I'll consider donating a bit more CPU time to SETI@Home, since it's been quite a while :)

I am surprized that I haven't seen others mention this, but make sure you are getting the right education for you. People learn different, and you may of had a problem with the learning / study methods used at university.

There is a difference between difference schools, state vs. private universities, two and four colleges, polytechs, and distance education vs. correspondence. Research the options, and pick the right one for you.

In this day and age you do not need to attend classes in person to earn a meaniful degree, in UK, the Open University leads the way, and in Canada there is Athabasca University, I am not as familiar with US schools, but there is the University of Phoenix as well as many others.

Define your goal(s) of attending a post-secondary school. Also an idea for your career goals might be useful, but you need specific education goals. Write them down. I said, write them down. This is how you will evaluate schools, programme and course choices.

Is it just to have a degree? Do you want more a fundamential understanding (i.e. theoric) of computing? Do you want business skills? To become a better rounded software engineer? Understand business, so you can grow your own business? Get a MBA? Meet women? For technical training? To earn more money? Continue doing what you already do, or so you can do something new? Certification?

An university degree is suppose to be based upon a theorical understanding, which while being less specific (i.e. more abstract), is more lasting and will not be outdated every 3 years. That is the #1 source of frustration and confusion I see from young computer science students. An university degree is not a career training programme. You get to do the career training in your own time.

Make use of your electives, do not choose courses because you think they will be easy like "Rocks for Jocks" and "Clap for Credit", find introductary courses you will be interested in, and will benefit you either personally or professionally.

Most schools have some means of providing tours of their facilities, especially in the summer. Since this is an investment that will cost approx. $40,000, you should research this investment as being right for you. If possible, arrange a talk with someone from the department that you are looking at majoring in.

Bone up on time management and planning skills, and study skills if you find studying difficult. University is about learning, but unfortunately very little is taught about how best to learn (for you). Read Stephen R. Covey's The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People it will help in setting your priorities, and planning. To help learn about learning, John L. Adams book Conceptual Blockbusting: Care and Feeding of Ideas, and George Polya's How to Solve It.

Practice reading, seriously if you do not do a lot of non-fiction book reading, start doing some more. A list of books any /.er should enjoy is Steven C. McConnell's Top 10 Reading List.

No, they are not. Hard dries could be used for archiving, but they are nto a substitute for a raid array and good tape backup system. There are systems that can backup 320 Gb effectively ...but not cheaply!

Two Intel Pro/1000 gigabit NICs are $50 each, second machine $400 + second 320GB disk $300-$400. And rdiff-backup.stanford.edu is free!

What I'd like to know is what sort of backlash there is in china against The Great Firewall? I very much doubt that this blocking goes un-noticed, yet I have never heard anything about any sort of resistance to it in china or any other country in the media, although it almost certainly does exist.

Naturally, a quick search on you-know-what brings up some interesting links.

I'd also like to add that I believe hacktivism to be, at least in this case, piss-all use, and that graffiti on government buldings is the way to get the message to the intellectual proles. And also the way to torture and execution.

Have a nice day.
Ali

WIND POWER IS EXPENSIVE!!! It doesn't cost much to use, but it does cost a ton to build initially, check out this article

So why was my previous comment a troll? Is it a troll because I don't want to pay higher costs for power? Is it a troll because I'm not ranting and raving about wind power????

Last time I checked, you shouldn't moderate something as a troll just because you don't agree

The early history of Hollywood is even more interesting.

The first motion picture studios were in New York City, but they moved out to California to avoid paying licensing fees to Edison for his patents. They then avoided his lawsuits by going to
Mexico until the heat was off. (1)

Then in the late thirties antitrust lawsuits were attempted against the big eight leading to a consent decree between the studios and the justice dept. (we all know how effective those are ;>) promising to limit some monopolistic practices. The independants (at that time) used their name recognition (Charlie Chaplin, Walt Disney, Samuel Goldwyn, Mary Pickford, Orson Welles) to take their case to the people recruiting other well known names to promote their cause - Howard Hughes, Hal Roach, Leo McCarey, Sol Lesser, James Cagney, Bing Crosby, John Huston, Preston Sturges, Sam Spiegel, and Stanley Kramer.

In 1948 a supreme court decision against the big eight for conspiracy forced them to sell their theater holdings and stop certain monopolistic practices such as block booking (requiring a theater to buy all the films they needed in a single package, hmm sounds a little like bundling).

The studio system and its opposition which forced the dissolution then both faded away leading to the rise of new monopoly structure.

(2)

There is an important difference between my SCSI chain and an IP network - you won't find many SCSI chains with the kinds of security threats that are quite common on networks these days. Remember that block devices live below the OS permissions level - it's deeper than root access.

I hope that iSCSI has good security measures *enabled by default*. I remember some discussion on iSCSI mailing lists about using SRP and potential intellectual property problems. I hope it's in the final standard.

what was a search engine doing conducting international diplomacy in the first place?

And how, exactly, did a Californian firm founded by a couple of Stanford university dropouts, using old doors for office furniture, wind up striking panic into the core of an authoritarian world power?

Engine trouble ;-)

``Hard money'' is the career goal of most young scientists, regardless of field. Those two words mean that your salary is paid regardless of what you do. A traditional way to get hard money is to work through the university system and become a tenured professor somewhere. The other main way is to become a civil servant at a government research lab. Once you're in, you're in. As a scientist, you're essentially bulletproof: it's very hard to fire a civil servant, especially one with as nebulous a set of responsibilities as a scientist carries.

But there are drawbacks too. With the security of a government job come responsibilities ranging from the trivial (such as not being allowed to eat the free doughnuts at a meeting) to the ludicrous (I went to a meeting held at the 1998 eclipse site on the island of Guadaloupe. My civil service friends were required to book hotels 25 miles away to save a few bucks a night -- but then they discovered that their hotel was on another island!) to the onerous (e.g. it's difficult to travel, get equipment, or hire help).

I ended up taking a ``soft money'' position at a nonprofit research institute. The downside is that I have to find sources of income (grants) to support myself. The upside is that when I want a book, I buy it; when there's a meeting I should attend, I go to it; and if I have an idea for a new instrument or analysis technique, I can just implement it. Management is very supportive.

Civil service is great -- but on the other hand, the people who are most attracted to it are the people who value security above opportunity. That fosters a CYA culture and makes it difficult to get things done (such as science). Although tenure and absolute job security in principal make it possible to explore unpopular-but-important ideas (and many civil servants are very productive!), they also make it possible to relax into a not-very-productive rut.

The entrepreneurial spirit of soft-money research labs, ironically, makes it easier to have (some kinds of) bold ideas, simply because you have to do something to keep yourself going. That small-but-significant frisson of worry about the future keeps people on their toes and thinking creatively. Ordinary entrepreneurs must get it in spades.

• The patenting of algorithms and the software that embodies them leads to inequities as often as it protects true innovation and genuine innovators.
• The standards for innovation set by the CS Theory community should be given more weight when deciding the validity of a software patent.
• There should be an effort to educate the courts on the distinct nature of innovation in computer software, and to help distinguish innovation from wishful thinking or the fantasies of people who are unaware of the state of knowledge.

Have they already done Invaders, night driver (scroll down) would be also possible - the classic Snake could be fun too. Well, actually, I quess any classic is rather easily portable :)

Folding@Home is what I do with my increased CPU power. Fine, we decoded the genome, now what? Protein folding and understanding proteins is the single most important thing for the advancement of medical research. Overall, I would rate it more important than getting crazy framerates in quake.

This may be the drug you're looking for.

Believe it or not, people have actually looked into this. Check out this page. <Insert requisite Microsoft bashing here>

As it turns out though, people seem to have an asymmetric sensitivity to eye contact. The camera positioning of the Beamer is such that it (perhaps by coincidence) takes advantage of this asymmetry. It would be better if the camera were even closer to the screen but they probably had some engineering problems.

Actually, current research suggests that there is an asymmetry in our sensitivy to eye contact. In fact, humans seem to be less sensative when someone is looking below their eyes (I don't think the asymmetry covers where men look, though). Some folks at Stanford looked into it - look here.

On the Beamer, it appears that the camera is located just above the screen. It might be a coincidence, but this is the best setup to take advantage of the asymmetry. Add to that the small screen and eye contact is probably not an issue at all.

Still don't know if people really want video phone calls though...

Personally, I been doing the Folding@Home project (although only at 30% CPU because I don't want the fan in my laptop on all the time).

It has been getting a lot more real results than SETI@home has.

Check out time travel here.

But seriously. The idea's I've seen on time travel aren't really based on going "back" or "forward" in time, but actually inventing a device which would need a 100% identical device to travel too.

For example (because sometimes I can't be clear enough): A equal pair of machines would be built. One would be sent into space and likely be sent at speeds approaching light speed. Then we could travel to that device (and back) and use that shortcut to save time in travel, and depending on the speed it flys maybe into the past or whatever.

Please correct me... I never understood this approach.

But Feynman Diagrams show that theoretically matter travels back and forth through time all the time.

But also since we are made of "star dust" we've already sort of time traveled. We are made up of particles (or waves for the cry babies) which existed forever, we can look at ourselves and see the big bang.

The article says Despite Air Force hopes that the Atlas 5 would slash space travel costs, its debut takes place during a prolonged slump in commercial satellite launches. A glut of other new-generation rockets completed or in the works, along with a weak satellite launch market in the coming years, could mean fewer Atlases are built to recoup development costs, according to commercial aerospace officials.

Yeah, even with the mod throttle we are still being slammed. Here is an active mirror of the review...

MIrror Here

Read the paper. This is a way of fabricating gold nanoparticles, not extracting gold. They grow small amounts of alfalfa in a controlled environment with extra gold in the soil. The gold nanoparticles are useful for some biosensor applications, because they will bond to DNA and can easily be detected.

Why is this course so popular? First of all they choose the best professors and lecturers to teach it. They are able to explain things clearly and they are very personable/funny/approachable.

Second, the programming assignments are well designed. I always knew WHY I was doing a particular assignment. I have since helped people from other universities with their CS assignments and I can say that assignment design is a big deal. Some profs just throw some random problem at the kids without thinking about the purpose of it. They don't provide clear goals. They don't provide any libraries to use. The documentation provided with assignment needs to be clear and complete.

The most important reason that these classes were both popular and productive was the section leaders. These were CS students in their senior or junior year that taught section once a week. The position was prestigious and it paid well. They got some of the best CS students that way. It is describe briefly in this article. (Search for CS198 if you don't want to read the whole thing.) The sections were very productive. You would write code to do some particular task and the section leader would help/critique. There was almost always a section leader "on call" in a cube in the lab that you could go to for help on an assignment. More than one near the due dates. They could find a bug in 2 seconds flat. But they would just show it to you, they would "help" you see it yourself. But the most important thing they did was "interactive grading". They would go through a printout of your code line by line and write comments both good and bad while grading your program. Then they would have a 20 minute one one one session with the student and explain what was good and what was bad about thier coding. Whether the program actually functioned or not was of secondary importance, especially early in the quarter. They made sure that your code made sense, was well documented, that you had variable names that made sense, etc.

Many schools just give grades based on functionality and never even look at the code produced. This sink or swim attitude might bring to light a few naturally good coders. The mentoring aspects of the program at I just described produce a lot of great coders.

In summary:
1. Choose good instructors.
2. Give assingments with a purpose. Document them.
3. Give the students detailed feedback and lots of support early on whether they think they need it or not.

Why is this course so popular? First of all they choose the best professors and lecturers to teach it. They are able to explain things clearly and they are very personable/funny/approachable.

Second, the programming assignments are well designed. I always knew WHY I was doing a particular assignment. I have since helped people from other universities with their CS assignments and I can say that assignment design is a big deal. Some profs just throw some random problem at the kids without thinking about the purpose of it. They don't provide clear goals. They don't provide any libraries to use. The documentation provided with assignment needs to be clear and complete.

The most important reason that these classes were both popular and productive was the section leaders. These were CS students in their senior or junior year that taught section once a week. The position was prestigious and it paid well. They got some of the best CS students that way. It is describe briefly in this article. (Search for CS198 if you don't want to read the whole thing.) The sections were very productive. You would write code to do some particular task and the section leader would help/critique. There was almost always a section leader "on call" in a cube in the lab that you could go to for help on an assignment. More than one near the due dates. They could find a bug in 2 seconds flat. But they would just show it to you, they would "help" you see it yourself. But the most important thing they did was "interactive grading". They would go through a printout of your code line by line and write comments both good and bad while grading your program. Then they would have a 20 minute one one one session with the student and explain what was good and what was bad about thier coding. Whether the program actually functioned or not was of secondary importance, especially early in the quarter. They made sure that your code made sense, was well documented, that you had variable names that made sense, etc.

Many schools just give grades based on functionality and never even look at the code produced. This sink or swim attitude might bring to light a few naturally good coders. The mentoring aspects of the program at I just described produce a lot of great coders.

In summary:
1. Choose good instructors.
2. Give assingments with a purpose. Document them.
3. Give the students detailed feedback and lots of support early on whether they think they need it or not.

Ok, first of all, if you haven't watched Lawrence Lessig's OSCON speech Free Culture, now is probably a good time.

Having said that, Lawrence mentions a legal battle that took place in England in the 1700's in an attempt to get Shakespeare into the public domain. Originally, English publishers managed to win a court case which said that they owned a perpetual copyright over Shakespeare.

Five years later they lost, and Shakespeare entered the public domain.

Rosen, Valenti et al are students of history. They know that the door swings both ways. I believe their thinking is that they should grab as much land as they are allowed to grab, so that when the door swings back, maybe it will be left leaning a bit to their side.

Personally I hope it swings back and flattens their faces, but we shall see.

KWTCMA

Linux needs a quality font package. Donald Knuth's work on comuter typography, which is comprehensive (7 volumes) should be the starting point for any open source typography effort. There is no need to reinvent the wheel, or to deal with Adobe or Micro$oft.

Linux needs a quality font package. Donald Knuth's work on comuter typography, which is comprehensive (7 volumes) should be the starting point for any open source typography effort. There is no need to reinvent the wheel, or to deal with Adobe or Micro$oft.

And its not sluggy-bastard-freelance, either. Try PhD, although I'd imagine the recognition factor of the comedy requires you to have done at least a few months in graduate school.

PageRank relies on the uniquely democratic nature of the web by using its vast link structure as an indicator of an individual page's value. In essence, Google interprets a link from page A to page B as a vote, by page A, for page B. But, Google looks at more than the sheer volume of votes, or links a page receives; it also analyzes the page that casts the vote. Votes cast by pages that are themselves "important" weigh more heavily and help to make other pages "important."

He says:

I do not have access to Google's page ranking technology, and apart from some partial details on their site, they keep their ranking techniques tight lipped to avoid intentional rank manipulating. As such, everything I say in this article is purely speculative based upon analysis of search results for various terms and phrases

No details? They published the algorithm in 1999! If he looked it up, he would have understood PageRank is a page-to-page relationship (not site-to-site), and avoided the idiotic statement "Is it really a democracy that every page on these megalinked aggregate sites become premiere voices of their topic?".

Apparently, this moron didn't even search Google -- the paper is the third result for a search on "PageRank". Why are we taking search engine advice from some imbecile who doesn't use search engines?

The Google team publishes more inside information than any search engine. There's a whole ODP category for Google research papers.

To put that into perspective, there are some 750 pages dealing with mantids that are linked from Google, and that limit is simply because that's the maximum results that Google will return for a particular search term.

That's not even true. Google will return up to 1000 results in a search. Can this guy even count?

There are a lot of better resources about Google on the Web. Why did Slashdot go with this guy?

On patents, I think the most sensible argument against them was presented in a letter to the US Patent Office by Donald Knuth, where he points out that software and the algorithms used therein are mathematics, and mathematics have previously been exempted from patents.

Regarding copyrights, while I would be quite happy with a short limitation on the life of a copyright (5 years would suit me just fine... 10-15 would be ok, anything longer is ludicrous in the technology field), I think his presentation is quite a bit more radical than most professional programmers might agree with after putting some thought into it.

Some of us don't particularly like working as employees of companies which we do not own, but without the protection that copyright provides it would be impossible to make a living by creating consumer software products. Yes, you could write custom software under contract to a corporation for money, or write software as an employee of a company, but to write a product for consumers? Who would pay for that? The average person who'd want to use a word processor certainly isn't going to cough up enough money to pay my rent for the amount of time I'd need to write one...

Without copyright, if I write a cool app and want to sell it, I'd only sell it once before anyone who wanted it could just get it for free... This is absolutely great for code I write in my spare time for fun, or tools and libraries I write to help me do my work where they might be useful to others, but *something* has to put food on the table.

However, I do think that once you buy something, at least the copy you own should be able to be used by you in whatever manner you wish. So his speech seems misguided... The real threat is that with recent legislation, that is less and less true.

I support the EFF and donate.... but the presentation is off target. I hope his arguments before the Supreme Court are less radical and stay based on the fact that 100 years is way too long for a copyright, rather than implying that copyright is bad.

Think he used a pirated copy of PowerPoint? ;)

Look at it this way: If you really want to be married to this woman, you value marrying her, and ought in principle to be willing to pay for the privilege. But, you want her to be committed to and value the relationship also, and if you pay her to get engaged or to marry you, you have no way of knowing she didn't just get engaged so she could "take the money and run."

So what do you do? You buy something really expensive that has no utility or intrinsic value, you give it to her (to prove you aren't going to resell it), and she can't "take the money and run" since diamonds are hard to resell and there is social pressure against reselling them anyway.

Basically, you are "burning money" to prove you value the marriage you are about to enter into. You do this to convince her you are serious, she needs to know you are serious since marrying someone who isn't serious is potentially costly in all sort of ways (emotionally, financially, time-wise, etc.).

True, there are only a few countries in which diamonds are used for engagements, but I bet most of the other societies have similar committment devices that also amount to "money-burning."

For more on this, see the book, Hidden Order: The Economics of Everyday Life by David D. Friedman (yes, son of the famous economist Milton Friedman). The book is available here and here with a table of contents, etc., here.

Check out the link below for a few surplus electronic parts distributors. I personally use bgmicro (they are listed at the URL) a lot. They have a great PDF catalog you should check out. It's impossible to afford electrical hobbies on a typical college student income without these surplus shops. Even with their help, expect to drop a few hundred dollars initially. Microcontroller programming kits, motors, IC's, PCB's/Chemicals, test equipment, tools and such really add up.

Electronics Sources: Surplus

I agree with most of your points: there's a lot of life left in the model making business. Sometimes models make more sense than 3d work, and since we don't have three dimensional screens, design reference models will be around for quite a while. Oh, and hell no theater won't replaced by CG (holograms?), no matter how good it becomes.

However, due to recent research papers, I do think that 3d-generated actors will be a reality, and without the need for references. There has been a lot of animation research into taking captured actions and changing them to fit the physical characteristics of generated models based on physics. As an example, I motion capture the skinny kid serving coffee on the set throwing a punch, and the motion is mapped to a 3d-generated (and non-aging) Ah-nold, with specialized algorithms adapting the motion to his bodytype, speed, size, etc. Its possible that eventually there will be whole libraries of motions that can be used with any 3d-generated 'actor' with the help of adaption alogorithms like these. For more information, you can check out the recent SIGGRAPH stuff, or perhaps look at this guy's work.

Speaking of cloth, yes there is also a lot more work to do here. Animating cloth by hand is a pain. Simulating cloth graphically is not hard, and can look quite good--until it collides with something. Fast cloth-on-cloth collision testing is still a ways away, but in a few years, I think animators will be able to specify the parameters of a model's clothes (for example) and then let the algorithms do the rest. For a good look at recent work in cloth simulation, check out this guy's work.

As long as the computing price/performance ratio keeps improving, the accessibility of computer-generated effects will continue to grow. And with computer graphics being such a hot research topic, both visual and procedural improvements will be coming fast and thick.

-s