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pandegroup is actually running 2 projects, folding@home & genome@home

Go to foldingathome.stanford.edu
They are in the process of folding the different protiens to see how they interact. The raw data and results will eventually be published on their site.
Though not exactly open source, there is talk of allowing developers to work on it.
Windows and Linux currently, more ports planned for the future, and they could use your help.
This was stuck up here on /. a while ago I think.

http://www.stanford.edu/group/pandegroup/Cosm/

I'm pretty sure they're clean.

--

It's a set of extensions to gcc (g++, actually) which can be programmed to look for semantic, rather than syntactic flaws in code, automatically. The theory is that if a class of bug turns up once, it'll probably occur throughout a given codebase. More details at http://hands.stanford.edu/.

There are other systems out there that can do similar things with eye movement, so you can save your neck.

Some good research from Stanford.

A practical demonstration.

Some people have no choice but to use such devices unfortunately.

It is nice to see it in Scientific American, but I think EUVL has been brought up in discussions of other NGLs here on /. The article does take a good broad perspective on the issues as they stand.

Intel has a paper on their website (if you can find it) that describes the process pretty straightforward as well (it might help the read to have a little bit of background).

Here is that and some other URLs:

http://www.llnl.gov/str/Sweeney.html

http://developer.intel.com/technology/itj/q31998/a rticles/art_4.htm

http://lithonet.eecs.berkeley.edu/network/backgrou nd.html

http://lasers.llnl.gov/IST/euvl.html

http://www.lbl.gov/Science-Articles/Research-Revie w/Highlights/1998/ALS_chips.html

http://chomsky.stanford.edu/~kevbert/neha_poster/s ld001.htm

http://www.cr.org/publications/MSM2000/html/W3202. html

http://www.google.com/search?client=googlet&q=EUV% 20lithography

-nicole

This article is a reference you may miss.

For a development so recent, there is considerable controvery over some basic details. For instance, consider GUI. Popular folklore attributes it to Parc, followed by Apple. But there is another viewpoint, the almost forgotten Engelbart. It's amazing that with all the people involved in these inventions still alive today, nobody quite agrees on who invented what. It's another matter trying to figure out who invented the first computer. I can't imagine what it will be like in a hundred years, when people look up contradictory records postulating various different accounts. Good luck trying to piece it together.

As for older theoretical subjects, one book you'll find invaluable is Donald Knuth's The Art of Computer Programming, in which he painstakingly traces back the history of various mathematical and computational developments.

Who invented the zero?

w/m

Definitely a good point, but I wouldn't underestimate the usefulness of simply being able to sequence better.

DNA Sequences alone can be/are useful for a lot of different research. Archaeologists and Anthropologists can use DNA sequences to help determine, for example, the relationship of one population to another and/or help trace migration of a population. Medical types can not only check for genetic diseases, but could also use DNA sequences to quickly check the identity of a pathogenic organism, if the sequencing technology becomes readily available enough. (Running a few PCR cycles is still much faster than trying to isolate and culture a pathogen from a swab). Zoologists and Paleontologists can use DNA sequences for similar purposes to what I mentioned for anthropologists and archaeologists, and can be handy for environmental research.

Again, this is true...but don't forget that "recombining already existing technologies" can be pretty powerful and useful all by itself. (Heck, "recombining existing technologies" is, basically, a fundamental design principle of Unix-based systems, isn't it? I know MY Unix-based systems are extremely useful... I love my "|" key...)

I'm confident we'll be getting plenty of use out of DNA while we work on the harder problems of protein functions and chemistry

P.S. Thanks for reminding me...I've been meaning to download the folding@home client and throw some of my meager computing resources at helping out...

Just have a look at this image from the construction of the Superkamiokande Neutrino Detector. The photomultiplier tubes ("mushrooms") used there are very much similar to those used for the AMANDA detector. You can see two of the AMANDA sensors here, together with the glass pressure globes they're put in before deployment.

I know this - have been working for the AMANDA group once, when we were calibrating the first PMT's for AMANDA back in 1995. It's done at Desy Zeuthen near Berlin. And we were using Linux boxes in the lab for data aquisition purposes ;-)

The nifty thing about AMANDA aren't the PMT tubes but the pressure globes they are put in (1500m of solid ice do exert some force ...). I've got one of the predecessors (used for the BAIKAL experiment) at home, it's cool telling people at a party that the salad bowl has once been at 1500m depth in Lake Baikal.

By the way, did someone notice that the AMANDA logo is a Penguin ?

All inventions are easier to copy than to develop in the first place and corporations will spend less on R&D if they can't expect to get a good return on their investment.

I think some software patents are legitimate. Ullman cited the best example--the RSA encryption method. There's nothing obvious about it and it was novel at the time. The people at RSA still had to put a lot of work into it in order to develop it into something useful, too. Look at the PKCS series of papers as well as the software written.

Since we have some real life innovators who are still living why don't we ask them. Off the top of my head I would recommend Tim Bernes Lee[?] or Alan Kay[?] as perfect candidates for a /. interview on the topic.

Sounds like another good reason to be a constructivisit. In Constructive mathematics, numbers are defined in terms of a total function which computes them (or, for a "real" number, a function which can get you arbitrarily close to them). None of this "let n = 1 if the continuum hypothesis is true, 0 otherwise" stuff! Constructive mathematics is pretty nice, though some "obvious" stuff is not provable.

Here's some links:

http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/mathematics-cons tructive/

http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~fp/courses/logic/

Of course, some classicists find delight in how insanely undecidable their mathematics is, and that's fine, too. =)

\Omega_{UTM} is a pretty cool idea, though, much worse than the standard trick of defining which has decimal digit n = 1 if turing machine n halts, 0 otherwise (also undecidable, but not as hopeless as his!). I wish I hadn't missed the lecture.

The best info I have found is
here. Very informative.

The correct title of the series is The Art of Computer Programming, although Volume I is named Fundamental Algorithms. You can read the details about it, and other forthcoming volumes, on this part of Knuth's home page.

As for MIX, the new editions will continue to use something similar to it, an assembly language for a machine called MMIX. Knuth explains why he continues to use a low-level language on his home page also. There are several reasons, and I can't do justice to them by trying to summarizing them here.

Funny side note: MMIX will have an operating system, NNIX. But the system is open, so

Other alternatives are also possible; for example, somebody at the Free Software Foundation might decide to come up with an alternative system called GNNIX.

Knuth's way with bad puns is one of his endearing qualities....

The correct title of the series is The Art of Computer Programming, although Volume I is named Fundamental Algorithms. You can read the details about it, and other forthcoming volumes, on this part of Knuth's home page.

As for MIX, the new editions will continue to use something similar to it, an assembly language for a machine called MMIX. Knuth explains why he continues to use a low-level language on his home page also. There are several reasons, and I can't do justice to them by trying to summarizing them here.

Funny side note: MMIX will have an operating system, NNIX. But the system is open, so

Other alternatives are also possible; for example, somebody at the Free Software Foundation might decide to come up with an alternative system called GNNIX.

Knuth's way with bad puns is one of his endearing qualities....

Now and again I wish to look up item of scientific interest--some formula in physics-and _every time_ I've turned to the Internet for research purposes, I would have been better served if I'd driven to the nearest library

Perhaps you should have tried the electronic HCP. Or one of the full text journals at Ideal, Highwire, or CUP. Darned expensive for the individual, but if you're coming from a subscribing university's subnet, faster, more convenient and cheaper than making a copy in the library.

A paper about our authentication scheme, which is based on our campus Kerberos infrastructure. We don't need to pre-register MAC addresses, unless some other schemes.

I reckon the truth as always is in the grey area in between. We can continue with a global economy based on growth, but that growth need not - in fact, MUST not - be at the expense of the environment, people's general wellbeing etc.
--
If the good lord had meant me to live in Los Angeles

I guess I'll drop that idea now ;) Anyway, I think the reviewers missed out on a couple of things I found most interesting:

1. Prof Donald Knuth (of Art of Computer programming fame) suggested to Diffie that a possible one way function was factoring, but Diffie and Hellman didn't pursue this strategy and it was independently discovered by Rivest, Shamir and Alderman.
2. Prof Larry Hoffman was presented with Merkle's paper containing the first ever public realisation of a Public Key system, but couldn't understand the maths involved, so ignored it!
3. Ericsson turned down the offer to buy ownership of RSA.

If you haven't got this book, and you're interested in crypto then I'd highly recommend it. It mentions the contributions of virtually every well known personality involved with modern cryptography: Tuchman, Horst Feistel, Coppersmith, Rivest, Diffie, Hellman, Chaum, Meyer, Gilmore, Schnorr, Eli Biham, Bruce Schneier, Jeff Schiller, Adam Back, Daniel Bernstein, Matt Blaze, Dorothy Denning, PRZ etc etc etc

I've read most decent crypto books, and Crypto is like a more up to date version of The Code by David Kahn...Coverage on the NSA follows neatly on from Bamfords The Puzzle Palace.

Actually, inner city schools tend to be well-funded. The terrible Washington, D.C. system has one of the highest per-student spending in the country. Throwing billions of dollars at the Kansas City schools didn't improve them at all.

In fact, extensive studies have shown that there's very little association between school funding and student performance.

See Does Money Matter or the work of Eric Hanushek

Individual and family factors are the dominant forces. Asian immigrants often attend poor schools yet manage to achieve. Conversely, there are many bad students in rich schools.

You can check out Stanford's fair use web site for more information. Also, see EFF's Understanding Fair Use Rights.

Xybernaut has been doing this for quite some time. There are also quite a few single board computers (SBCs) that are a very good base to build your own wearable. EMJ is a good place to find out more about SBC's. There are instructions for building your own matchbox server at the Stanford wearables page. With the addition of a HUD, this could easily be converted to a wearable. You can even order your own pre-made matchbox server here.


Enigma

Xybernaut has been doing this for quite some time. There are also quite a few single board computers (SBCs) that are a very good base to build your own wearable. EMJ is a good place to find out more about SBC's. There are instructions for building your own matchbox server at the Stanford wearables page. With the addition of a HUD, this could easily be converted to a wearable. You can even order your own pre-made matchbox server here.


Enigma

If some highschool kids can get can sats up and some college kids can get piocosats up and communicate with them, why couldn't NASA find a way to get NEAR back down. Ok Ok, maybe I expect to much.

If one of your goals is to have the piece of paper that says you're a qualified computer scientist, then clearly you have to go back to school in some form to get that. But if that doesn't matter so much to you, there are plenty of ways outside of school to gain knowledge that's directly relevant to your skills, or that will provide you with an excellent foundation to work from.

If you're good at studying by yourself, on the CS side there are classic textbooks like SICP (link has full text; also see the Slashdot review) and other reference books like Knuth's The Art of Computer Programming, or more focused books like Aho et al on Compilers. Studying material like this on your own can be difficult without any guidance, which is of course one of the reasons people go to college. But starting along this road may also help identify what you're interested in and what you're not, and where your strong and weak points are. That could help you choose your next step.

If you do start self-studying, some social support can help - joining mailing lists related to the topics you're interested in, finding local people who're interested in pursuing something similar (perhaps via clubs), etc.

Aside from the traditional pure CS material, there are plenty of good books out there that relate more directly to the world of work. One book that I've recently found helpful is "Analysis Patterns - Reusable Object Models" by Martin Fowler. This covers patterns that arise often in general business and financial applications, so may not be the kind of thing you're looking for specifically, but I mention it as an example of the kind of stuff that's out there - there's far more than just "Java for Dummies", and if you want to improve your skills and knowledge, you should seek some of these out.

If you do go back to to school, I think in some respects, Math might be a better choice, since (a) you really love it and (b) I think it's a "deeper" subject - compared to many advanced math topics, much of computer science is simple by comparison. But this comes back to what you want out of it: a math degree would open up science and engineering jobs that you could never get without it, but it doesn't directly provide you with CS skills, although a smart employer should recognize that a math major with CS skills is a great catch.

It would probably be advisable, whatever else is done in the universally decodable encoding scheme, to come to a better understanding of the relationship between the combinatorial heirarchy and the physical coupling constants of the universe before settling on a core encoding scheme.

It would probably be advisable, whatever else is done in the universally decodable encoding scheme, to come to a better understanding of the relationship between the combinatorial heirarchy and the physical coupling constants of the universe before settling on a core encoding scheme.

Go take a look at some of the writings in Donald Knuth's book Selected Papers on Computer Science to get a feel of what computer science is about. Knuth's target audience is the general public and it may very well fit your needs.

If you like designing algorithms, by all means, go to computer science.

Okay, so just so that I'm clear on this. The BSD code contributions were made freely by volunteers, who were not compensated for their contributions, nor did they hold on to the source code. (Indeed, as your own quote clearly states, BSD was never distributed without source code.) BSD was built off of the AT&T source code and for most of it's early history the developers never seperated the BSD code from the AT&T code, and a consequence, you needed the AT&T source code license to get it. This is all consistent with what I've said before.... so I'm not sure I understand what your point is.

The BSD distribution certainly included many, many innovations over the original AT&T code base. Nobody paid for those innovations, and the innovations were distributed in source form without requiring the source be kept proprietary. Certainly, the AT&T source code license didn't include a license for the BSD code.

I think it's a pretty good counter example to Microsoft's argument that innovation will not occur without the benefit of being able to keep the source code proprietary.

Please reread my posts. I never claimed that GCC was the living embodiment of the latest compiler theory. If your going to apply that kind of criteria there really isn't any software in the Windows or Macintosh world at least that qualifies as "innovative". As I've said before, GCC was one of the first cross-platform compilers, and later iterations included the innovation of being a cross-language compiler as well. On top of that, despite being so old and unsophisticated, GCC still manages to generate more efficient code than the most popular compilers out there. (I seem to recall the Metrowerks compiler has been hailed by the Macintosh community as innovative several times, yet GCC generates far more efficient code.) If you're going to continue to just say, "that's not innovative," I'd like to suggest you present the innovation that supports your point.

You say my statements about Timbuktu and X/Windows are unsupported, but you have not provided any supporting data. You're consistently stating that I'm making false, and yet you're making claims that you are not even sure of yourself. As I said before, I am sure of my claims about Timbuktu. I was there when it first came out.

So, let's review that one. First, Timbuktu is the same kind of technology as X/Windows. Timbuktu allows remote control of a GUI desktop. X/Windows' key capabilities aren't about remote control (although one could implement remote control using it's capabilities). X/Windows is a cross platform network GUI.

Now, since you couldn't be bothered to check up on X/Window's history, but it in fact was first developed at MIT in 1984. It was developed to solve problems they were facing with Project Athena. There was a lot of interest from the outside world for a standardized/hardend/freezon release. In 1988 MIT released version 11 release 2 to the general public. You can find documentation of this here.

Timbuktu was of course not developed in 1984. Indeed, it's resource requirements were far too much for the original Macintosh. I was unable to find any clear documentation about the origins of Timbuktu remote. However, rather than assuming that your claims are false, and despite the fact that I distinctly remember that X/Windows existed when Timbuktu came out, I checked for some kind of documentation. I finally found version 1.0.1 winning a 1989 Eddy award. I guess the product wasn't quite as early as you'd imagined.

So, to review, you're wrong about both when X/Windows was created, and when Timbuktu was created. You're also missing the point about the differences between X/Windows and Timbuktu.

Now on to the TeX link. I'm surprised that someone who's been around in the business as long as you would not know anything about Donald Knuth (author of The Art of Computer Programming). He's the original author of TeX, and he very much always intended it to be available to anyone who wanted it, source code included. He started work on to assist with his development of The Art of Computer Programming books. He took a 10 year hiatus from working on it after publishing volume 3 of the series, during which time he focused on the development of TeX (and Metafont). Check his CV. I noticed while looking at the CV that he actually published a book on TeX in 1979.

I also can't believe that you think that the first sentence on the home page of the TeX user's group would being in error about when the group was formed, particularly given the fact that you have no evidence to suggeset this was wrong.

Again, the specific date of TeX's development really doesn't matter anyway. TeX was (and still is) very innovative in the field of typesetting. So much so that it continues to be used today despite the fact that Knuth hasn't done much work on it since the 80's.

Finally, a comment about flames. Let's review your own postings. Despite your apparent ignorance of the history of computer science you are consistently claiming I'm making false statements (without providing any evidence to suggest your claims). When I do provide evidence, you seem to be either ignoring it, or in one case claiming it is incorrect (again, without counter-claiming evidence). For whatever rason, you seem to be clinging to your own revisionist history where software innovation has only occured in proprietary software; this is an increadible claim considering all the innovation that occured in the software industry both before the concept of source code existed, let alone the notion of copyrighting source code and providing binary-only licenses. On top of all that, you write a paragraph treatise about the tastes of the open source development being for 20 year old technology, while simultaneously disputing that any of the technologies I've brought up existed that long ago.

In short, you are flaming.

It's quite interesting that Hoff repeatedly talks about Intellectual Property and patent issues from back in 1971. It seems that this isn't just a modern problem, but that the US patent office has always been somewhat broken.

Actually, I was poking around the other interviews (tweak the URL to get there - someone knows good web design!) and ended up with Moore's interview (You know, Gorden E Moore? From whose business ventures damn near all of our IC technology sprung?) where he talks about the same stuff with Rob Walker.

RW: Ah, one of the questions that has come out of a number of lawsuits as of recently, that here on the west coast, in silicon valley, we didn't patent circuit designs or computer aided design for that matter. And as a result, we never patented at Fairchild the ROM and the RAM. Intel never patented the microprocessor... and others did. East coast companies or TI in particular, took our work and patented it. How come we never recognized the importance of that... circuit development?

GM: Well, it was probably a different attitude about patents. One thing that happened in the semiconductor industry... semiconductor processes are a long series of steps and the patents had gotten pretty broadly spread because all of the people working on the technology had some of them. And the net result was in order for any of us to operate we had to be cross-licensed so the participants tended to all cross-license one another. So, there was not a tremendous advantage to having more patents... with a couple of exceptions, there wasn't much net benefit from it.

What we never anticipated, I guess, was a lot of other participants were going to enter the business later on. So, at Fairchild we tended to patent relatively few things, typically the ones that we thought we could police most easily and were the most difficult to get around, you know, the more fundamental things. But, I was responsible for a lot of those decisions. I remember one in particular that, in retrospect, is kind of funny. In the early days of the integrated circuit, Bob Norman, one of the people who were involved there, suggested the idea of semiconductor memory... the whole idea of how semiconductor flip-flops could be used as a memory structure, and I decided it was so economically ridiculous, it didn't make any sense to file a patent on it.

Holy shit, how's that for a killer of DRAM patents?

Another fine clip:

GM: Well, you ask about patenting on the microprocessor and frankly, we didn't think the microprocessor per se was that patentable. What we had done was take a computer architecture and make it all on one chip instead of on several chips. And that was kind of the direction that the integrated circuit technology was pushing in anyhow, always putting more and more of the system on a chip. What TI did was then start saying: 'Well, a microprocessor with a keyboard is an 'invention,' and I'll admit, I never would have thought of filing patents on those things that TI got issued patents for.

Just thought you might like to see it.

--
ALL YOUR KARMA ARE BELONG TO US

at this page.

A company in Lousville, KY [full disclosure: I worked for thier previous incarnation], has been working on this with great success for quite a long time. Agora Interactive the system they call "GATE" also includes video conferencing in the system.

They also developed a virtual reality game based on a doom/quake-like engine using the iGlasses, a standard arcade box, and a Pentium 133.

Unfortunately, look like they filled for Chapter 11 (reorganization) in January.

Four people are credited with designing the 4004: Ted Hoff, Stan Mazor, Federico Faggin and Masatoshi Shima.

There are evidently bad feelings between Faggin and Hoff because Faggin feels he did all of the real work, and Hoff got much of the credit. Many accounts do not give Shima any credit, only giving credit to the three Intel engineers (Shima was an engineer at Busicom, a Japanese calculator company at the time, and later became an Intel engineer).

Interview with Shima (extremely interesting and detailed)

Another interview with Shima

Interview with Hoff

An e-mail from Mazor, and nice pictures of the 4004

A really nice picture of the 4004

A picture of three of the engineers (no Shima) years later

A picture of all four engineers

Federico Faggin's initials on the 4004 -- the only initials on the chip

Very Interesting. I'd never seen the resolution of this.

If you go to the interview and search on "Hyatt" you come to the point where Hoff belittles Hyatt's patent, gives some lame implied demurrer about the design not being the implementation, blames the PTO for doing its job, and then admits that "royalties are being paid" to Hyatt, presumably by Intel and everyone else who constructs microcomputers.

It's pretty easy to believe that if Hyatt's patent had no merit, or limited scope, or even if it had a disqualifying claim, then Intel, Compaq, IBM, Dell, Apple, and all those other 8,000-ton gorillas would have fought it in court, successfully, and they would not be paying Hyatt anything nor citing his numbers on their plastic.

--Blair
"In your patent application for The Universe, it is not necessary to provide a working model."

A recipe for sticking it to the man:

Combine righteous hacker outrage with cheap amateur satellites and mix in an open sharing standard that already has the critical mass needed.

Bake for a few weeks, and voila. File sharing for all, without the overhead of legislation.

The coke cans are dropped out at only 12k ft (the launch vehicle puts up 3 at a time) they are dropped on a parachute - the hang-time is about the same as for the sky-time in a single micro-sat pass so it's a great way to test if your payload can handle the stresses of launch and test your downlick hardware and software in real-world conditions....

Arliss is growing .... there are more and more payloads going up every year (dates for this year are here) - and now they have a rover contest - launch your rover to 10k ft have it return and find it's way back autonomously to a designated target. I also hear plans are being made to extend the launch sites across the country

They're durable. Books can be burned or soaked, but short of that they're remarkably hard to destroy. Books from centuries ago have been preserved and read, despite the aging fragility of the paper; I can't even emulate computer software that was written forty years ago.

For the last 100 years or so, most books have been printed on acidic paper that doesn't last nearly so long. Here are some 19th century Dickens novels that are already too brittle to read. Apparently alkaline paper is no more expensive than acidic paper now, though. The Alkaline Paper Advocate appears to have far more information than you could ever want about this.

While some people are discussing Folding@Home as a response to your question of a "seti-like" processing system; there is actually a much more relevant project, also hosted at Stanford. The Genome@Home Project is attmepting "to design new genes that can form working proteins in the cell" from the DNA sequence of non-human organisms. It is a new project, but gaining speed quickly. It is worth taking a look at if you have spare cycles you can give to a good cause.
-OctaneZ

I wonder if it would be possible to use a massive parallel processing system (such as SETI) just to *start* things. I know that it isn't the lack of CPU the main issue, but I think it *could* become. Once a good strategy has been found, wouldn't a great amount of cpu power be useful? At least to try things, to experiment, to choose or refine a strategy.

There already is one: Folding @ Home. (As potential contact with aliens seems to be well handled at the moment, I'm going to be moving my spare cycles over to this.)

OK, so most Linux people don't like the fact that winmodems are closed devices that are not supported on Linux. The conventional wisdom complains that existing winmodems give poor performance and kill the CPU. However in a recent /. post no less a personage than John Carmack suggested that winmodems could be implemented in a way that is better than conventional modems for the needs of interactive games.

In the process of doing a web search I then turned up Stuart Cheshire's old home page. For those who don't know who he is, well before the web was popular he wrote a classic networked Mac game called bolo. (In fact when the web became popular the bolo players used to curse that the web was dragging the internet down too much...) Most links to it are dead, but the official home page is still up although there has not been a release since 1995. (This was apparently done as research into the needs of interactive networked programs. Gee, all of those hours that I spent as a test subject without knowing it...)

With Stuart's credentials established, it is well worth looking at his rants. In particular his latency rant, which was expanded out into a white paper.

Once you are through reading those you will see that for anything interactive, particularly games, what really matters is latency, not bandwidth. And modems are a major source of this latency. In addition he and John Carmack agree that software modems (AKA winmodems) can be (though they are not currently) programmed to operate in a mode that reduces latency, and the result would be better for interactive games than conventional modems.

So, are winmodems just a bad idea, or are they just poorly implemented? Conventional wisdom says that they are bad no matter what. But the people who should know best suggest otherwise.

-snellac

OK, so most Linux people don't like the fact that winmodems are closed devices that are not supported on Linux. The conventional wisdom complains that existing winmodems give poor performance and kill the CPU. However in a recent /. post no less a personage than John Carmack suggested that winmodems could be implemented in a way that is better than conventional modems for the needs of interactive games.

In the process of doing a web search I then turned up Stuart Cheshire's old home page. For those who don't know who he is, well before the web was popular he wrote a classic networked Mac game called bolo. (In fact when the web became popular the bolo players used to curse that the web was dragging the internet down too much...) Most links to it are dead, but the official home page is still up although there has not been a release since 1995. (This was apparently done as research into the needs of interactive networked programs. Gee, all of those hours that I spent as a test subject without knowing it...)

With Stuart's credentials established, it is well worth looking at his rants. In particular his latency rant, which was expanded out into a white paper.

Once you are through reading those you will see that for anything interactive, particularly games, what really matters is latency, not bandwidth. And modems are a major source of this latency. In addition he and John Carmack agree that software modems (AKA winmodems) can be (though they are not currently) programmed to operate in a mode that reduces latency, and the result would be better for interactive games than conventional modems.

So, are winmodems just a bad idea, or are they just poorly implemented? Conventional wisdom says that they are bad no matter what. But the people who should know best suggest otherwise.

-snellac

OK, so most Linux people don't like the fact that winmodems are closed devices that are not supported on Linux. The conventional wisdom complains that existing winmodems give poor performance and kill the CPU. However in a recent /. post no less a personage than John Carmack suggested that winmodems could be implemented in a way that is better than conventional modems for the needs of interactive games.

In the process of doing a web search I then turned up Stuart Cheshire's old home page. For those who don't know who he is, well before the web was popular he wrote a classic networked Mac game called bolo. (In fact when the web became popular the bolo players used to curse that the web was dragging the internet down too much...) Most links to it are dead, but the official home page is still up although there has not been a release since 1995. (This was apparently done as research into the needs of interactive networked programs. Gee, all of those hours that I spent as a test subject without knowing it...)

With Stuart's credentials established, it is well worth looking at his rants. In particular his latency rant, which was expanded out into a white paper.

Once you are through reading those you will see that for anything interactive, particularly games, what really matters is latency, not bandwidth. And modems are a major source of this latency. In addition he and John Carmack agree that software modems (AKA winmodems) can be (though they are not currently) programmed to operate in a mode that reduces latency, and the result would be better for interactive games than conventional modems.

So, are winmodems just a bad idea, or are they just poorly implemented? Conventional wisdom says that they are bad no matter what. But the people who should know best suggest otherwise.

-snellac

OK, so most Linux people don't like the fact that winmodems are closed devices that are not supported on Linux. The conventional wisdom complains that existing winmodems give poor performance and kill the CPU. However in a recent /. post no less a personage than John Carmack suggested that winmodems could be implemented in a way that is better than conventional modems for the needs of interactive games.

In the process of doing a web search I then turned up Stuart Cheshire's old home page. For those who don't know who he is, well before the web was popular he wrote a classic networked Mac game called bolo. (In fact when the web became popular the bolo players used to curse that the web was dragging the internet down too much...) Most links to it are dead, but the official home page is still up although there has not been a release since 1995. (This was apparently done as research into the needs of interactive networked programs. Gee, all of those hours that I spent as a test subject without knowing it...)

With Stuart's credentials established, it is well worth looking at his rants. In particular his latency rant, which was expanded out into a white paper.

Once you are through reading those you will see that for anything interactive, particularly games, what really matters is latency, not bandwidth. And modems are a major source of this latency. In addition he and John Carmack agree that software modems (AKA winmodems) can be (though they are not currently) programmed to operate in a mode that reduces latency, and the result would be better for interactive games than conventional modems.

So, are winmodems just a bad idea, or are they just poorly implemented? Conventional wisdom says that they are bad no matter what. But the people who should know best suggest otherwise.

-snellac

Arliss is growing .... there are more and more payloads going up every year - and now they have a rover contest - launch your rover to 10k ft have it return and find it's way back autonomously to a designated target

• The Architecture of Privacy
  
• Cyberspace's Architectural Constitution.
  
• Architecting for Control
  

• It's the Architecture, Mr. Chairman.
  

Looks like these guys have come up with a redimentary opensource tivo: http://www.stanford.edu/~jjd1/opendvr/. Looks like a fun and very promising school project! Aparently they could not solve the realtime encoding problem. S

It's not about racial groups, it's about animal abuse...human cruelty.

A number of years ago, Toronto really became a laughingstock when baseball player Dave Winfield, after accidentally killing a (which, by the way, is vermin - it's basically a rat with wings), was instantly arrested by the police and busted for cruelty to animals.

Excerpt from this website http://www.stanford.edu/~greggjp/EEEEEE/Notes00/Ma y00Notes1.html

If I remember right, Winfield was actually arrested, though the charges were dropped. Something about Billy Martin refuting the very idea that Winfield could've hit the bird on purpose, given that he hadn't hit a cutoff man all year. (In case you don't know what I'm talking about, Winfield was booed for years in Toronto after killing a seagull -- the national bird of Canada -- with a thrown baseball.)

Those people really have their priorities totally screwed-up as a society.

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Ricochet modems also have a packet-based peer-to-peer "STAR" mode which Linux supports through the strip.o kernel module, basically acting like a low bandwidth but longer range wireless ethernet, at, I believe, the same legally limited 1 watt of power used by the Metricom pole top repeaters. Stanford University has a network of these things called MosquitoNet.

At ~10X the range, and therefore ~100X the coverage area of 802.11b wireless ethernet, the 128kbps $99 metricom units could easily be used by nerds or local ISP's to blanket most metropolitan areas with their own wireless internet service.

By the way, since metricom modem cards are made by separate companies like Novatel and Sierra Wireless (don't know about the external modems) and the ISP's are also independent companies, I think Metricom-based networks would find a way to continue if, heaven forbid, Metricom were to go under. I certainly hope the Metricom people make a fortune. They have made a great product, which I use every day.