Slashdot Mirror

The flying wing has to be scaled up to a ridiculous size to accommodate the passenger capacity of a 747.

It's not a flying wing. It's a blended-wing-body. The BWB is not a Northrop YB-49 linearly scaled to hold 400 people. It's a new airplane. There are 400 passenger variants, and they are not of ridiculous size. In fact, much of the fuel savings is derived from the fact that the similarly acommadating BWB is significantly lighter than a 747.

Additionally, flying wings are inherently unstable. They lack rudder mechanism and since the whole body acts as lift, it is massively disrupted by flight conditions in ways that commercial passenger craft aren't.

The BWB has plenty of yaw authority because of its drag ruddervons and verticals at the wingtips.

The Stealth F-117A "Wobblin' Goblin" was well known for its erratic flight, and its believed that there have been several more stealth bomber/fighter crashes than the government lets on.

The F-117 is a unique aircraft. I do not understand how it is related to the blended wing body. The principal design feature of the F-117 is low observability. Civilian BWBs are unconcerned with this characteristic. The fact that they are both somewhat triangular when viewed from above does not make the F-117 in any way indicative of the Blended Wing's performance.

The delta wing is only effective at higher speeds is my understanding.

The BWB is not a delta wing.

I can only imagine how difficult it would be to try to pilot one of these things in crash landing conditions. It probably has no control if its engine is out, like fighter craft and unlike passenger craft. Thats just not safe enough for commercial carrier flight.

The BWB will have very little thrust assymmetry in engine out conditions, much like a 727 or DC-9/MD-80. This is because the engines do not provide a significant moment on the airframe.

They also haven't caught on because flying wing technology has dragged its feet since the advantages have been limited.

This is a conclusive statement based on your previous findings, which are false. It is therefore not relevant.

Add the fact that they are expensive to design and test (especially when your prototypes are crashing all the time), and the only people really left that might be interested is the military.

All new aircraft designs are expensive to design and test. Most of the major design hurdles have been completed, and the testing is going well. So far, no BWBs have crashed. This one in particular worked out quite well.

There is a lot you can do with this technology to make flight faster and more energy efficient, but not really safer or more practical or cheaper.

This is again an unsubstantiated conclusive statement. It would've tied your argument together well if your points were valid.

Dr. Kroo was one of the only academics to work closely with the inventor of an even more radical concept called the Oblique All Wing (aka Oblique Flying Wing) Supersonic Transport. The OAW SST concept originated in the 1940s with supersonics pioneer Robert Theo Jones (who preferred to be called "RT Jones").

I became interested in Jones' concept when an article (very similar to the one available online from Hiller Museum of Aviation) appeared in "The West" magazine in the early 90s. The thing that hooked me about the idea was that RT Jones had originated the supersonics models for swept wings used for all of aviation and had come to the conclusion that:

1. The optimal supersonic wing was an ellipse with no body that tilted into the wind more and more as it went faster and faster -- an amazingly simple and elegant concept.
2. The price per passenger mile for a trans-Pacific flight would be no more than for a 747 even though the flight time would be half.

Having hooked me at the time I was most active in aerospace politics I decided to look into why the supersonic wind tunnel at NASA Ames wasn't being utilized by the Stanford crew under the ultimate mentorship of RT Jones (who it was obvious to me, was nearing the end of his functioning life). As it turns out there were some problems with NASA HQ not wanting to have confusing signals sent to Congress about which direction NASA was going to go with its High Speed Civil Transport program. There were funds at stake here. At one point NASA Ames attempted to take a small part of its "discretionary" budget and fund the supersonic wind tunnel runs of a model of the OAW SST, but when it did so NASA HQ got "wind" of it and not only forbade the research but docked NASA Ames an equal amount of money in the next year's "discretionary" budget.

When I heard about this, I became angry.

I plunked down some dough and flew RT down to meet with Congressman Ron Packard (R 43rd district CA) and discuss the situation. We got some other Congressmen to look at the situation a bit as well. The real clincher didn't happen until I discovered the person with the most intimate knowledge of the supersonic modeling equations was going to work for Airbus after having been trained by RT Jones at Stanford. This gave me the leverage I needed to push the "American Competitiveness" buttons with the Congressmen -- and I did just that.

This had repercussions.

The initial result was a specific line item in the NASA bill. This was to send a signal to NASA HQ that they weren't to stop the supersonic windtunnel testing from going forward at NASA Ames -- that the OAW SST model from Stanford and RT Jones would be experimentally tested against the equations. The second result was that someone's head was going to roll for letting the cat out of the bag about NASA HQ's bad behavior. I think the guy who got demoted was Tom Gregory even though he wasn't the source of the dirt -- so I have to apologize to him for the consequences of my rather heavy-handed politics -- but the consequences for the testing were at least a little good.

The tests got run, finally.

RT Jones was pretty sick the last time I talked to him -- and discouraged. The fact is he was within a few years of dying of a prolonged illness. He didn't think it was worth pursuing the OAW SST anymore -- that a subsonic 747 style jet could be made more comfortable for the long flight. It was sad hearing him talk that way about his brain child but it was understandable given the life-long struggle for acceptance of the idea and his weakened state. Nevertheless, the idea remains an intriguing if not viable one -- and someday I hope there is at least a FedEx next-business-day robotic package OAW SST fueled by methane -- the system I first thought would be viable.

If its just web, take a look at lbnamed, a load balancing name server. They use it at Stanford with some sucess to redirect new connections to the machine with the lowst load (based on system load and users logged in).

--
Hey, atleast I don't wash your car windows while your at a stop light, then beg for karma.

Here are some links to some load balancing projects I'm aware of:

• lbnamed - A load balancer written in Perl
• Super Sparrow - A Linux-based load balancer
• Ultra Monkey - A high-availability and load balancer solution based on Linux (it looks like Super Sparrow may be Ultra Monkey's load balancer)
• LVS - A high-availability and load balancer solution based on Linux

Here's your friendly /. neighbourhood rhetoric wonk weighing in... I have to wonder what the semantics, grammar, and rhetoric of the Longhorn interface are going to be. In case you're wondering, the underlying ideational structures of the interface create its meaning, and make the difference between dumb and intelligent design, useful and frustrating, easy-to-learn and Adobe ;) and so on. So far I haven't been too impressed with much of anything MS, rhetoric-wise. Some pretty impressive people (not just weirdos like me) have also weighed in on the importance of this issue, like:

Terry Winograd
Joseph Goguen
Eben Moglen
Neil Randall

and a bunch of lesser lights including Neil Stephenson.

While I'm not against innovation, I have a hard time imagining that MS could actually come up with something more intelligent than these folks, all of whom, I notice, aren't working for MS. Even Neil Randall, who apparently took some money from MS to do a study works for the University of Waterloo (hi, Neil!).

Maybe I'm just a Jaded Cynic, but I have to wonder.

No matter how cheap HDs get, they just don't have the [...] lifetime

Really, it depends on what you mean by "lifetime". Even assuming the media is still good, try finding a working drive for an arbitrary backup from a decade or two ago. And longer than that? Forget it. (But it's plausible that CDs will be an exception.)

For moderately long-term storage, your best bet is stone, although some metals are a good choice, too. But really, the only currently successful medium for real long-term storage is DNA. That's not because DNA is durable; it's because Lots Of Copies Keep Stuff Safe.

So the lesson is that if you really want to be able to get at your backups in the future, the best way is to keep them 1) live, 2) distributed, 3) replicated, and 4) monitored. Whether you do that by colocating a couple of hard drive arrays or by encoding the data into bacterial DNA with checksum-linked apoptosis mainly depends on your budget.

I am not smart enough to explain it, but I understand that 3DES is more resistant to a man-in-the-middle attack (also woman-in-the-middle).

I think Stanford's SRP was developed to address this.

Blowfish is awesome (fast & strong). Maybe Twofish is even better. But I think it is known that the randowm key exchange is stronger in 3DES, when it sets up the connection.

Stanford, where Knuth is an professor emeritus does not require or even suggest that students read ANY of TAOCP to obtain a CS degree. Reading all of it would be difficult since it isn't completed.

Now ever more wasted CPU cycles on looking for aliens with radios.

hey look, something worthwhile!

Advanced Programming in the Unix Environment - a bit outdated, but still good; does not cover kernel internals
The Practice of Programming - good tips related to style, algorithms & data structures, debugging, etc.
UNIX System Administration Handbook- actually shows you how to get stuff done
Concrete Mathematics - to help you understand The Art of Computer Programming

In many cases, however, a read through the theory will save you a lot of time

I think it's valuable to do reading in things other than technical manuals to get a handle on the forces that shape and are shaped by the technology that IT professionals help shape. I know I'm playing fast and loose with the context of the quote I put above, but I really think that computer professionals benefit a lot by reading about how the law and technology influence each other (and how one sometimes outpaces the other and the ramifications that can have).

To that end, I'll recommend anything written by Lawrence Lessig until I'm blue in the face. The Future of Ideas and Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace go really far in illuminating what (to anyone without Lessigs years of education and practical application) can seem like randomly occuring and chaotic changes in policy and technology.

I also think that being able to speak about history and law in technology contexts is a good career move, especially for those of us who aren't the most talented coders. Business, government and education all waste millions every year because they lack the foresight to come up with good IT policy. There's a lot of change to be made here, but it takes more than just technical knowledge to do it right.

Hi,

If Martin Fowler's Refactoring is not on your list, it should be added.

This book is changing the way people write code, and is up there with Knuth's books, Kernighan and Ritchie, and Design Patterns in terms of influence over software development.

Despite all this, everyone agrees that some time around 2015, plus or minus a few years, we hit the fundamental limit on flat silicon wafers: the atoms are too big.

There may be ways around that, but remember that the real limit is cost per gate. A technology that provides higher density at higher cost per gate isn't going anywhere. After all, even now, the physical space taken up by ICs isn't a problem.

It seems that there are two camps forming. One that is looking at it from a technical "reproduction of waves" standpoint, and one that sees a synergy in the musical experience that includes things such as the emotional involvement of the musician, the room, audience, etc. That kind of reminds me about an article I read a while back where someone programmed a computer to compose in the style of Bach. The music that came out, according to 'true' musicians sounded like 'A computer programmed to compose in the style of Bach". Which would seem to lend some credibility to the second camp. Here is a link to an article about a similar experiment at Stanford a while back.

You can think of Cg as a real-time shading language. These shading languages have been an active area of research in recent years.

The industry-standard shading language today is RenderMan, designed by Pat Hanrahan while he was at Pixar. As mentioned elsewhere, it is used for movie production-quality shading in software rendering systems.

Consumer graphics chips today such as the nv20 (NVIDIA Geforce 3) and the R200 (ATI Radeon 8500) are programmable, but they expose the programmable features in the form of assembly-like instruction sets. Writing shaders in assembly is ok when the number of supported operations is small for a given rendering pass, but as shaders become longer and more complicated, the process quickly becomes tedious.

In the graphics research community, Marc Peercy and some folks over at SGI first demonstrated how RenderMan shaders could be mapped to multiple rendering passes on simple graphics hardware in their SIGGRAPH 2000 paper.

Then, Kekoa Proudfoot and some folks at Stanford designed a shading language that targets programmable graphics hardware (such as the Geforce 3), and you can read about it here.
Note that a key member of the project is Pat Hanrahan, the designer of RenderMan. The paper associated with this project is in SIGGRAPH 2001.

Both of the above were research efforts to demonstrate that (1) it is possible to compile complex shaders efficiently to commodity graphics hardware, (2) it is desirable to use a higher-level abstraction such as a shading language to program GPUs with instead of low-level assembly code.

Now there are two efforts to bring shading languages to widespread, mainstream use in the industry: the OpenGL 2.0 shading language proposal by 3D Labs, and Cg by NVIDIA.

A nice aspect of having Cg sit on top of DirectX and OpenGL, instead of being integrated into the language (like the OGL2 proposal), is portability. In theory, you can write your uber-shader ONCE, and it would be the compiler's job to map it to the appropriate hardware, etc.

They're already heading that way; the Register had an article describing some work being done to do general raycasting in hardware. I guess it's heading towards turning graphics cards into boards full of many highly parallel mini-CPUs, since vertex and/or pixel shading are rather parallelizable in comparison to other things the main CPU might be doing. Of course, OpenGL is already a sufficiently versatile system that one can implement Conway's Life using the stencil buffer, so for a sufficiently large buffer, you could implement a Turing machine; I don't know how much (if any) acceleration you'd get out of the hardware, though.

• opengl shader.
• a great paper on the hardware shading problem, and a very generic approach.
• stanford's rtsl.
• the proposed opengl2 also has a hardware shading abstraction language.

hopefully, opengl2's shading will become standard, and mitigate the cross-platform differences. it's seemingly a much better option than this new thing by nvidia, but we'll have to wait and see what does well in the marketplace, and with developers.

And what about the people crunching SETI@home or folding@home or distributed.net's challenges? Sure, 3 or 4K may not seem like much, but it adds up, and I imagine there will be a small decrease in the participation in these projects if users feel the need to conserve bandwidth.

Of course, we could start a distributed.net-style company, and try to get ISPs in on it... Have always-on connections offer reduced rates for use of your computer's extra time. That way people could get high-speed connections for less without really sacrificing anything.

That same theory might also make ISPs more lenient about multiple computers on a home connection. (don't know about your cable provider, but mine doesn't like that).

>Does it emit 2.4GHz Microwaves and how many?

Not enough to worry about unless it includes a klystron.

Remember, the fcc allows you to emit a maximum of 0.1 watts of unauthorized radio power. Considering 900 Mhz computers did not ruin the cellphone band, I expect the same of 2.4 Ghz machines (even though they operate in the unlicensed radio spectrum).

Why can't all electronic devices have cool names like that? :-)

... but what EXACT copyright is bein violated and how?

The television broadcast, shows and commercials are certainly copyrighted. Since the early 90s, all works of authorship are automatically copyrighted unless the author declares the work to be in the public domain. The aggreate of the show with commercials inserted is also probably a subject of copyright. That is exactly what is copyright might be violated (wether it is a voilation of not is up to the courts, not mere mortals like you and me, regardless of how strong our opinions may be, expressed here on slashdot or elsewhere).

According to copyright law, the copyright holder has several exclusive rights. The ones that might be violated here are:

1. Right to prepare derivative works
2. Right to distribute copies

#1, the exclusive right to prepare derivative works is quite a gray area. The Replay4000 apparantly has the ability to automatically detect commercials and prevent them from being recorded. Personally, I think that's a great feature (which I would certain use, except that I don't watch TV).

In the case of a VCR, the broadcast is recorded to the videotape without any modification. Commercial skipping happens during playback, but the copy (which was fair use) is an exact copy of the original. But if the recorder analyzes the picture in real time and automatically alters it, maybe that's enough to be considered a "derivative work".

#2, the exclusive right to distribute copies of the work is also a point of contention. The Replay4000 has a file sharing feature, where copies of the broadcast (presumably originals OR modified copies that might be derivitive works) can be transfered to 15 other Replay4000 owners via broadband internet connections. This file sharing certainly is distributing copies, so the only hope for it to be legal is if it's a fair use

There are four factors for fair-use (decided on a case by case basis by courts):

1. purpose and character of use (educational, non-profit, commercial)
2. nature of the copyrighted material (artisitic vs informational)
3. amount of the work copied
4. effect on value and potential market for the author

In terms of the fair use criteria, #1 and #4 are a mixed blessing for Replay4000 users. Sharing is almost always non-profit, but usually for entertainment rather than eductional purposes (yeah, some shows are eductional, but to really be for educational purposes you'd be talking about copies for students at a school). #4 is also middle ground... a small number of copies to friends has a small impact on the market (though the studios will argue that the derivitive works worsens the market for royalties) and the broadcasters will claim the market for "premium" channels is dimished if users distribute certain key shows to their friends who don't susscribe to those channels.

#2 and #3 really work against the Replay4000. The material is "artisitic" (neglecting the overall lack of substance and quality of TV... at least when my girlfriend made me sit through a "survivor" episode a couple months ago). The copies are the whole thing (#3).

One final thing to keep in mind, which seems to be easy to forget while reading all these "ought to be" slashdot comments, is that fair use is decided on a case-by-case basis by courts. The famous Sony vs Universal case (VCR is fair-use) was decided by a 5/4 vote. Very close, and the VCR of the mid 80's required the user to press FF to "skip" a commercial, instead of making a modified recoding (derivative work) automatically. That 80's VCR allowed "swapping", but by physically transporting tapes instead of just pressing a couple buttons (think "subjective opinion of a judge on the impact for the market for or upon the value of the copyrighted work).

I personally hope the Replay4000 and similar devices are ruled to a legal fair use. But saying "it's exactly like a VCR" is a stretch... and the VCR case from the 80's was a 5/4 split of the high court!

Sure, Alchemists were not able to turn various metals into gold, but today, using nuclear physics, we can turn lead into gold and by semi-simple means, carbon into diamonds.

However, I agree with your comment that If DRM can be done at all, it will take a whole lot more money than the entertainment industry is prepared to spend. Yes, gold can now be produced by nuclear reactions, it is just plain easier to go out and dig the stuff up. The entertainment industry will find, eventually, that it CAN be done to manage digital rights, but at such a cost that it just isn't worth it. Hopefully, that day will come long before we all get thrown in jail for letting our friends borrow a digitally true copy of seinfeld that we recorded last week on our PVR. I don't know about anybody else, but I honestly have paid for software, music, videos, etc.. that I want to support those that have created it.

The big problem is that people today aren't creating things that are truly part of themselves. If they were, it wouldn't matter how much money they did or didn't get. The attitude of "yeah, I could do that, but what would I get for it?" is what is keeping the United States of America (and many other good nations) from becoming the best they/we could become. At some point, people have to discern what is important to them and do it ONLY for that reason, because it is important to them. I think if you (and I mean anyone here, not just the one post I'm replying to) look into the philosopher Søren Kierkegaard you will see that his philosophy strikes at why the world wars were fought and why so many people are so disillusioned today.

Eh, just my .02 (inflation adjusted, currency exchange rates, taxes and tariffs may increase or decrease value).

Thank goodness. I didn't think I was going to be able to hold this webserver in my hand much longer. Good thing they didn't mention it on /. 3 years ago or it would have been pummelled into the ground too. Oh wait, they did.

Atomic clocks on ISS are a trivial test of relativity compared to Gravity Probe B, hopefully to be launched soon after DECADES of development. A one-pager "GPB for Dummies" is here. GPB tests not for alterations in time but another phenomenon known as "frame dragging" which has never been directly measured. There's been lots of criticism about GPB as being too ambitious, so there's been lots of independent reviews.

The programmer's bible for this is The Art of Computer Programming by Don Knuth. It isn't the easiest book in the world to read, however, and consists of three volumes and an additional one Knuth wrote recently.

An interesting example of this I found out about recently are coroutines. I struggled with writing part of a program for weeks on end trying to do something similar to this. Had I known about this kind of technique then, I would've done it in a day.

The programmer's bible for this is The Art of Computer Programming by Don Knuth. It isn't the easiest book in the world to read, however, and consists of three volumes and an additional one Knuth wrote recently.

An interesting example of this I found out about recently are coroutines. I struggled with writing part of a program for weeks on end trying to do something similar to this. Had I known about this kind of technique then, I would've done it in a day.

Nice fucking try.

In addition to this, it's interesting to note that in American media, which is supposed to have a reputation for being more liberal than conservative, the marginalization says otherwise -- prominent liberal thinkers are more likely to be identified as "liberal" than conservative thinkers are as "conservative" (Nunberg's article on this is here).

Unfortunately, much of the data I have is not sufficiently structured for an RDBMs. To be more specific, I have about 5 GB of digital photographs / scanned negatives, 1 GB of email archives, 1 GB of various and sundry text files, 100 MB of assorted MS Office-type documents, 100 MB of source code (only about half of which is in CVS), 500 MB of web site source material (Photoshop files, HTML, etc).

So I figure that the filesystem is the best database for this kind of information. But I could well be wrong!

This is kind of offtopic, but I just read a book called Bold Science: Seven Scientists Who Are Changing Our World. It talks about Venter's interesting background. Other scientists mentioned:

Susan Greenfield,

Geoffrey Marcy,

Polly Matzinger,

Saul Perlmutter,

Gretchen Daily, and

Carl Woese.

to those who are interested, I stumbled on an interesting article from Stanford's philosophy pages:

Language of Thought Hypothesis
[ http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/language-thought ]

But why do they need to go to college to become programmers, especially if they are promising? What they need is a good base in logic, algorithms, craftsmanship, a language, and some hard earned experience. I have no degree and no high-school diploma, but I own my own personal library devoted to programming , read and code regularly, and can still (yes, even after the .bombs) write my own ticket for jobs. Most people in the programming industries these days want to know what you can do and how you can do it - not where you when to school or what your GPA is, because quite honestly there is a huge influx of really poor but really heavily degreed and certified programmers and administrators. One of the hazards of being at the top of the "most desired profession" lists for too long I think....

dominik@schnitzer.at, mozparty-at-subscribe@relax.ath.cx, dominik@schnitzer.at, david_markvica@web.de, johannes_richter@gmx.net, kairo@kairo.at, rossi@chello.at, markush@world-direct.com, cbiesinger@web.de, jenskager@gmx.net, jo-at-mt@gmx.net, johann.petrak@gmx.at, dviper01@gmx.net, simon@simonschwaighofer.net, dreckskerl@glump.at, wt-lists@trexler.at, dusty@strike.wu-wien.ac.at, kasparhauserjr@hotmail.com, b.schallar@gmx.net, mutato@libero.it, phil@goli.at, diddalick@gmx.net, studio@paw8.com, croco@utanet.at, petru@paler.net, jlemmerer@node.at, bigkub@time2change.at, patrick@seher-it.at, ronald@hartwig.at, mozilla_party@webterminate.com, stefan@kleinhans.it, horst.jens@gmx.at, jjan@gibts.net, mjahn@agency.at, gpoul@gnu.org, green@eggs.ham, gerhard.hipfinger@openforce.at, mailto:moz@moz.org>, florianweinwurm@yahoo.com, christian@precht-jensen.dk, Bill_Gates@microsoft.com, Tux_the_penguin@linux.rules.microsoft.sux.open.sou rce.is.the.way.to.go.net, domi@schnitzer.at, joe_ringmaster@gmx.at, sifu@isohypse.org, dk@perm.ru, nobandwidth@bigpond.com, nobandwidth@bigpond.com, luke@strangemonkey.com, mrundataker@optushome.com.au, mcgarry@tig.com.au, chris@think.net.au, Mathias.Burbach@Bigfoot.com, acuteparanoia@optushome.com.au, syzh401@cse.unsw.edu.au, maillist@jasonlim.com, ram@digitalmethod.org, jason@sydneypubguide.net, geek@digitalone.com.au, curious@ihug.com.au, bill@maidment.com.au, kristof@staesis.org, bill@microsoft.com, belle@netset.net.au, ksosez@softhome.net, jruderman@hmc.edu, andyed@surfmind.com, down8@yahoo.com, mozparty@sigkill.com, bulbul@ucla.edu, gavin-mozparty@doughtie.com, roger@digitalfountain.com, matt@linuxschooltorrance.com, mozparty@ventura.nu, rombouts@compuserve.com, ian@freenetproject.org, tristanreid@yahoo.com, groovefx@yahoo.com, jj@lacasabonita.com, gmoudry@hotmail.com, eyezero@yahoo.com, ian@primewave.net, jlawson7@adelphia.net, el_arturo@att.net, janie@freenetproject.org, 145371217@numenor.net, infinite_8_monkey@yahoo.com, charshman@divus.org, mozparty@shadowlurker.net, john@marinapacific.com, ilanterrell@yahoo.com, aafes@psu.edu, bustamam98@yahoo.com, mozparty@myunixbox.com, yaten@sbcglobal.net, joelinux@pacificnet.net, dgc@penguino.net, poserskater69@yahoo.com, lheartb@hotmail.com, ncmother@zimage.com, daniel@likeicare.com, digital.evil@lycos.com, cjeburke@yahoo.com, jblow@hotmail.com, zachary.anthony@verizon.net, boogah@23.org, mebelost@yahoo.com, nickkricheff@netscape.net, mikemcg@ucla.edu, gogomozilla@denofslack.net, mike@mm1.com, seanmcoleman@attbi.com, jsm@bigfoot.com, hoarycripple@crippl3.net, mozparty@nslu.x.myxomop.com, mozparty@camworld.com, mozpartyNYC@isoga.net, ccarlen@netscape.com, h@rediffmail.com, lefever@rcn.com, tedjackson@accounting.org, darren@ny.com, marlon@nyc.com, plui@hyperreal.org, dzeluff@zeluff.com, joel@natividads.com, ken@bigbadapple.com, treebeard@treebeard.net, florent@nyc.com, chad@macristy.com, spud@montelshow.com, gbman_of_gvill@yahoo.com, eam-mozparty@learningpatterns.com, pkrause@primavera.com, tossoffus@yahoo.com, ryan@pantz.com, nichomof@eecs.tulane.edu, billg@microsoft.com, DevilsRejection@msn.com, petergunn@hotmail.com, bagerj@sullcrom.com, isaac@structuredsystems.net, bobk@panix.com, ngellner@hotmail.com, luke@sigterm.org, vivake@yahoo.com, jon@mediavortex.com, groovefx@yahoo.com, brendan@sighup.net, jds@panix.com, bluerose@bluerose.com, chris@allermann.net, dimkal@yahoo.com, preppyl@yahoo.com, blujoker@blujoker.net, nowell_h@hotmail.com, aragorn@cs.stanford.edu, treed@cpr.com, brt204@nyu.edu, andreas@antonopoulos.com, dj@randomwalks.com, lists@pote.com, mike@mhudack.com, reliable57@yahoo.com, jared@geek-boy.com, ondadl@mac.com, floss@myrealbox.com, xod@thestonecutters.net, mozilla@sectae.net, tywonm@screamingmedia.com, Odin_NT@hotmail.com, crooney@panix.com, bg25222@binghamton.edu, eugenem@brainlink.com, dave@downneck.net, romspace@mac.com, sdaejo@yahoo.com, masseo1@yahoo.com, jim@fearandloathing.net, mike@mjoy.us, miles@openly.com, LuciferSD@hotmail.com, nsdilwor@intertechmedia.com, chrisdowden@yahoo.com, pgs10@columbia.edu, sbrennan@ovid.com, lthomiso@rcn.com, paralox@paralox.ath.cx, Jester_458@yahoo.com, jsadove@beltion.net, stuehmke@yahoo.com, mike@realfx.com, alex@risky-roosky.com, shava@efn.org, kra10@columbia.edu, saihung@ix.netcom.com, gropo@mac.com, scottnym@yahoo.com, shaas@vibe.com, roon_toon@hotmail.com, ajaygautam@yahoo.com, jhdaly@mindspring.com, manuel@sphinx.ms, very_itchy_rash@yahoo.com, emeldrum@drew.edu, jeld@mindless.com, as867@columbia.edu, slams@penguin.rutgers.edu, wassa@columbia.edu, tony@vegan.net, zilla@bibliotrack.com, zeno_lee@hotmail.com, fosh@fishnet.cx, linux@gpl.us, jblow@hotmail.com, dkrook@hotmail.com, ivesti@yahoo.com, arek@arekwyderka.com, bljoechang@yahoo.com, brian@tribrothers.com, sparky@marklife.org, charles@softwareprototypes.com, scottkundla@hotmail.com, ccharabaruk@meldstar.com, ian@pottinger.ca, netdemonz@yahoo.com, diatribe@mailcity.com, nick@tomkinet.com, shawnlin@yahoo.com, sculley@pathcom.com, herd.killing@rogers.com, dave@renouf.com, aliyamin@hotmail.com, aswitzer@ispgn.com, netm0nkey@ispgn.com, hyakugei@hotmail.com, geduggan.mozparty@peri.csclub.uwaterloo.ca, lwhite@darkfires.ca, jorel@the-wire.com, js@tap.net, davew@tap.net, tmh@whitefang.com, vid_mozillaparty@zooid.org, anon@foolswisdom.org, morris_mk@yahoo.ca, colinmc@idirect.com, marcus.brubaker@utoronto.ca, akish@kishcom.com, nconway@klamath.dyndns.org, jason@thegeekcave.com, rampaging_simian@hotmail.com, garret@sirsonic.com, piowie@myrealbox.com, m5m5m@yahoo.com, ivan.brovko@net-sweeper.com, returnofthedorks@hotmail.com, axxackall@yahoo.com, tednye@sympatico.ca, darren.fuller@bell.ca, jbailey@nisa.net, swangeo@yahoo.ca, Hercynium@yahoo.com, cinetron@passport.ca, jotaroh@hotmail.com, aghajani@principle.com, fzv@yahoo.com, rocketmail_com@rocketmail.com, foo@bar.com, wolfe@alt.net, drew@xyzzy.dhs.org, jimmiejaz@nixhelp.net, bofh@swma.net, nilesh_mehta@email.com, mslack@rogers.com, m-cahill@rogers.com, tworkowski@sympatico.ca, george@openlight.com, irina@openlight.com, ilia@lobsanov.com, rjs@tao.ca, paul-mp@it.ca, alvarolists@aycuens.com, xan@dimensis.com, ike@lab.org, miguel@asiinfo.net, marevalo@marevalo.net, iolalla@yahoo.com, peluz0n@justice.com, weeddeveloper@yahoo.com, alfonsobugs@terra.es, sgala@apache.org, z_gringo@hotmail.com, santiz@madritel.es, murphy@litio.net, fox@mozilla.gr.jp, party@mozilla.org.uk, danj@fledgeling.com, fun@thingy.apana.org.au, moz@the-allens.net, onelists@hotmail.com, joel@fysh.org, simon.mozilla-party-if-its-in-central-london@rumbl e.net, bigboyjim@excite.com, andrew.and.friends.iff.central.london@sent.freeser ve.co.uk, itwillbecentrallondon@mozilla.org.uk, noahsark2x2@tiscali.co.uk, mmm-central-london@smileyben.com, jonathan-for-central-london@peepo.com, dave-Party-in-Central-London@dgta.co.uk, DJGMOL@netscape.net, srick@europe.yahoo-inc.com, moz-party@zpok.demon.co.uk, moz-party-central-london@trickofthelight.org, marc@brosystems.com, party@budge.net, rillian@telus.net, uphillsurfer@hotmail.com, edward@debian.org, mozilla@robertbrook.com, reagan@technomoose.com, lew@saltbeefsandwich.co.uk, osama@afghanistan.com, barking@insaneworld.org.uk, john@billabong-media.com, leith@cs.bu.edu, mozparty@noseynick.org, jonasj@jonasj.dk, bugzilla@kenneth.dk, chr_damsgaard@hotmail.com, alring@email.com, hp.grondal@get2net.dk, martin@marquentein.dk, Lovechild@foolclan.com, Kim@schulz.dk, kl@vsen.dk, mbendix@dunghill.dk, schnitzer.at@tange.dk, tommy@svindel.net, moz10@pbb.dk, dezral@despammed.com, nick@tioka.com, ask@fujang.dk, gecko@c.dk, spam@deck.dk, bugzilla@gemal.dk, b@bogdan.dk, kenneth@gnu.org, jee@email.dk, daniel@rtfm.dk, umfalvo@yahoo.com, christian@ostenfeld.dk, xor@ivwnet.com, Jason@screaminweb.com, alex@spamcop.net, dustym@riseup.net, rmcgee1@earthlink.net, dr_zeus@hotmail.com, chris.lozano@myrealbox.com, looney_binn@yahoo(dot)com, apendell@attbi.com, dantrevino@wrevolution.org, fireball1244@mac.com, tommyo@hargray.com, natas@redtailboa.net, emmett_in_dallas@yahoo.com, razzbuten@yahoo.com, igdavis@truculent-telephone.org, foobar@null.net, bob@kludgebox.com, cgrimland@yahoo.com, ghamlett@swbell.net, bgood@inceptual.com, slot0k@pogox.org, kwhudson@netin.com, jimjamjoh@softhome.net, jimmys@utdallas.edu, charlesv@mfos.org chris@focus2.com jest6r@hotmail.com steve@ncc.com, usrg@mail.utexas.edu, steve@deltos.com, alex@avengergear.com, mkoenecke@alum.haverford.edu langley@hex.net mordred@inaugust.com swapan@yahoo.com drosoph@hotmail.com, goulash1@mac.com, ean@brainfood.com, vj@vj.com lpret42@hotmail.com bugoff@hotmail.com chad@digitaltriage.net, stewart@digitaltriage.net scottvr01@yahoo.com adam@dfwuptime.com dsaint@gnumatt.org naltrexone42@yahoo.com, webmaster@bast.net, tommyo@hargray.com, ladd@kryp.to, jtaylor5@bayou.uh.edu, jgschmitz@linuxmail.org, enslaver@enslaver.com edfierro@yahoo.com, moz@photonsphere.com, rayw@fuckmicrosoft.com, rfmobile@swbell.net, kevin@unif.com trident5@bigfoot.com Erik_Osterholm@ieee.org, tmunson@houston.rr.com, alessi_brand@hotmail.com, rballa1@lsu.edu, wasted@kewlhair.com, jofficer@martinapparatus.com, idiot@mylinuxisp.com, j0sh01@ev1.net faust@wintermarket.org bouncer@hotmonkeyporn.com tk-mozparty_@perljam.net janisch@students.zcu.cz, aha@pinknet.cz kuzi@atlas.cz scat@reboot.cz, petr@dousa.cz, ruzicka@core.cz, roman@management.cz, hojan@students.zcu.cz, tille@soti.org, cas.tuyn@hetnet.nl, aeon@pandora.be, sensi_millia2000@yahoo.com, crypto@shiftat.com, jan.fabry@vsknet.be, monkeyboy@fruru.com, adulau@foo.be, johan@linux.be, karu@pobox.com, soggie@soti.org nick@tomkinet.com, why_are_you_too_lazy_to_drive_1_hour_to_toronto@yo u_lazy.com try_grammer_class_a_while@get_a_life.com john@interlynx.ca asharp@axo.cc, unionstation@ryder.ca, prade@hotmail.com, 2600@hamilton2600.ca, chris.lozano@myrealbox.com, dantrevino@wrevolution.org, jksteinhauer@netscape.net, i_love_junk_email@yahoo.com, cmiller@surfsouth.com, jan@bestbytes.de, me@phillipoertel.com, sebastian@pixelsalon.de, ccozan@andtek.com, ben@itlib.de, martin.ament@gmx.de, pulsar@highteq.net, muid@gmx.de, cedi@zooomclan.org, soapy@soapy.ch, deep_blue_ocean@gmx.ch, stamp@zooomclan.org, hans@switzerland.com, milamber@zooomclan.org, mtettea@switzerland.com, cylander@zooomclan.org, duke@zooomclan.org, pegirun@gmx.ch, pilif@pilif.ch, mlati@yahoo.com, Mozillzooom@holophrastic.com, erichiseli@yahoo.com, la_burdet@yahoo.com, rkoerber@gmx.de, dotzmasta@hotmail.com, B.Eckstein@cli.de, rtfm@linux.de, info@phosmo.de, gz@disintegrated.de, byronbay@gmx.de, stiwi@mac.com, mage@koeln.netsurf.de, mozilla@portfolio16.de, wrede@fh-aachen.de, ilikemozilla@html.de, cloud@final-fantasy.de, sfricke@sfricke.de, info@flossbau.de, no@dom.de, julian.suschlik@gmx.net, omero@m4d.sm, lapo@lapo.it, alcor78@email.it, info@fuelcat.it, mutato@libero.it, ildella@inwind.it, a.marabini@spinthehumanfactor.com, uomoman@criticalbit.com, thefl74@netscape.net, elbardo@libero.it, clem131@libero.it, t-i-e@bigfoot.com, gng74@libero.it, moz.party.20.gnes@spamgourmet.com, ema.cerqui@libero.it, ubertob@tin.it, mozparty.20.anagoor@spamgourmet.com, gianpaolo@preciso.net, ian@deepsky.com, marco@porciletto.org, planetx2100@hotmail.com, billabong@tiscalinet.it, piofree@libero.it, skunkyboy@tiscalinet.it, vincenzo@mondopiccolo.net, macmatteo@interfree.it, contreras@jce.it, hereandnow@libero.it, pza@students.cs.mu.oz.au, caedwa@students.cs.mu.oz.au, mgi@students.cs.mu.oz.au, bah@humbug.net, mfp@cs.mu.oz.au, nospamplease@indevelopment.org, peter@simplyit.screaming,net, pmj@users.sf.net, xanni@sericyb.com.au, agh@kalcium-is.com, felicityconsult@ozemail.com.au, lucas@lucaschan.com, andrewg@nopninjas.com, andym@abnormal.com, ts@meme.com.au, jasonpell@hotmail.com, syngin@gimp.org, mhammond@skippinet.com.au, szutshi@devraj.org, rmoonen@bigpond.net.au, fawad@fawad.net, ufs@softhome.net, kotrade@yahoo.com, ben@benscorp.com, stevesmith@columbus.rr.com, kkimmelosu@yahoo.com, neal.lindsay@peaofohio.com, pat@linuxcolumbus.com, chrisbaker@iname.com, hiroki2c@yahoo.com, seth@remor.com, jsohn@columbus.rr.com, ross@nanonet.net, mark@cushman.net, swinghammer.2@osu.edu, roberto.12@osu.edu, farhat@hotmail.com, pgunn@dachte.org, jwagner@gcfn.org, bp@osc.edu, joepletch@postmark.net, dsherman@iwaynet.net, glenn@uniqsys.com, bernstein.46@osu.edu, trent_reznor@nothing.com, erikniklas@bobanddoug.com, walters@gnu.org, timo@bolverk.net, annek25@aol.com, jlamb@leader.com, bart@osc.edu, jason@mcvetta.org

It seems to me like the "method and apparatus for atomic file look-up" is an old technique. See, for example, Stanford's Cache Kernel, which is entirely built around the idea of the kernel keeping caches (address space translation, file name translation, etc.) and faulting to user mode processes.

The story that ZDNet is carrying says that Google has also created some new experimental add-ons to the Google Toolbar:

"The second page features experimental add-ons to Google's toolbar, a software download that lets people surfing the Web with Microsoft's Internet Explorer browser search the Google database through a persistent application built into the IE interface."

And here are the descriptions of said add-ons:

"One feature called 'browser control,' sure to raise eyebrows about Google's ambitions and direction, lets people suppress advertising pop-up windows that appear when the browser attempts to leave a Web site. The feature works by clearing the JavaScript event 'onUnload.'

"Asked to clarify whether this browsing feature marked a departure from Google's traditional search mission, the Google representative would only say that 'it's something we're experimenting with to see if there's any level of demand or interest.'

"Another experimental navigation feature, albeit with a more direct connection to search, helps Google toolbar users navigate through results with a 'next' and 'previous' button, eliminating the need to double back to the search results page.

"A third toolbar experiment is a 'combined search' button, letting people search Google's image, newsgroup and general databases in combination."

However, I looked on the Google Toolbar site, Google Labs, and even searched the web (with Google), and I couldn't find this "second page" that ZDNet's article mentioned.

My question is, does anyone here know where the experimental add-ons for the Google Toolbar are at? Perhaps they are only for a private beta group (like the Folding@home Google Toolbar add-on)? Perhaps ZDNet's info isn't quite right?

The bump map generation to which you refer can no longer be called "innovative", since people have been doing it for years. I first saw it in Krishnamurthy and Levoy 96 (underlying low resolution geometry is b-spline patches, but the principle is the same).
The interesting bit is generating a good common parameterization of your low and high resolution meshes.
Also see Cohen's Appearance-Preserving Simplification of Polygonal Models.

Every second of every day, our genetic material and their supporting machinery regulate an inimaginable number of complex chemical pathways by carrying out the entire range of sensing, analysis and control. If they didn't, we'd just be a mush of amino acids.

Machinery that regulate chemical processes in our bodies are an inherent part of the processes themselves. In fact, it's productive and enlightening to think of biological systems as computational and chemical processes within them as algorithms. Researchers like Prof. Erik Winfree at Caltech are beginning the difficult process of applying this insight into research.

Due to the difference between the environment that DNA computers require and the environment supported by the modern infrastructure we have built for computing, the type of DNA computers studied in today's laboratories will never replace the silicon chip. Also, unlike quantum computing, DNA computing does not offer exponential growth in computing power with the number of elements used. However, DNA computing may find a niche in bioinformatics by offering a way to probe, analyze and ultimately control complex biological processes in vitro.

Hence, research into DNA computing may offer us a way to understand, interact with, and ultimately control nature's algorithms in biological systems.

The challenge for computation over the next century is to overcome barriers in the shrinking of circuit size for conventional computers, create practically useful quantum computers, apply conventional and quantum computers along with experimentation to understand the role of computation in complex processes (notably biological systems), and use the understanding gained to create a unified architecture for computation that will allow us to embed synthetic algorithms into every complex dynamic system we design and create and extend our control to the atomic level. When that happens, nanotechnology will finally fulfill its promise.

Stephen Wolfram, Erik Winfree, Hideo Mabuchi, Jeff Kimble, John Preskill, Bill Goddard, Isaac Chuang are leaders on the bleeding edge of computation. There are many many others I don't know about.

On that note, I will end my foray into wild speculation.

Not really that much of a spread of technologies, mostly just small-scale molecular/DNA computing and quantum computing. If you ask me the real front runners for next gen computing are RSFQ, spintronics, and massively parallel "quasi-processors" / reconfigurable computers (such as RAW and "smart memory"). More the kind of thing you'll see on your desktop 5-10 years from now rather than in the lab and still needing another decade to fully develop.

He was a great man - intelligent, well read and an awesome speaker who we honor with a day every year in remembrance of his struggle for equal rights and the barriers to equality that must still be overcome. Its too bad that these works cannot be freely listened to and studied in order to educate and inform the people. I was thinking about collecting mp3s of his speeches and making them available to others at work on MLK day, but i guess its illegal to spread his good news.

MLK Jr. strived for racial, social and economic equality for minorities, the poor, and the uneducated. Im sure he wanted to protect his works from being co-opted for profit, and I doubt that he would rejoice that his family is now one of the rich oppressors who demand money for his works and restrict information that could help people take the power back through non-violent protest and community action.

Here at the king center through the goodness of their hearts they have made available an excerpt from one speech.

This page at Stanford University does have some more streaming excerpts though they are clearly trying to sell the full works.

I think its time to fire up audiognome and practice some civil disobedience.

Some variation of the methods described in "Literate Programming" by Donald Knuth are a good place to start. In summary, Knuth says that you should be able to extract from the same source both machine instructions, and a human parsable document, with unusually high importance placed on the later. Whether or not you want to imbed LaTeX into your document is up to you (I never have bothered), but on the whole find something that will make your code and algorithms understandable to another programmer who's never met you (because that's probably who will be either grading or maintaining your code at some point).

Some variation of the methods described in "Literate Programming" by Donald Knuth are a good place to start. In summary, Knuth says that you should be able to extract from the same source both machine instructions, and a human parsable document, with unusually high importance placed on the later. Whether or not you want to imbed LaTeX into your document is up to you (I never have bothered), but on the whole find something that will make your code and algorithms understandable to another programmer who's never met you (because that's probably who will be either grading or maintaining your code at some point).

... is the only truly well-commented code. Literate programming was invented by Knuth. If you don't know who Knuth is: he's the author of the definitive CS work called "The Art of Computer Programming". Ask any of your friends who actually studied computer science about it.

Knuth wrote more than books. For example, he wrote the typesetting program, TeX which is to this very day the most popular way academics in the CS field employ to write their papers (especially using a macro package called LaTex). He just wasn't satisfied with the available ways to write mathematical books at the time (early 80s). He had a good reason - you can see the difference in quality between it and anything else - especially Word (Ugh).

To ensure you'll have the right idea about the quality of his work, note he's actually sending people checks when they find a bug in his books or his code. Of course people tend to frame them rather than cache them :-). Also note that nobody has managed to obtain such a check for a long time.

So, what is literate programming anyway? Instead of inventing yet another definition, here's a pretty good definition which you can find in the site, together with many others:

Marc van Leeuwen. "Requirements for Literate Programming" in CWEBx Manual, pg. 3-4.

The basic idea of literate programming is to take a fundamentally different starting point for the presentation of programs to human readers, without any direct effect on the program as seen by the computer. Rather than to present the program in the form in which it will be compiled (or executed), and to intercalate comments to help humans understand what is going on (and which the compiler will kindly ignore), the presentation focuses on explaining to humans the design and construction of the program, while pieces of actual program code are inserted to make the description precise and to tell the computer what it should do. The program description should describe parts of the algorithm as they occur in the design process, rather than in the completed program text. For reasons of maintainability it is essential however that the program description defines the actual program text; if this were defined in a separate source document, then inconsistencies would be almost impossible to prevent. If programs are written in a way that concentrates on explaining their design to human readers, then they can be considered as works of (technical) literature; it is for this reason that Knuth has named this style of software construction and description "literate programming".

Does it work in practice? All I can say is that I have used it in a real-world project with great success. The main downsides to it, and this applies to any type of documentation, is that it takes up-front time (even if it does save time later), and that you need to employ people with some measure of writing ability. It is surprising how many people can code well, but are hard-pressed to write coherent, readable description of their code. Especially if you write your documentation in English and the programmer's native language is Hebrew or Russian :-(

Oh, and it also is hard to do in IDEs like Visual Studio. And you won't learn about it in your university, never mind your VB in 3 days course. Just like design by contract and many other techniques, the problem isn't that humanity doesn't know how to write software well - it is that humanity doesn't want to.

"CWEB is a version of WEB for documenting C, C++, and Java programs. ... If you are in the software industry and do not use CWEB but your competitors do, your competitors will soon overtake you---and you'll miss out on a lot of fun besides."

The CWEB page also includes example programs, but you will have to run them through CWEB to get the hyperlinked PDF files.

"CWEB is a version of WEB for documenting C, C++, and Java programs. ... If you are in the software industry and do not use CWEB but your competitors do, your competitors will soon overtake you---and you'll miss out on a lot of fun besides."

The CWEB page also includes example programs, but you will have to run them through CWEB to get the hyperlinked PDF files.

Have a look at CWEB by D.E.Knuth. It shows a way of writing C / C++ / Java code that can really be understood.
Apart from that, the use of syntactically more rigid programming languages like Oberon reduce the chance of obfuscated code in the beginning.

Consider combining the technology for extracting a full 3D model of a head from only a single image with this technology for rendering video sequences of a person with different models.

All of a sudden, audio becomes the only issue. And someone else already said that it's possible with only short clips...

Here's a short run-down of the improvements that really caught my eye this time around.

• Better PPC support (64-bit PowerPC GNU/Linux support in the backend, and altivec support with -maltivec)
• UltraSPARC 64 fully supported
• AMD x86-64 support
• SSE/SSE2/3DNow!/MMX instructions and command-line flags to enable. No C++ compatible intrics for SSE2
• New ports for MMIX, CRIS, and SuperH
• Code profiling

Everyone knows I'm no fan of the GNU project, but GCC3.1 shows that they have a lot going for them. Very exciting guys, I can't wait to see what 3.2 has in store.

--Dan

henrik wann jensen is developing some of the most usable algorithms for skin and other translucent materials. He gave a talk last month at Cal as a prospective faculty member. It was fairly impressive.

his home page

rendering skin

rendering smoke

henrik wann jensen is developing some of the most usable algorithms for skin and other translucent materials. He gave a talk last month at Cal as a prospective faculty member. It was fairly impressive.

his home page

rendering skin

rendering smoke

henrik wann jensen is developing some of the most usable algorithms for skin and other translucent materials. He gave a talk last month at Cal as a prospective faculty member. It was fairly impressive.

his home page

rendering skin

rendering smoke

You can Google Search the rest if curious.