Slashdot Mirror

Just curious why everyone is referring to Xerox in the posts about this story.

Engelbart was at SRI. I'm pretty sure Ted Nelson wasn't at Xerox either - he's at Keio University now. And Vannevar Bush was way before PARC's time.

Anyway, just curious.

From my expaerince with the US patent system:
You do not have to defend a patent to keep it. If you want to charge people retroactivly, you will have a tough row to hoe.

British patents can be very vague, compared to US patents.
here is the link you requested.

of Douglas C Englebart demonstrating links in Dec 1968 can be found here.

I had forgotten NATO Commander.

That said, I was completely apalled that Bolo didn't even get a mention.

To quote the author: "Bolo is a 16 player graphical networked real-time multi-player tank battle game. It has elements of arcade-style shoot-em-up action, but for the serious players who play 12 hour games with 16 players working in teams in different networked computer clusters around an office or university campus, it becomes more of a strategy game. You have to play it to understand."

Or does being network enabled back in '87 somehow disqualify it as an RTS?

A good list, but...

Inefficient code probably has other flaws, and if you're spending an unexpected amount of time in a single procedure it deserves a careful look.

Inefficient code probably has other flaws only because all code probably has flaws. Making code robust takes effort, and making code fase takes effort. The combined effort of trying to do both at once overwhelms many programmers, with the entirely predictable result that as the code improves on one axis it tends to get worse on the other. In other words, optimization is a good way to introduce bugs. That's not to say you should never optimize, but if your goal is to spend a month doing nothing but fix bugs then you shouldn't be anywhere near a profiler.

Then compare the number of open() and close(), the number of malloc() and free().

Check out Engler et al's meta-level compilation project as a way to automate this process. These tools were run on real code that had already been examined by thousands of skilled developers - the Linux kernel. The tools still found hundreds of real and potentially serious bugs. If it can be that effective for the Linux kernel, it can probably be used for just about any other project.

The benefits of photon maps is that they are NOT computationally expensive compared to other methods. Say you have a scene with a crystal vase on a table. You generate the photon map of 'light' passing through the vase once. You then use this to generate a light map, or texture, of the caustic pattern to 'paint' on to the table. Now its just a matter of rendering the table with a texture. Now in a scene like you described, where the glass is moving, that's a different story because a new photon map needs to be generated for each frame in the scene. To find out more about photon maps check out Henrik Wann Jensen's homepage

One of my friends tried to get me to take the class but I refused. I think my reason was that Jeffrey Ullman was associated with the course somehow and I couldn't stand him. His books were ok, but the few times that I went in to get help from him he was totally condescending. I decided never to take a class from him again. Interesting how some people who are so smart think that their smarts makes up for their complete lack of courtesy and/or patience. So that is how I missed out on having something to do with Google. Aren't I lame? Yes Andy, I know you told me to take it.

Check this:
http://robotics.stanford.edu/~birch/klt/

I think that different MPEG compression schemes track motion differently - some using a brute force method. This method treats your image like a linear function so that it can search for the region of interest in the next image by using a "newton's method" like scheme - Much more efficient than brute force pixel comparison. I could be wrong though - I wasn't really paying attention in class

Sugar food

Caffeinated food

Fat food

Free food!!!
The slashdotted recipe seems to have too much junk. I think most of us can survive on Coke/coffee, taco/potato chips and instant noodle ;-) Who need fruit, vegetable or milk?

(Well, straightly speaking, these are refering to postgrad students. But, I think the scope can be extended a bit.)

This press release is kinda interesting. First, the work was presented over two months ago. Second, the work was carried out in the lab of Richard Andersen. Yet Andersen, who has spent a lot of the last decade reorganizing his lab around such efforts, was not mentioned. Instead, Meeker, a graduate student on the project was named. In addition, all this work in the Andersen lab was spearheaded by a person who is now at Stanford, Krishna Shenoy who recently left the lab. In addition, the intellectual property for the project, the patents, are co-authored by Andersen and Shenoy.

It's kinda weird when you know a bit about the work behind these press releases, and then see how it is actually presented to the "lay" public.

Personally, I think the project has a low probability of success. A neural prosthetic device should be interfaced with as peripheral part of the nervous system as possible. This group has chosen to use as abstract a part of the nervous system as possible. But maybe they'll prove me wrong.

Hi,
For a free microarray database and software package utilizing Perl and Linux, you might look into the following links.

Stanford Microarray Database [SMD] Package

SMD on Linux

Cheers, jcmatese

Oh, you mean RC5's not frivolous? There are people dying in the world due to our continued lack of scientific knowledge regarding various diseases and our own gene structures.

Try one of these instead, please...

Genome@Home: gene structure
Folding@Home: protein folding
United Devices: cancer and anthrax
Parabon Pioneer: cancer
Entropia's FightAIDS@Home: AIDS

Oh, you mean RC5's not frivolous? There are people dying in the world due to our continued lack of scientific knowledge regarding various diseases and our own gene structures.

Try one of these instead, please...

Genome@Home: gene structure
Folding@Home: protein folding
United Devices: cancer and anthrax
Parabon Pioneer: cancer
Entropia's FightAIDS@Home: AIDS

• Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs
• Common Lisp HyperSpec
• Common Lisp the Language, 2. ed
• Common Lisp - A gentle Introduction to symbolic computation
• The Scheme Programming language, 2. ed
• Reflections on trusting trust
• Lisp: Good News, Bad News. How to Win Big
• John McCarthy's homepage
• Dennis Ritchie's homepage
• Various classic papers it's a shame ACM never bothered to continue adding to
• Another list of classic papers (this time related mostly to programming language design)
• GTK-Gnome Application Development (not a classic, though, as the field is too young)
• KDE 2.0 Development (not a classic though, as the field is too young)
• Eric Weissteins Mathworld
• Compilers and compiler generators - an introduction with C++ (although I'm not too sure if it deserves being called a classic...)
• Parsing techniques - A practical guide
• Art of assembly language programming (never was a dead tree, but good anyway)
• Paul Carters 386 assembly book (same comment as above)
• An Introduction to Scheme and its Implementation (see comment above)
• How to design programs - An introduction to programming and computing (not a classic, yet!)
• The Gutenberg archives contains much non-copyrighted classic fiction in ASCII format
• Sacred texts has copies of or links to many religious text for various major (or minor) religions

Sigh...


With conventional sinewave technology, the bandwidth of the signal relative to the carrier frequency is very small at most a few percent using spread spectrum. However, it is possible to transmit and receive electromagnetic impulses which have a relative bandwidth approaching 100%. This "nonsinusoidal" radiation is currently being used for anti-stealth and ground-probing radar, under the more common heading of ultra-wideband or impulse radar.

You are confusing technologies.

Please refer to this website for more infomation, or even this article

My research group at Stanford has been experimenting with various modulation and encoding techniques for these types of future networks in an effort to minimize errors, and get as close to the Shannon limit as possible. Check out our site that describes some of our research and has pictures of various prototype "wide" equipment.

Wide band wireless networking

My research group at Stanford has been experimenting with various modulation and encoding techniques for these types of future networks in an effort to minimize errors, and get as close to the Shannon limit as possible. Check out our site that describes some of our research and has pictures of various prototype "wide" equipment.

Wide band wireless networking

Knuth just retired from Stanford, and he says he's going to finish that series over the next 20 years.

Stanford has plans to launch multiple 4-inch cube micro satellites ("CubeSat's") for about $ 25,000 per satellite to cover the launch costs.
(Stanford University CubeSat program)

A bunch of Universities and several amateur groups are currently building cube satellites as part of this project. At least one company has investigated selling cubesat kits. Here is an amateur group that is interested in producing cubesat kits that would sell for well under 5K per satellite (StenSat Group)

Micro satellites can be built with COTS discrete electronics. Microcontrollers such as the PIC processor have been radiation tested and should work fine in LEO orbits. High efficiency solar cells are the probably the most expensive items and if necessary they can probably be scrounged from various sources (surplus, rejects,etc...)

So in addition to doing a lot of TeX and Tib work to get the bibliography part printed usably, I wrote what you will find at the other end of clbib@csli.stanford.edu with the subject "help". (I expect that it has been completely rewritten now. I certainly hope it has.) I've just tested it and it appears that it is either down, removed entirely, or no longer responds immediately..

Anyway, I never dealt with Chicago University Press directly, but I was told that they were convinced in the end that making the information available that way helped sales of the printed book.

So in addition to doing a lot of TeX and Tib work to get the bibliography part printed usably, I wrote what you will find at the other end of clbib@csli.stanford.edu with the subject "help". (I expect that it has been completely rewritten now. I certainly hope it has.) I've just tested it and it appears that it is either down, removed entirely, or no longer responds immediately..

Anyway, I never dealt with Chicago University Press directly, but I was told that they were convinced in the end that making the information available that way helped sales of the printed book.

So in addition to doing a lot of TeX and Tib work to get the bibliography part printed usably, I wrote what you will find at the other end of clbib@csli.stanford.edu with the subject "help". (I expect that it has been completely rewritten now. I certainly hope it has.) I've just tested it and it appears that it is either down, removed entirely, or no longer responds immediately..

Anyway, I never dealt with Chicago University Press directly, but I was told that they were convinced in the end that making the information available that way helped sales of the printed book.

Another excellent web comic that uses a university to avoid bandwidth expenses is Jorge Cham's PhD.

I wonder if they have been taking McOwen to court if has run something that could actually save lives on the department's spare time.
I think they just decided to use public opinion against "cracking" and made McOwen a criminal ("Look, he's trying to break codes on company time. He must be a criminal"). Sorry, not criminal, what's the buzzword again? Ah, terrorist...

What is a CLM?
Excuse my ignorance. Some sort of post-programming incompatability issue?

A work in the public domain can be copied freely by anyone. Such works include those of the U.S. Government and works for which the copyright has expired.

http://fairuse.stanford.edu/library/faq.html

This statement is inaccurate. It is well known that Microsoft hires only about 2 per cent of job applicants. This does not sound like "merely average".

You, AC sir, seem convinced that citizens do not have any rights in this matter, and all rights accrue to the holder of copyright. In this you are opposed to established case law, as well as to the intentions of the framers of the Constitution. ("To promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries...")

Here. Go read up. Please don't post on copyright matters until you do.

I agree with you that Lessig definitely did not mean this to be a joke. Microsoft could be an ally of freedom of the internet, but only if the remedy in the MS vs DOJ case steers them in this direction. Professor Lessig himself makes this point clearly in his testimony on the issue.

" . . . futility of war . . . . "

War can be considered many things, but it is not futile. All we are, and all we believe is the result of thousands of years of warfare--the "winning" side promoting their agenda [religion, philosophy, genetic code, or business] and destroying/assimilating the "losing" population.

To quote the cliché, "History is written by the victor".

To this end, war is not "futile"--this is not an evaluation of whether war is "right", "justifiable", or "a necessary evil". Regardless of these [important] evaluations, war is effective.

That's part of the reason it's a problem.

There is a certain futility to modern warfare. In that, war requires deeds now considered unethical in most cultures; great contradictions as "Thou shalt not kill" and Ste. Augustine's "Just War".

What is making modern war futile [thankfully] is our problem with executing it properly. A typical pre-industrial culture has different rules of war--take the Japanese, Aztecs, Native Americans, Cossacks--the general rule is, conquer them by slaughter, kill all of their men, kill all of their children down to the cradle, rape/marry/kill all of their females so their decedents are also yours. If you applied this method to Palestine or Ireland, there would not be a terrorist problem in either location.

This method was applied by the Europeans and their American, Canadian, and Mexican decedents upon the scores of nations in the Americas [at least we gained the "United Nations" idea from the Iroquois nations first]. How many terrorist attacks have occurred based upon an entire continent under occupation? Close to none over the last hundred years.

Also, war seemed effective in eliminating slavery in the USA. And, through allowing the slave-owning population to survive, resulted in a very powerful terrorist organisation to be born [the KKK]. Strong enough to have both Senators and Governors as open members for about a century.

So, we are unwilling to fight these kinds of wars anymore, and follow the logical course--we start making the war "clean". Higher technology does not mean "more ethically sound" war. The United States has the military-industrial power to nuke just about any nation on Earth into molten glass, and then gave flotillas of B-52s dumping salt to cover their entire land so that nothing grows there for a thousand years. But instead of using the higher-tech to build more effective weaponry in greater quantities, they develop highly precise weaponry and invent the concept of "surgical strikes".

But don't think that it'll just be a bot-on-bot match. The end targets are the same--military, industrial, command and control, logistic, support, and 'terror'. All of which involve people. If the Taliban/Al-Qaeda had the capacity to pop up a sub of nuke-wielding bots in San Francisco, you wouldn't be stretching to find the "suffering of war".

What's really changed:
Tech-war results in much fewer civilian casualties, especially when you consider the numbers and agendas involved.
Modern warfare is ineffectual against occupying areas and halting ideas.

Since Orwell was quoted to start, I'll quote him to close:

People sleep peaceably in their beds at night only because
rough men stand ready to do violence on their behalf.
--George Orwell

In any case: The idea of keeping documentation and code next to each other in the same file, makes it much easier to document changes as they occur. How that is done is argueably a matter of taste (doxygen, POD, cweb, etc.).

The canonical example of the technique is probably the source code for TeX.

Well, then they have to make up for it on the weekend, or they have some serious brain disorder, and not the kind you want to have. Almost everybody needs about 8h of sleep per night. Some people need more. If you sleep less than what you need, you incur a sleep debt which you will have to repay. If the debt gets too large, you'll just keep falling asleep briefly throughout the day and not even notice (which can be rather dangerous). And if you are living with a large sleep debt, it's bad for your health.

Most Americans are already chronically sleep-deprived and suffering numerous health problems as a consequence.

One research group that has done excellent work on this and published a lot is Prof. Dement at Stanford (no, I'm not making up the name).

He has a guide specifically for students.

Well, then they have to make up for it on the weekend, or they have some serious brain disorder, and not the kind you want to have. Almost everybody needs about 8h of sleep per night. Some people need more. If you sleep less than what you need, you incur a sleep debt which you will have to repay. If the debt gets too large, you'll just keep falling asleep briefly throughout the day and not even notice (which can be rather dangerous). And if you are living with a large sleep debt, it's bad for your health.

Most Americans are already chronically sleep-deprived and suffering numerous health problems as a consequence.

One research group that has done excellent work on this and published a lot is Prof. Dement at Stanford (no, I'm not making up the name).

He has a guide specifically for students.

we're running out of oil faster than anyone wants to admit.

Things look pretty bad based on that report. Per capita oil production starts a nose dive this year.

The problem is that the sites I found say that report is wrong.

I probably shouldn't bother replying to this AC, but someone might have believed him.

We will run into an oil shortage, but we still have some time to develop alternatives.

-

Other than the Discovery channel crap I studied no Q. Physics. That book was an easy read for anyone who's taken algebra, and I finished it in less than a month. [not bad, I read it when I took a shit... you know]

Has anyone tried using rsync/rdiff coupled with version control?

Apple did an admirable job popularizing some of these ideas and bringing to market a successful product, although in the process, they cut many corners. But Apple neither developed the groundbreaking ideas nor were they even first to market.

Marc Levoy's group at Stanford has been making 3D scans of artwork since 1992. They've now done Michaelangelo's David sculpture, several other major Italian statutes, and some famous buildings.

Read up on what 'fair use' actually means in the context of Copyright law.

Hint: It isn't to do with what you think is fair.

The majority of the opinions here so far seem to say that learning assembly isn't important for non-hardcore-programmer types.

I agree, if we're talking about any particular assembly. PowerPC assembly, for instance, or MIPS assembly.

But everybody who programs-- even people who just want to understand programming-- should slog their way through Knuth's TAOCP. The abstract stuff in that book is implemented in concrete terms through a really simple fictional assembly language called MIX. When you're reading the first chapter of Volume 1, you'll be so frustrated with it that you'll wanna strangle the first person you see. But by the time you get through it, you won't be an assembly programmer, but you will find yourself saying things like, "I should arrange the loops this way, because then the inner loop will fit entirely in registers and the data fetches will be less than one cache line."

Saying stuff like that makes you sound really smart, which leads directly to better paying jobs.

When I was a kid I played with particle systems. I'd set up a cloud of particles with mass and/or electrical charge and see how their simple interactions created large-scale behaviour. It was a simple system that didn't scale well (I made some attempt to break the space up into cubes and treat the contents of far away cubes as one particle, but it wasn't a seamless transition). Even with the limited number of particles I could play with (a few hundred), I still saw a lot of interesting things happen, like the material breaking up into 2 or 3 separate clusters. If I had oodles of CPUs, I'd enjoy figuring out good ways to split the load between them.

In today's society (those societies whose members waste time on Slashdot, anyway), life isn't just about making a living. So in essence, these machines can be used for having fun, which is a good enough reason to make them.

P.S. It's no reason to build a cluster, but if SETI@home doesn't turn you on, perhaps Folding@home will.

surprised that no-one has mentioned knuth's suggestion yet

i've mirrored knuth's discussion and suggestion for a solution below - link can be found here, on his news for 1999 page.

~~~~~~~mirrored text of donald knuth~~~~~~~~

Many people (and many online dictionaries) claim that a kilobyte (kB or KB) is 2^10 bytes, and that a megabyte (MB) is 2^10 kilobytes, etc.

I'm a big fan of binary numbers, but I have to admit that this convention flouts the widely accepted international standards for scientific prefixes.

Therefore I propose a simple way to resolve the dilemma and the ambiguity: Let us agree to say that

2^10 bytes is a large kilobyte, abbreviated KKB;

2^20 bytes is a large megabyte, abbreviated MMB;

and so on up the line: Large giga-, tera-, peta-, exa-, zetta-, and yottabytes are GGB, TTB, PPB, EEB, ZZB, and YYB, taking us up to 2^80. (Notice that doubling the letter connotes both binary-ness and large-ness.)

These proposals were motivated by the suggestions in 1995 of IUPAC-IDCNS (the International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry's Interdivisional Committee on Nomenclature and Symbols), which were extended by IEC TC 25 (Technical Committee 25 of the International Electrotechnical Commission), chaired by Anders J. Thor. According to those committees, 2^20 bytes should be called a "mebibyte" and abbreviated MiB; 2^40 bytes should be called a "tebibyte" and abbreviated TiB; etc. The members of those committees deserve credit for raising an important issue, but when I heard their proposal it seemed dead on arrival --- who would voluntarily want to use MiB for a maybe-byte?! So I came up with the suggestion above, and mentioned it on page 94 of my Introduction to MMIX. Now to my astonishment, I learn that the committee proposals have actually become an international standard. Still, I am extremely reluctant to adopt such funny-sounding terms; Jeffrey Harrow says "we're going to have to learn to love (and pronounce)" the new coinages, but he seems to assume that standards are automatically adopted just because they are there. Surely a huge number of standards for other computer things, like networking protocols, have been replaced by better ideas when they came along. Thus I hope it still isn't too late to propose what I believe is a significantly better alternative, and I still think it unlikely that people will automatically warm to "mebibytes". Indeed, the last time I looked (June 28), names like "mebibyte.com" were being offered for sale but with no takers! I might, however, want to buy into a name like mmegabyte.com... And even in the unlikely event that mebibytes do catch on, MMB surely wins over MiB as their abbreviation. [See also the discussion by Kevin Walsh.]

Non-commercial pirates are ordinary people, who otherwise would be like you and me (well, ok maybe they're exactly like me.) They are the people who like certain content and are just looking to access it at their leisure. Non-commercial pirates are fans of content. They are students (formal and informal) who want to learn from the content. They are critics who further critical discussion of content. They are consumers who will likely purchase content when they are able. They are archivists saving the content that the distributors have abandoned. They are nurturers who want to see more content and help make content better.

But, in order to have a large enough inventory to attract people to their wares, some pirates may turn their activities into businesses. Turning commercial causes provable financial damage to the content holder (at least whatever the pirate charges, theoretical maximum of up to what the content holder charges, although certainly the discount rates of the pirate may boost his sales over what the legitimate holder would have) With such damages, there is an unquestionable standing for a lawsuit. On-line commercial pirates are especially susceptible. The 24/7 availability that offers such an advantage to on-line business, dramatically increases the pirates' chances of getting caught. Unlike the street-corner pirate, the on-line pirate can't turn off his web site if the cops come strolling by. Suffice it to say, commercial pirates are thieves, they are scum, whatever ugly adjective you want to use probably applies to them. They take the creative labor of others and use it to make a profit for themselves. Laws, regulations, mandates, and technical barriers will not stop them from their piracy. They have access to devices to circumvent whatever barriers put before them. They smell money, and don't care who is hurt in their pursuit of it.

Eric Flint from Baen Publishing isn't worried about online piracy because is a minor problem, any losses are offset by increased exposure of the content, and any attempt to restrict piracy is worse than the problem of priacy in the first place (see this Salon cartoon for an example carried none too far to the extreme ). His own experience has shown that content released freely, and without barriers to priracy (technological, legal, or moral) are the ones that drive exposure to the artist and sell better than similar books not available freely.

Content distributors (especially in the music industry, the RIAA and record companies) tend to justify their existance because of the amount of their marketing of the artists (in addition to the actual production/distributing efforts.) Online piracy is, then, a dilemma for artists. Piracy increases their exposure by definition, but at an inferior quality and no royalties. Piracy should show to consumers the complete uselessness of the content distributors as guardians of good taste. How many awful CD's do you have that you bought because of a catchy tune on the radio.

Current copyright laws almost ensure that there will be a historical hole where content simply disappears. Which company will be the one to ensure that Arthur Byron Cover's 1988 novel Planetfall for future generations? Neither quality nor the commerial success of content should be the judge of whether or not it is to be preserved. Many of Shakespeare's plays where bawdy low-rent entertainment in its era, but is now considered high-art. American Pie 2 deserves no less preservation than American Beauty. Plantfall deserves no less preservation than Snow Falling on Cedars. Married With Children no less than The Honeymooners. With corporate takeovers and massive inventories, content distributors can be the worst preservers of content. While this report notes some possible solutions, it generally suggests working with the content distributors to authorize preservation efforts. This is unworkable when a distribtor is unaware of their content property, has dissolved, or is hostile to the preservation effort. The societal need for preservation outweighs the property rights of the distributor.

It is high time that legislators and regulators stop acquiescing to every demand of the content distributors. The policy pendulum has swung too far in their favor. The problem is that the pendulum has swung quietly, without the public's knowledge. Efforts that the public does know about don't sound as harmful as they actually are, so your constituents (or those who are affected by your regulations) aren't alarmed. But as representatives of the people, you are the guardians of their rights. Fair use rights that the content distributors are attempting to restrict and even to abolish. The most perilous danger with legislative acts recently, such as the DCMA, is that they ingore that all copyrighted materials will eventually reach the public domain, as required by law (via the "limited time" clause). While content entering into the public domain is not advantageous to content distributors, it is vitally important to the general public.

Of course, that's just my opinion... (don't sue me Dennis!)
-sk

as much as I'd enjoy reading Lessig's take on every little thing, I'm in agreement with the other replies, his time is better spent elsewhere.

You could alwasy go read his books, Code: and other laws of cyberspace and his new one The Future of Ideas: The Fate of the Commons in a Connected World

Or jsut check out his website

One alternative is Ken Perlin's QuikWriting, which has been discussed on slashdot and covered by Wired.

"Quikwriting is significantly faster and less stressful to use than Graffiti, and lets you write very quickly without ever picking your stylus up off the surface, although it has the disadvantage that you need to learn a special alphabet. For further info, you can preview a Technote in either PDF or PostScript, which was published at the ACM UIST'98 conference."

Another alternative that builds on Perlin's QuikWriting work, is Francois Guimbretiere's and Terry Winograd's FlowMenus, published at UIST'00.

"We present a new kind of marking menu that was developed for use with a pen device on display surfaces such as large, high resolution, wall-mounted displays. It integrates capabilities of previously separate mechanisms such as marking menus and Quikwriting, and facilitates the entry of multiple commands. While using this menu, the pen never has to leave the active surface so that consecutive menu selections, data entry (text and parameters) and direct manipulation tasks can be integrated fluidly."

I'm currently designing and programming a user interface on the Palm for a remote control application. So I've implemented "Finger Pies", which are simply pie menus that you can use with your finger!

To paraphrase Ben Shneiderman: Finger Pies work well for implementing direct manipulation user interfaces on handheld personal touch screen devices, in which the application provides meaningful, engaging, tightly coupled feedback on the screen, in response to your gesture. By integrating immediate gratification over time, the user enjoys the satisfaction of direct engagement in an immersive experience, and achieves the cognitive resonance of continuous gratification. [My apologies to Ben for the tongue in cheek impression.]

Finger Pies are not meant to replace character input systems like Graffiti, but they are extremely useful and reliable for many applications of handheld input devices, because they're easy enough to use with your finger instead of a pen.

Finger pies are good for reliably selecting between two, four or eight options at a time (which can be nested as pop up submenus), and they're much more robust and resistant to noise than gesture recognition.

One problem with gesture recognition in general, is that it doesn't allow for "reselection" or in-flight refinement and error correction. That is, once you've made a mistake in a gesture, there's no way to change or cancel it, so you will often get characters that you don't mean, and you have to stop what you're doing and erase the mistake.

Pie menus allow you to cancel or change the selection at any time before you commit to the selection, so you can easily browse the menus. So pie menus are most appropriate when there aren't too many items, the items don't change dynamically over time, and when you need to minimize the error rate and selection time.

Most gesture recognition systems are not "self revealing" like pie menus, which can pop up a "map" showing the directions. So pie menus are much easier to learn than gesture recognition, and more appropriate for novice users. Best of all, they naturally train users to "mouse ahead" and select without looking, so they have a smooth, gentle learning curve.

Another advantage of pie menus is that they're not patented or restricted, and there are several freely available open source implementations.

-Don

Penny Lane: "This song was written about the roundabout in liverpool where John and Paul grew up. Half of the song is fact, half is fiction, but most of it is nostalgia. John was starting to write about personal places, and Paul really took this one and ran. "I wrote that the barber had photographs of every head he'd had the pleasure of knowing. Actually, he just had photos of different hair styles. But all the people do stop and say hello." say Paul. Also, "finger pie" is actually an old obscenity in Liverpool. The girls would never thnk of saying the word. It was used in the song as a fun joke for the lads back home. Months after, waitresses in Liverpool had to put up with lads asking for "fish and finger pie." There is also a phallic reference to the "fireman who keeps his fire engine clean." Penny Lane has become a Beatles landmark, and like Blue Jay Way, has it's problems with stolen signs, which are now nicely bolted down. Penny Lane was recorded on December 29, 1966 and released as a single with Strawberry Fields.The song also has a promotional video." -http://members.aol.com/Sumacca/songs.html

One alternative is Ken Perlin's QuikWriting, which has been discussed on slashdot and covered by Wired.

"Quikwriting is significantly faster and less stressful to use than Graffiti, and lets you write very quickly without ever picking your stylus up off the surface, although it has the disadvantage that you need to learn a special alphabet. For further info, you can preview a Technote in either PDF or PostScript, which was published at the ACM UIST'98 conference."

Another alternative that builds on Perlin's QuikWriting work, is Francois Guimbretiere's and Terry Winograd's FlowMenus, published at UIST'00.

"We present a new kind of marking menu that was developed for use with a pen device on display surfaces such as large, high resolution, wall-mounted displays. It integrates capabilities of previously separate mechanisms such as marking menus and Quikwriting, and facilitates the entry of multiple commands. While using this menu, the pen never has to leave the active surface so that consecutive menu selections, data entry (text and parameters) and direct manipulation tasks can be integrated fluidly."

I'm currently designing and programming a user interface on the Palm for a remote control application. So I've implemented "Finger Pies", which are simply pie menus that you can use with your finger!

To paraphrase Ben Shneiderman: Finger Pies work well for implementing direct manipulation user interfaces on handheld personal touch screen devices, in which the application provides meaningful, engaging, tightly coupled feedback on the screen, in response to your gesture. By integrating immediate gratification over time, the user enjoys the satisfaction of direct engagement in an immersive experience, and achieves the cognitive resonance of continuous gratification. [My apologies to Ben for the tongue in cheek impression.]

Finger Pies are not meant to replace character input systems like Graffiti, but they are extremely useful and reliable for many applications of handheld input devices, because they're easy enough to use with your finger instead of a pen.

Finger pies are good for reliably selecting between two, four or eight options at a time (which can be nested as pop up submenus), and they're much more robust and resistant to noise than gesture recognition.

One problem with gesture recognition in general, is that it doesn't allow for "reselection" or in-flight refinement and error correction. That is, once you've made a mistake in a gesture, there's no way to change or cancel it, so you will often get characters that you don't mean, and you have to stop what you're doing and erase the mistake.

Pie menus allow you to cancel or change the selection at any time before you commit to the selection, so you can easily browse the menus. So pie menus are most appropriate when there aren't too many items, the items don't change dynamically over time, and when you need to minimize the error rate and selection time.

Most gesture recognition systems are not "self revealing" like pie menus, which can pop up a "map" showing the directions. So pie menus are much easier to learn than gesture recognition, and more appropriate for novice users. Best of all, they naturally train users to "mouse ahead" and select without looking, so they have a smooth, gentle learning curve.

Another advantage of pie menus is that they're not patented or restricted, and there are several freely available open source implementations.

-Don

Penny Lane: "This song was written about the roundabout in liverpool where John and Paul grew up. Half of the song is fact, half is fiction, but most of it is nostalgia. John was starting to write about personal places, and Paul really took this one and ran. "I wrote that the barber had photographs of every head he'd had the pleasure of knowing. Actually, he just had photos of different hair styles. But all the people do stop and say hello." say Paul. Also, "finger pie" is actually an old obscenity in Liverpool. The girls would never thnk of saying the word. It was used in the song as a fun joke for the lads back home. Months after, waitresses in Liverpool had to put up with lads asking for "fish and finger pie." There is also a phallic reference to the "fireman who keeps his fire engine clean." Penny Lane has become a Beatles landmark, and like Blue Jay Way, has it's problems with stolen signs, which are now nicely bolted down. Penny Lane was recorded on December 29, 1966 and released as a single with Strawberry Fields.The song also has a promotional video." -http://members.aol.com/Sumacca/songs.html

One alternative is Ken Perlin's QuikWriting, which has been discussed on slashdot and covered by Wired.

"Quikwriting is significantly faster and less stressful to use than Graffiti, and lets you write very quickly without ever picking your stylus up off the surface, although it has the disadvantage that you need to learn a special alphabet. For further info, you can preview a Technote in either PDF or PostScript, which was published at the ACM UIST'98 conference."

Another alternative that builds on Perlin's QuikWriting work, is Francois Guimbretiere's and Terry Winograd's FlowMenus, published at UIST'00.

"We present a new kind of marking menu that was developed for use with a pen device on display surfaces such as large, high resolution, wall-mounted displays. It integrates capabilities of previously separate mechanisms such as marking menus and Quikwriting, and facilitates the entry of multiple commands. While using this menu, the pen never has to leave the active surface so that consecutive menu selections, data entry (text and parameters) and direct manipulation tasks can be integrated fluidly."

I'm currently designing and programming a user interface on the Palm for a remote control application. So I've implemented "Finger Pies", which are simply pie menus that you can use with your finger!

To paraphrase Ben Shneiderman: Finger Pies work well for implementing direct manipulation user interfaces on handheld personal touch screen devices, in which the application provides meaningful, engaging, tightly coupled feedback on the screen, in response to your gesture. By integrating immediate gratification over time, the user enjoys the satisfaction of direct engagement in an immersive experience, and achieves the cognitive resonance of continuous gratification. [My apologies to Ben for the tongue in cheek impression.]

Finger Pies are not meant to replace character input systems like Graffiti, but they are extremely useful and reliable for many applications of handheld input devices, because they're easy enough to use with your finger instead of a pen.

Finger pies are good for reliably selecting between two, four or eight options at a time (which can be nested as pop up submenus), and they're much more robust and resistant to noise than gesture recognition.

One problem with gesture recognition in general, is that it doesn't allow for "reselection" or in-flight refinement and error correction. That is, once you've made a mistake in a gesture, there's no way to change or cancel it, so you will often get characters that you don't mean, and you have to stop what you're doing and erase the mistake.

Pie menus allow you to cancel or change the selection at any time before you commit to the selection, so you can easily browse the menus. So pie menus are most appropriate when there aren't too many items, the items don't change dynamically over time, and when you need to minimize the error rate and selection time.

Most gesture recognition systems are not "self revealing" like pie menus, which can pop up a "map" showing the directions. So pie menus are much easier to learn than gesture recognition, and more appropriate for novice users. Best of all, they naturally train users to "mouse ahead" and select without looking, so they have a smooth, gentle learning curve.

Another advantage of pie menus is that they're not patented or restricted, and there are several freely available open source implementations.

-Don

Penny Lane: "This song was written about the roundabout in liverpool where John and Paul grew up. Half of the song is fact, half is fiction, but most of it is nostalgia. John was starting to write about personal places, and Paul really took this one and ran. "I wrote that the barber had photographs of every head he'd had the pleasure of knowing. Actually, he just had photos of different hair styles. But all the people do stop and say hello." say Paul. Also, "finger pie" is actually an old obscenity in Liverpool. The girls would never thnk of saying the word. It was used in the song as a fun joke for the lads back home. Months after, waitresses in Liverpool had to put up with lads asking for "fish and finger pie." There is also a phallic reference to the "fireman who keeps his fire engine clean." Penny Lane has become a Beatles landmark, and like Blue Jay Way, has it's problems with stolen signs, which are now nicely bolted down. Penny Lane was recorded on December 29, 1966 and released as a single with Strawberry Fields.The song also has a promotional video." -http://members.aol.com/Sumacca/songs.html

give users the ability to run arbitrary shell commands

And what a fine system is AEGIS.
let's evocate mmhh say.. Iran Air Flight 855 ? (link is a transcript of a Newsweek article)
290 civilians, 60 of them children...
If i remember correctly, that's about the ONLY war time performance of the AEGIS system, and man, what a glorious achievement.
I hope you're proud of a navy which thinks (with all the help of AEGIS) a Commercial Airliner (Airbus, 177 feet long, with a wingspan of 147 feet and weighing 170000 pounds) climbing at 12 000 feet, 350mph, is a F14 (38 foot wings, 62 foot long, weighing 48000 pounds) at 9000Ft and diving, at 450Mph.
What a glorious achivement for a fine weapons system.
I Sure hope you'll be able to do as good as this with your new stealth ship.. After all, Had the Vincennes been a stealth ship, none of that would have happened (oops, i mean, noone would have known it was the US.).
Bunus Link:
http://www.stanford.edu/~lswartz/acad/vincennes.pd f
Better have a damn good UI...

Hi Mike,

Following on our thread, X-posted to /.
If you need the original hardcopy I guess
it could be obtained from Rockefeller or
maybe the NYker? JMC himself might have
a copy in his files (I don't know his current
Secretary at the moment, and don't want to bother
him again.

Cheers,
Winton

FORWARD FROM John McCarthy:

The proposal to the Rockefeller Foundation, in my files as

href=http://www-formal.stanford.edu/jmc/history/da rtmouth.html

(and in HTML form)


http://www-formal.stanford.edu/jmc/history/dartm ou th/dartmouth.html

for the summer project on artificial intelligence was August 1955.

Since they supported it, it would have been in their list of grants in
1955 or 1956. The New Yorker picked it up, perhaps from the list of
grants, and one of their bottom-of-the-column wisecracks said
something like "about time". That may be 1956 but could be later.