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I was really hinting at a larger concept outlined in Milton Friedman's essay regarding the social and ethical responsibility of corporate exectives. The idea that companies should be directed by their shareholders, and the CEO's and boards should act in their interests, keeping everything open. Like any other economic model, it's idealistic to the point of being somewhat of a theoretical extreme. However, the point that I was trying to apply to M$ is that trying to work to benefit shareholders and also customers can coincide with "the right thing." We shouldn't automatically suspect them of foul play. (I'm certainly not accusing you of not sort of "getting my wonderful point that was so rudely rebutted" like many do on /.) I just felt the need to clarify my original post.

I wonder how well a musical debugger would illustrate the functionality of Don Knuth's Dancing Links.

I have a crush on gytseng@stanford.edu and jssmith@stanford.edu, don't you?

I have a crush on gytseng@stanford.edu and jssmith@stanford.edu, don't you?

If so, let him know -- I was pretty surprised when someone had a crush on junk@rpgexchange.com, a dummy address I have never used or published ever :)

"Disclosure to Third Parties

We may occasionally, for entertainment purposes, disclose non-personally identifiable information to registered Crushlink users about other users.

We do not share our mailing list with any other company, person or entity."

For your entertainment purposes, the CrushLink founder Greg Tseng's contact emails at Stanford (physics dept.) and his Harvard alum email:

gytseng@stanford.edu

gtseng@post.harvard.edu

Show him you have a crush on him too by offering him things like "Free Inkjet Printer Cartridges", the "Lowest Mortgage Rates Around", how to make "$204,000 in 2 months", and hell how to "Increase Your Energy and Sex Drive!" :)

-fren

Fortran is still alive and well in the high energy physics (HEP) community... though it is fading away slowly (not as slowly as some people would like though). Up until very recently, FORTRAN was *THE* language for data analysis but is slowly being replaced by C++ in newer experiments such as BaBar at SLAC and is replacing FORTRAN for data analysis at a few older experiments such as H1 at DESY. The reason why FORTRAN is fading away so slowly is mainly because of CERNLIB which is a FORTRAN library that contains many useful functions (random numbers, matrix manipulation, data fitting etc...) As most particle physicists "grew up" using CERNLIB, it will be a while yet before FORTRAN well and truly disappears (in the HEP community anyway). Also of note, CERNLIB has now been released under the GPL, so anyone can use it. Nice.

AFAIK, there have been lots of reports on single-electron transitor for several years.

Though not ready for production, actual implementation do exist today, and since transitor has more area in application, memory-only device at atomic scale is not a news.

Try "googling" with "single-electron transistor SET", and you should find tons of resources on this topic.

• http://luciano.stanford.edu/~shimbo/set.html
• http://www.nikkeibp.asiabiztech.com/nea/200103/ale rt_124812.html

http://www.stanford.edu/~spqrsyc/crew/officerow.mp eg

Sit up, back 'em in.

Those who question the applicability of fair use statutes usually simply don't understand them.

Check out the SPINACH project at Stanford: http://mosquitonet.stanford.edu/publications/spina ch.html

It's designed to precisely address this issue by limiting network access from hosts whose Hardware Ethernet addresses are unknown to the local subnet only (not past the router) until it is authenticated (by some password or other scheme). Thus, if you put a Dreamcast on a SPINACH network, it could only reach hosts on the immediate subnet, unless you spoofed the MAC address or something...

When I was in grad school, I did a paper on the Windows interface from an end-user design perspective, and it sucks. Surely there are other ways to handle a GUI that might make sense.

Other people who've weighed in on this subject include prominent researchers like Jpseph Goguen, Terry Winograd, and Eben Moglen.

Right now I'm not proposing a solution, either, but I am working on understanding the problem.

It's gonna be a fun couple of years coming up here :-)

Cheers!
Rob

For those who are interested, Pascal's Wager actually involves something far more significant.

1 of these

24 of these

Some of these
&

A couple of these

--

I think what Richards is overlooking in his commentary is that Cg is not *supposed* to be a general-purpose graphics programming language. Its design goal was precisely what he said later in the article -- to expose the capabilities of current (and presumably future) NVIDIA hardware without requiring programmers to write assembly code. Likewise, conditionals like if, case, and switch aren't in there right now because the profiles the compiler is aimed at -- DirectX and OpenGL extensions -- don't yet support them. I expect this to change.

Also, Cg programs run at the level of vertices and pixels. This is the wrong place to be thinking about a scene graph: that happens at a much higher level of abstraction. Dealing with scene graphs in a fragment shader is a little bit like making L1 cache aware of the memory-management policy of whatever OS happens to be running.

After reading the article a few times, I think it's meant more as a "here's why our product is better than theirs" release than an honest criticism of the design of Cg. If he was interested in the latter, there are a few obvious issues. I won't go into them all, but here are two I ran into last week at a Cg workshop:

• Cg limits shaders to single-pass rendering. This is a design limitation: there are lots of interesting multipass effects, and it's not all that difficult to get the compiler to virtualize the shader to do multipass on its own. The Stanford Real-Time Shading Project people wrote a compiler that does precisely that: it uses Cg as an intermediate language. The advantage of that design decision is that you-the-programmer have fuller control over what's happening on the hardware, which is the entire point of the exercise.
• Cg requires that you write separate vertex and fragment shaders. You can't do things like texture lookups inside a vertex shader; you can't change the position of your vertices inside a fragment shader. Again, this gives you control over the details of the pipeline at the cost of some added complexity. This can be changed by changing the semantics of the language.

One final note: Cg is not the be-all and end-all of real-time shading languages. Nor is DirectX 8.1, 9, or whatever. Nor is the SGI shading language. Real-time shading on commodity hardware is still a new enough field that the languages and the hardware are evolving. DirectX 9 and OpenGL 2.0 both incorporate shading languages that will by nature be less tightly coupled to one vendor's hardware. Watch those over the next year or so.

I have no doubt that if you want to have a more theoretical background on many subjects regarding Computer Science, you have to read (or, at least, take a glance at) Knuth's The Art of Computer Programming.

His books give an excellent introduction to many subjects, including many of the hardest problems in Computer Science. The first volume of his "The Art of Computer Programming" gives a very concise and comprehensive review of Mathematics needed for the remaining volumes. You might even learn about mathematical objects you never heard of (if you don't have higher education in Mathematics).

If you need something ligther on the Mathematics needed for Computer Science, then you might want to read his "Concrete Mathematics". Quite a beatiful book (typographically speaking), with an outstanding expostion of some advanced topics in Mathmematics neede for Computer Science and also quite funny to read.

I should also mention that his books are also a prime example of how someone should write a book. His books, while mostly technical, show a clear style of writing, direct and also entertaining, while discussing deep subjects.

The "problem" with Knuth's books are that they are intended for serious readers. You know if you are serious if you can read the first pages of his first volume. :-)

Another book that I would recommend is Andrew Tanenbaum's "Modern Operating Systems" (which is a bit more practical than Knuth's books) gives an overview of the structure of some common Operating Systems, including DOS and Unix.

I could give you many other recommendations, but you'd have to specify if the other recommendations that you want are more practical or more theoretical.

I hope this helps.

I have no doubt that if you want to have a more theoretical background on many subjects regarding Computer Science, you have to read (or, at least, take a glance at) Knuth's The Art of Computer Programming.

His books give an excellent introduction to many subjects, including many of the hardest problems in Computer Science. The first volume of his "The Art of Computer Programming" gives a very concise and comprehensive review of Mathematics needed for the remaining volumes. You might even learn about mathematical objects you never heard of (if you don't have higher education in Mathematics).

If you need something ligther on the Mathematics needed for Computer Science, then you might want to read his "Concrete Mathematics". Quite a beatiful book (typographically speaking), with an outstanding expostion of some advanced topics in Mathmematics neede for Computer Science and also quite funny to read.

I should also mention that his books are also a prime example of how someone should write a book. His books, while mostly technical, show a clear style of writing, direct and also entertaining, while discussing deep subjects.

The "problem" with Knuth's books are that they are intended for serious readers. You know if you are serious if you can read the first pages of his first volume. :-)

Another book that I would recommend is Andrew Tanenbaum's "Modern Operating Systems" (which is a bit more practical than Knuth's books) gives an overview of the structure of some common Operating Systems, including DOS and Unix.

I could give you many other recommendations, but you'd have to specify if the other recommendations that you want are more practical or more theoretical.

I hope this helps.

I have no doubt that if you want to have a more theoretical background on many subjects regarding Computer Science, you have to read (or, at least, take a glance at) Knuth's The Art of Computer Programming.

His books give an excellent introduction to many subjects, including many of the hardest problems in Computer Science. The first volume of his "The Art of Computer Programming" gives a very concise and comprehensive review of Mathematics needed for the remaining volumes. You might even learn about mathematical objects you never heard of (if you don't have higher education in Mathematics).

If you need something ligther on the Mathematics needed for Computer Science, then you might want to read his "Concrete Mathematics". Quite a beatiful book (typographically speaking), with an outstanding expostion of some advanced topics in Mathmematics neede for Computer Science and also quite funny to read.

I should also mention that his books are also a prime example of how someone should write a book. His books, while mostly technical, show a clear style of writing, direct and also entertaining, while discussing deep subjects.

The "problem" with Knuth's books are that they are intended for serious readers. You know if you are serious if you can read the first pages of his first volume. :-)

Another book that I would recommend is Andrew Tanenbaum's "Modern Operating Systems" (which is a bit more practical than Knuth's books) gives an overview of the structure of some common Operating Systems, including DOS and Unix.

I could give you many other recommendations, but you'd have to specify if the other recommendations that you want are more practical or more theoretical.

I hope this helps.

Of course, that's http://folding.stanford.edu

And now we know why I didn't go there or any other Ivy League school, don't we?

To paraphrase P.J. O'Roarke, its not like the economy is a pizza and if I have too many slices you're left with just the box. If economics were a zero-sum game like that, then more immigrants would mean less jobs. Since, in fact, immigrants must spend their money on services and products made by natives, they create as many jobs as they fill.

Stephen Moore at the Cato Institute did an interesting study about the H1-B issue:

"...every additional high-tech worker brings to the United States about $110,000 of free human capital. An additional 50,000 H1-b immigrant visas is the equivalent of a $5.5 billion transfer of wealth from the citizens of foreign countries to the citizens of the United States. High-tech immigration is like reverse foreign aid."

Let's see if I can summarize (sorry I don't have the specific links/cases anymore):

• in many countries, pretty much everything is copyrighted even if I don't put all the (C), all rights reserved, yada yada. By default all websites are copyrighted.
• Claiming anything on the internet is 'public use' or the like is total crap. It does not absolve you of copyright law breaches.
• keeping copies of copyrighted things is a Bad Thingtm to do
• If you sell technology that does keep copy of stuff, as well as going after your customers, they can go after you.

Sure, the google cache is useful. I use it myself. It's always amazed me that it is that useful, because the only reason they have anything in the cache is due almost entirely to the good will of anyone who owns that content.

There's some good sites around, including UK gov't, Stanford and the copyright website. I'm not affiliated with any of them...

Yeast is a fungus. Vegans eat fungus. While fungus is definitely "living", I would hesitate to call it "creatures", at the risk of being called dumb, which is what you are.

"how can putting living creatures (yeast) into a dish allow it to stay vegan?"

Well, (A), nutritional yeast is not alive, and (B) it isn't a creature (animal), it's a fungus. Vegans have no problem with eating plants, fungus, or bacteria -- it's just members of the animal kingdom that we have issues with.

Nutritional yeast has been killed and doesn't have any leavening power. It's actually quite tasty, with a sweet nutty, or a cheesy kind of flavor. I use it ground up with blanched almonds, in a shaker, to top pasta and pizza where others might use Parmesan cheese. One part sliced blanched almonds, food-process until ground, add two parts nutritional yeast and a pinch of salt.

More info at:

Vitamin B12 in the Vegan Diet

Types of Yeast and Red Star brand propaganda

Brewer's Yeast is different from nutritional yeast apparently. But it's allegedly the same species as well (Saccharomyces cerevisiae). Prepared differently? I don't know.

Saccharomyces Genome Database. It turns out this yeast is "clearly the most ideal eukaryotic microorganism for biological studies. The 'awesome power of yeast genetics' has become legendary and is the envy of those who work with higher eukaryotes." Delicious.

Forget SETI -- contribute to a project with a more guaranteed payoff, like Folding @Home, which is basically a distributed protein folding program. You'll be contributing to Alzheimer's research, and other medical breakthroughs... I personally think this is much more valuable than SETI (and much more likely to produce something useful).

The Stanford CS Library has lots of docs of interest for beginning CS students (C, Perl, linked lists, ...), and the Binky Pointer Video is a funny animated introduction to pointers

The Stanford CS Library has lots of docs of interest for beginning CS students (C, Perl, linked lists, ...), and the Binky Pointer Video is a funny animated introduction to pointers

Point-based rendering has shown some amazing results -- QSplat, for example, provides results in realtime that are flat out unimaginable out of traditional engines. Even higher quality output is coming out of the Surface splatting hackers.

Image based systems also seem to be yielding results -- Gondry's Star Guitar video, which showed scenes from a window of a train synchronized to music, was undeniably compelling and could simply not have been done with traditional 3D approaches. Schodel and Essa's work with Video Sprites are also quite impressive.

I don't mean to provide a litany of unusual rendering techniques for you to ponder. I bring them up because polygonal approaches have clearly yielded some incredible results, and I'm interested to know whether you think point-based and/or image-based strategies will yield similarly disruptive fruit. Also, I'm curious whether you're aware of any other particularly obscure but powerful methods for scene generation.

So, in short: What's next for 3D?

Yours Truly,

Dan Kaminsky
DoxPara Research
http://www.doxpara.com

Donate any down-time to Folding@home.

There is very easy, and know or anything but not selling stylii.

just a turntable with you!

Technology is very convenient (and 3 ms of the final scratch for his sets on a pretty good, so that you use the mp3 with the Gorillaz, and different from what this has a program more to take up a special time-code record, needle, and Steve Lawler, use tools like it's just at it. The cutoffs are the site: "Your thoughtful gift of the track (you can easily line is that the topic of Production-oriented DJs use the hot-queues, but vinyl. DJing is played at it currently only one out first interesting things I guess the natural thing with a similar to Laser Turntable? According to reduce your choices) that they take into the proliferation of bands on an SD card, scratch, and this technology can.

Why would actually degrades its "record box" categorization system presented in his notebook, rather than just isn't that Stanford had one out a product realization lab the author built a few years ago. I believe.

Seems Stanton turntable, a program more than with a lot of true analog records (have to do extremely quick seeks and they can identify phrasing and until decent tracks that for his notebook, rather than it was that you explain to play gangsta rapper "Tasty Taste" in the tunes are not shaped as a lot of records ;)

Personally, I should also sell it keeps the super secret scratchs.

Ob OnTopic Tie-In: Because I'll get cancer long before you'll chat with aliens.

If you're into the happier club/rave stuff, this won't do much for you, but there's a great site listing both mainstream and more obscure harder stuff. Industrial and darkwave aren't everyone's cup of tea, but they're definitely electronic. Industrial/Gothic music index. The site can also help track down the connections between bands/artists since musicians in the industrial scene seem to change their tag depending on who they're working with and the current flavor of their work. Enjoy.

Exponential backoff is braindead when you need good thoughput on a fat but noisy pipe. The reason TFTP gets lousy throughput is not because it uses UDP but because it waits for every ACK before it sends the next packet rather than having a receiver window feature like TCP does.

Apparently you have to be smarter than mister Top 2 Percent to make this work.

Here's some links for you:

• http://www-iepm.slac.stanford.edu/monitoring/bulk/ summary1.html
• http://www.babinszki.com/Networking/Max-Ethernet-a nd-TCP-Throughput.html
• http://www.lariat.org/Berkeley/node8.html#SECTION0 0040000000000000000

When I saw that Stanford had a product realization lab I regretted I wasn't young enough to "have went to Stanford." Then again, with grammar like that, they wouldn't have let me in.

http://www.stanford.edu/~dgi/university/tt.mov

[I personally remember playing that game at school (on our single Apple ][) whenever I could get the chance. It wasn't until years later that I saw those symbols again and realized what the game had really been about!]

It has been interesting to see all the tricks needed to keep up with the GPU performance growth curve. The growth curve is so much steeper than the CPU growth curve (double every 18 months) because graphics processors can take advantage of more parallelism.

But the parallelism has mostly just happened on chip for consumer GPU's. It will be interesting to see how well it works between chips. This sounds awfully similar to UNC's PixelFlow, which used object-parallelism (GPU-parallelism) and image composition to construct the final image. And between chips parallelism is more feasible than the between-computers solution of WireGL.

Why settle for just 2 GPUs, here is the Lightning-2 - "A High-Performance Display Subsystem for PC Clusters" - http://graphics.stanford.edu/papers/lightning2/.

I recently heard one of the researchers give a talk about WireGL and found it very fascinating. If one has a GigE dedicated network, then a graphics cluster like this would be perfect for supporting graphics over the network for multiple PCs.

Why settle for just 2 GPUs, here is the Lightning-2 - "A High-Performance Display Subsystem for PC Clusters" - http://graphics.stanford.edu/papers/lightning2/.

I recently heard one of the researchers give a talk about WireGL and found it very fascinating. If one has a GigE dedicated network, then a graphics cluster like this would be perfect for supporting graphics over the network for multiple PCs.

I was poking around Knuth's site, looking at the instruction set for MMIX , when I came across this instruction (SR, SRU added for comparison):

3C SR shift right (1) rA
3D SRI Stanford Research Institute (2) rA
3E SRU shift right unsigned (1)


What's that do then?

From this page :

"Although I'm working full time on Volume 4 these days, I will try to reply to all such messages within six months of receipt. "

SIX MONTHS...

I sure hope Newspaper wins because this is a silly objection. There is such thing as "fair use" you know (http://fairuse.stanford.edu/, for the curious) which allows you to monitor content for research reasons. To give you a real example. Assume I am a GE or a P&G. I pay NBC, NYT or Fox top dollars to air my commercials. I *need* to know that these were played at the proper time, with the proper frequency etc that I have paid for. Now, this kind of monitoring is neither CNN's/NYT's business nor is it mine. I would like a third party to do this stuff for me. ONLY for research & monitoring purposes. I don't see what is wrong with Newsbooster's business principle. They are not in any way replication IP-protected content material, they are merely informing you when something relevant is published! My 20 yen.

From the cited page...

Pursuant to Title 17 Section 105 of the United States Code, these DTDs are not subject to copyright protection and are in the public domain.
...
These DTDs can be redistributed and/or modified freely provided that any derivative works bear some notice that they are derived from it, and any modified versions bear some notice that they have been modified.

Sorry, cupcakes, that's not how the public domain works. If you release it into the public domain, you no longer have *any* control whatsoever upon the modification, reuse, or redistribution of the work. The required notice clause listed above in invalid.

Cite, cite (#3), cite.

Kuroth

I probably saw the same thing: just found it here (and google found me another page on fully split keyboards).

However the reason for my suggestion of two keyboards was to make some (ie the middle columns), or even all, of the keys available to both hands, for those of us who don't touch type by the book

I find myself not keeping my hands in the recommended typing positions mostly because all of the symbols which form a large percentage of the source code of most computer languages would be rather uncomfortable to type, notably the }, )and Tab (if you're using emacs or anything with tab completion) characters one a qwerty keyboard which have very high frequencies in java and c++ (and the problem is even worse on a dvorak layout, which is great for typing English, but terrible for c++).

With the whole keyboard repeated, I'd be able to type like back in the bad old days of non-split keyboards and let the other hand drift over momentarily whilst typing a back-tick, Escape or a } (or worst of all a "Page Up" (well not quite the worst, when some software forces you to have to reach for the mouse .... grrrrrr)) rather than having to either stretch excessivly or wait for the correct hand to get back in place.

Using a USB keyboard solves the problem of needing some kind of ps2 Y splitter.

I think that will determine your search more than absolute size. Afterall, you could get a webserver the size of a matchbox, but it'd be pretty lousy as a user workstation... If you want really dense servers, check into the "blade" fad. If you want really tiny user workstations, look into Shuttle's line of small and quiet most-everything-is-integrated barebones PCs (they've got pci slots for that extra nic or whatever). And of course there are all kinds of tiny single board computers for industrial applications.

Whaaa??? Hardware/Software to make people civil?

Somehow your joke got moderated as "insightful" instead of "funny". Apparently some of the moderators don't know that "civil society" means "the democratic society of citizens, not governments" (for a more rigorous discussion, look here and here)

In fact, Lessing was wrong - there is a "law of the horse". One of the earliest legal codes we have, from one of the Scandanavian kings (Ranulf?), has at least two horse-specific laws. And they're interesting.

One law provided that, if a horseshoer made a horse temporarily lame, (which happens occasionally, more often with inept horseshoers) they had to provide a loaner horse until the hoof healed up. This is perhaps the first piece of consumer protection legislation. Note that it's very specific, and, like modern "lemon laws", places the blame unambiguously on the service provider. It's not a general tort or liability law; it's a law that arbitrarily assigns blame for a specific, common problem.

Another law provided that that if someone borrowed a horse and rode it around the village, they were guilty of a minor offense, but if they rode it out of the village, they were guilty of a major offense. Some jurisdictions make that distinction today in auto theft cases, mostly for juveniles.

So the law of the horse did exist when horses were important.

There's a sizable law of steam. Start with the ASME Boiler Code, which is very specific and has the force of law in many countries. Boilers used to blow up frequently before there was law that set standards for boilers and the people who design and build them. The U.S. safety regulations for steam locomotives (49 CFR 230) are still valid and enforced. There's a National Board of Boiler and Pressure Vessel Inspectors.

For a history of the law of steam, see page 35 of this recent boiler explosion investigation report. There's a law of steam for good reason. The first law of steam was enacted in the US in 1838, after a riverboat blew up, killing 300 people. The issue remains; a steam locomotive blew up in 1995, killing several people.

Thus, claims that there is no "law of the horse" or "law of steam" are false. Such laws exist.

I believe the applicable law here is Title VIII of the Lanham act, which deals with "False designations of origin and false descriptions".

On this page you can read about a case where Monty Python successfully sued ABC TV under the Lanham Act, for editing and thus "damaging the integrity of the work":

the court upheld these claims on the theory that the ABC edits had substantially altered the work and exceeded the scope of the licensing agreement. The court held, on alternative grounds, that when ABC edited the work and attributed it to Monty Python, it erroneously attributed authorship of the edited work to the group and that such attribution constituted a false designation of origin and thus misrepresented the author's work in violation of federal trademark laws

Note that the court argued both sides of the issue, which could apply in the Cage case too.

However, it's a sad comment on the state of the arts in America that such a simple, whimsical attribution becomes subject to a legal dispute.

Apparently Batt's propaganda campaign is succeeding! :) I think it's simplistic to dismiss this issue in that way. The laws in this area exist for good reasons, and "whimsically" attributing authorship of a song without explanation is a lot like inserting "whimsical" statements into a legal contract. A reasonable person could look at Batt's album and come to the conclusion that the "work" in question had something to do with Cage, so Cage's estate has a legitimate interest on that basis and under law.

Finally, one could see this as simply an extension of Cage's original conception beyond the artistic sphere and into the legal sphere, which is consistent with Cage's contention that "art and life should no longer be separate, but one and the same". Consider this legal action a piece of performance art, perhaps in fulfilment of Cage's piece 4'33" No. 2 (described at the above link), which exhorts the artist to "fulfil an obligation to others" with "maximum amplification" (in this case, provided by the web). Cage's estate is thus both performing a Cage work, and fulfilling their obligation to protect Cage's name. We should applaud! ;)

Or folding proteins. (Need a faily fast computer to be useful. ie. >500Mhz)

Folding@Home

In the US, OPhoto and ShutterFly are a couple.

There is also some Linux software to manage your own photo albums, if you have a web site available:

• iGal
• WebMagick
• My personal favorite, Gallery, which I use on my own photo site.

I also have a HP PhotoSmart 100 printer, so my as far as photos go, I have reached nerdvana. :)