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Napster Ethics by Aigeanta · 2000-06-05 07:50 · Score: 2 · on Napster, Napster, Napster

I just finished a group final for a Stanford class called Computers, Ethics, and Social Responsibility, and our project focused on the ethical issues surrounding Napster. We cloned the Napster design for our ethics website, which is apparently allowable under Napster's Terms of Use agreement, as long as we don't mock them or cause brand confusion. Anyway, if any of you have a particularly strong opinion about Napster, MP3s, the RIAA, or artists' and listeners' rights, please consider posting it on our Outside Opinions page. Thanks a lot!

Re:Damascene Steel by Redline242 · 2000-06-02 22:43 · Score: 2 · on The Oldest Knives In The Solar System

A couple links of note for people interested in this stuff:

Meier Steel has some INCREDIBLE examples of Damascus steel work
This site has a very nice photo-essay on the making of traditional Japanese swords

Re:Going to Jail? by muldrake · 2000-05-31 04:37 · Score: 1 · on The MP3 Troubles Continue

They might have to search his car, too, and all his clothes

Don't forget the full-body cavity search! He might just have a beowulf cluster of wearables rammed up his ass.

Re:hey by phil+reed · 2000-05-30 21:31 · Score: 2 · on Google's 4000 Node Linux Cluster

You're a little late on number 6. 1+1 has been shown to be equal to 2, but the proof took 211 pages in Principia Mathematica . You can also find the proof for 2+2=4 here. 2+2=4 is obviously related to 1+1=2, with a few extra steps.

...phil

Put that into a cellular/mobile phone! by mvw · 2000-05-30 18:04 · Score: 1 · on Tiny PC: The Matchbox Web Server's Revenge

Combine that matchbox pc with a Nokia Communicator mobile phone. Wow.

And that docking station is awesome.

And these are just lab versions, working with standard notebook PCMIA dimensions.

Thumbcode by twjordan · 2000-05-30 00:17 · Score: 1 · on Tiny PC: The Matchbox Web Server's Revenge

the coolest thing I saw on that page was a link to this site about thumbcode and other devices. I want one today!

Tiqit by gargle · 2000-05-29 08:19 · Score: 3 · on Compaq Itsy Usability movies

Also take a look at Tiqit, founded to market minature computers by the Stanford professor whose matchbox web server was slashdotted sometime back.

Wrong URL by trey · 2000-05-28 16:13 · Score: 1 · on Proving General Relativity with Crystal Balls

The url for the experiment is actually here. IMHO machining a perfect sphere is very difficult. This experiment will be all about how clean that sphere really is. Good luck guys!

Re:Gyroscope Design by eallison · 2000-05-28 03:53 · Score: 1 · on Proving General Relativity with Crystal Balls

Here's the official site for the project: einstein.stanford.edu. It has a complete description of the all the parts of the experiment, including the design and manufacture of the gyros.

Old news - here is a reference from about Dec 99. by z-man · 2000-05-27 23:04 · Score: 1 · on Proving General Relativity with Crystal Balls

The gravity probe mission idea, to test relativity has been around for a while. I remember reading the article in Science Illustrated back in early 99. Anyways, I also found a link to official site for Gravity Probe mission.

Rational Programming is Not an Oxymoron by Baldrson · 2000-05-27 21:57 · Score: 2 · on What Will The Internet Of The Future Be Like?

The future of the Internet is in what I call "rational programming" derived from a revival of Bertrand Russell's Relation Arithmetic. Rational programming is a classically applicable branch of relation arithmetic's sub theory of quantum software (as opposed to the hardware-oriented technology of quantum computing). By classically applicable I mean it is applies to conventional computing systems -- not just quantum information systems. Rational programming will subsume what Tim Berners Lee calls the semantic web. The basic problem Tim (and just about everyone back through Bertrand Russell) fails to perceive is that logic is irrational. John McCarthy's signature line says it all about this kind of approach: "He who refuses to do arithmetic is doomed to talk nonsense." More on this a bit later, but first some history, because he who fails to learn from history is doomed to repeat its nonsense:

When I invented the precursor to Postscript (an audacious claim that I can back up -- it started as a replacement for NAPLPS which I proposed while Manager of Interactive Architectures for Viewdata Corp of America back in November of 1981 -- the Xerox PARC guys found my approach of what they called a "tokenized Forth" communication protocol to be an intriguing way to encode text and graphics), I was interested in having a Forth virtual machine migrate into silicon (ala Novix) so it could evolve from mere graphics rendering into a distributed Smalltalk VM environment (ala Squeak) as videotex terminal/personal computer capacities increased. But I was _not_ interested in object-oriented programming as the long-term semantics of distributed programming environments. (I still have some of the hardcopy of the communiques with Xerox PARC and others from this period.)

Rather, relational semantics were what I saw as the ultimate direction for distributed programming. I had a bit of a go at Tony Hoare's "communicating sequential processes" paradigm and its Transputer realization because he was, at least, starting with the hard problem of parallelism rather than making like the drunk looking for his keys under the light post the way everyone else seemed to be doing (and still are, save for Mozart, since threads, etc. are always an afterthought). But, because there were other hard problems like abstraction, transactions and persistence that he ignored, I christened his approach "Occam's Chainsaw Massacre" in my communiques (in honor of his distributed programming language "Occam") and dropped it in favor of relational programming, which has inherent parallelism resulting from both dependency and indeterminacy. (BTW: Dr. Hoare seems to have finally come to his senses about this issue.)

Unfortunately, the only researcher doing hardcore work on relational programming (meaning, getting to the root of relational semantics in a way that Codd had failed to do) at the time was Bruce MacLennan, then, of The Naval Postgraduate School, and he just didn't have the glamour of Alan Kay at places like Xerox PARC to attract the attention of guys like Steve Jobs. Bruce had a bit of a blind-spot, too, when it came to transactions and persistence, which I attempted to remedy by bringing David P. Reed's work on distributed transactions for the ARPAnet to him, but although he wrote a white paper on a predicate calculus (close to a relational) implementation of Reed's thesis (MIT/LCS/TR-205), he didn't really "get it", IMHO. Reed and MacLennan abandoned their work for other pursuits (ironically, Reed was chief scientist at Lotus while Notes was being developed but did not contribute his ideas on distributed synchronization to that development despite the fact that we had a mutual acquaintance from my Plato days by the name of Ray Ozzie -- so, I share some of the blame for this failure) even as Steve Jobs botched the embryonic object oriented world by abandoning Smalltalk and giving us, instead, a lineage consisting of Object Pascal on the Lisa/Mac which begat Objective C on Jobs's NeXT which begat Java at Sun via Naughton and Gosling's experience with NeXT.

This brings us to the present -- a world in which Javascript-based technologies like Tibet promise to not only salvage the object oriented aspect of the Internet from the birth defects of Jobs's spawn, but actually provide an advance over Smalltalk in the same lineage as CLOS and Self. But it is also a world in which there is growing confusion over the proper role of "metadata" in the form of XML -- particularly when it comes to speech acts and distributed inference. I would call Tibet "the next major Internet advance" except for the fact that the basic idea for a Tibet-like system has been around and well understood since the early 1980's. When it is finally released, Tibet (or a system like it) will put the Internet back on track. I call that a "recovery", not an "advance".

We are now poised to move forward with type inference based on full blown inference engines, thereby dispensing with the nonterminating arguments over statically vs dynamically typed languages that allowed Steve Jobs's spawn to get its nose in the tent. If you want to declare a "type" in a declarative language, just make another declaration and let the inference engine figure out what it can do with that information prior to run time. See how easy that was? Well, there is more to it than that, but not that much: Assertions have implications and assertions made prior to run time have implications prior to run time. Live with it and don't repeat the mistakes of the past.

The confusion over semantic webs, and the reason Berners Lee et al will fail, is essentially the same as the confusion that has beleaguered all inferential systems such as logic programming and "artificial intelligence" over the years: logic is irrational and the real world demands rationality -- otherwise nothing makes sense. By "rationality" I mean that reasoning must literally incorporate "ratios" -- or, as John McCarthy would put it, doing arithmetic so things make sense. By making sense, I mean there is a sense in which one interprets the sea of assertions that clearly dominates for a particular purpose. With logic not only are you limited to 0 and 1 as effective quantities; you have no adequate theoretic basis from which to derive more accurate quantities with which to make sense by taking ratios and determining which inferences are dominant.

Fuzzy logic and expert systems incorporating probabilities have typically failed because they are not based in the first principles of probability and statistics. As Gauss, the premiere probability theorist put it, "Mathematics is the study of relations." He didn't say, "Mathematics is the study of multisets." There are good reasons that relational databases, and not set manipulation languages, have come to dominate business applications -- and Gauss was aware of these differences when he began to derive his laws of probability. Subsequent axiomatizations of mathematics based on set theory were similarly misguided and have led to the idea that "fuzzy sets" are the way to introduce rationality into programming. Rather than sets, relations are the foundation, not just of mathematics but of rationality in the same sense that Gauss realized when he derived his theory of probability from the study of relations.

Rationality allows for judgment which is recognized as inherently fallible -- but which allows one to procede without exponentiating all possible paths of inference. Judgment also allows various identities to limit sharing of information to that needed -- thereby creating speech acts and a basis for rational measures of credibility associated with those identities. Since credit-rating is a degeneration of credibility, it should come as no shock that the invention of negative numbers, originating as they did with the Arabic invention of double entry account keeping, has its analog in something that might be called "logical debt" with which negative probabilities are associated.

And now we have come to the "quantum" aspect of rational programming. It is precisely the "credibility debt" aspect of rational programming that corresponds, in mathematical detail, to the various equations of quantum mechanics and their negative probability amplitudes. (Von Neumann's quantum logic failed to properly incorporate logical debt which has led to much confusion.) Logical debt is important to distributed programming for the same reason debt is important to financial networks. Logical debt is a way of handling poor synchronization of information flow in the same way that financial debt is a way of handling poor synchronization of cash flow. As in any rational system, there are both limits to credit and limits to credibilty that influence one's judgments and actions, including speech acts.

The object oriented folks may, in a sense, have the last laugh here because when we divide up inference into identities that engage in speech acts, we are reintroducing the notion of objects that hide information via exchange of speech act messages that can be thought of as "setters" (assertions) and "getters" (queries). However, I believe it is only fair to recognize that the excellent intuitions of Johan Dahl and Kristen Nygaard did need the added insights and rigor of philosophers like J. L. Austin and T. Etter.

Re:JPEG2000 Comparison... by gargle · 2000-05-27 13:55 · Score: 4 · on JPEG2000: Is It The Future Of Imaging?

We did a JPEG vs JPEG2000 comparison for a class project here. The improvement seems to be dramatic, especially at low bit rates.

if you like that comic... by aclaudet · 2000-05-25 22:00 · Score: 1 · on Evil Geniuses In A Nutshell

...and you went to, or are going to, grad school you'll almost certainly like Piled Higher and Deeper in the Stanford Daily. Check out their Matrix parody

My god, that's funny stuff.

p.s. I bought the Evil Geniuses book based solely on the title in a /. banner ad. I wasn't disappointed.

Re:Vague on increased precision by Carnage4Life · 2000-05-24 22:00 · Score: 1 · on Big Step in Quantum Searching

That is not necessarily true. Read the article and the links on quantum computing on Grover's page. This article states that IBM researchers claim that Quantum computers will be so much faster than conventional PCs that searching eight trillion bytes of data searching for one word may take a month but a Quantum computer could do this in 27 minutes. This means that quantum computing algorithms can therefore be much more complex than regular algorithms with imperceptible speed difference on a quantum PC while the same algorithm would be horribly inefficient on a conventional PC. For example a sequential search is considered horribly inefficient on conventinal PCs but with the speed of Quantum computers, it would get the job done in a speedy enough manner. (I haven't studied quantum computing besides reading a few articles so please forgive me if my example isn't technically accurate, maybe a grad student somewhere can shed light on this?)

Free speech laws in Europe and the US by Anonymous Coward · 2000-05-23 14:27 · Score: 1 · on French Court To Yahoo!: Dump Nazi-Related Auctions

Many postings reveal a misunderstanding of free speech issues on the part of many posters, and a lack of knowledge of French and US law as it relates to free speech and "hate speech".

First of all, contrary to what many people seem to think, the US has at least as many restrictions on free speech as most European countries (including France). For example in most countries (US included) you can't libel or threaten individuals, neither can you call for murder. The US has many more restrictions in the law (no child pronography, restrictions on "normal" pornography), and in the customs (no nudity on TV, etc...). Many American left-wing activists and black artists who emigrated to France in the 1950s certainly thought that France had a more liberal attitude towards free speech than the US back then. So, it's all a matter of perception.

The Yahoo lawsuit was made possible by two additional French laws described below. Incidentally, the French government was not involved in this lawsuit. The suit was brought up by LICRA, which is the French equivalent of the Anti-Defamation League in the US.

France has a law that restricts threats, libels, defamation, or calls for violence not only towards individuals, but also towards groups of people, particularly if these groups are defined by skin color or ethnicity. Such speech is called "incitation a la haine raciale" (enticement to racial hatred) and is a crime.

Contrary to what CNN says, there is no law in France against "artifacts with racial overtones" (there are plenty of movies on French TV with swastikas and such), but the anti-racial-hatred laws would limit what you can do in public with those artifacts.

There is another law in France that forbids people from denying the existence of the holocaust (Germany has a similar law). We often forget that fascism in Germany and Italy in the 1930's was the result of popular movements, and rose to power through quasi-democratic processes (at least initially). Those movements existed in France, but were not very strong (in fact, France kicked out the conservatives and elected a socialist government in 1936). A good way to prevent fascism from occuring again through the democratic process is to make sure the electorate remembers what happened back then. That's why France and Germany have these anti-revisionist laws.

- Anonycous Moward

Matchbox size Server by molda · 2000-05-22 21:42 · Score: 1 · on Potato-Powered Web Server

Stanford University have developed a webserver the size of a matchbox here at the Wearables Lab

Finally... a story where this is *not* offtopic... by Anonymous Coward · 2000-05-19 20:38 · Score: 5 · on Oxford Yanks Student Page Over Spoof DeCSS

and I'm asleep at the keyboard. Doh!

Oh well... here it is.
Add your own, and spread this far and wide:

This announcement brought to you by the DeCSS Polar Bear.

Referances by Money__ · 2000-05-16 05:50 · Score: 2 · on Bow Tie Theory: Researchers Map The Web

Adamic and Huberman (1) 99. L. Adamic and B. Huberman. The nature of markets on the World Wide Web, Xerox PARC Technical Report, 1999.

Adamic and Huberman (2) 99. L. Adamic and B. Huberman. Scaling behavior on the World Wide Web, Technical comment on Barabasi and Albert 99.

Aiello, Chung, and Lu 00. W. Aiello, F. Chung and L. Lu. A random graph model for massive graphs, ACM Symposium on the Theory and Computing 2000.

Albert, Jeong, and Barabasi 99. R. Albert, H. Jeong, and A.-L. Barabasi. Diameter of the World Wide Web, Nature 401:130-131, Sep 1999.

Barabasi and Albert 99. A. Barabasi and R. Albert. Emergence of scaling in random networks, Science, 286(509), 1999.

Barford et. al. 99. P. Barford, A. Bestavros, A. Bradley, and M. E. Crovella. Changes in Web client access patterns: Characteristics and caching implications, in World Wide Web, Special Issue on Characterization and Performance Evaluation, 2:15-28, 1999.

Bharat et. al. 98. K. Bharat, A. Broder, M. Henzinger, P. Kumar, and S. Venkatasubramanian. The connectivity server: fast access to linkage information on the web, Proc. 7th WWW, 1998.

Bharat and Henzinger 98. K. Bharat, and M. Henzinger. Improved algorithms for topic distillation in hyperlinked environments, Proc. 21st SIGIR, 1998.

Brin and Page 98. S. Brin, and L. Page. The anatomy of a large scale hypertextual web search engine, Proc. 7th WWW, 1998.

Butafogo and Schniederman 91. R. A. Butafogo and B. Schneiderman. Identifying aggregates in hypertext structures, Proc. 3rd ACM Conference on Hypertext, 1991.

Carriere and Kazman 97. J. Carriere, and R. Kazman. WebQuery: Searching and visualizing the Web through connectivity , Proc. 6th WWW, 1997.

Chakrabarti et. al. (1) 98. S. Chakrabarti, B. Dom, D. Gibson, J. Kleinberg, P. Raghavan, and S. Rajagopalan. Automatic resource compilation by analyzing hyperlink structure and associated text, Proc. 7th WWW, 1998.

Chakrabarti et. al. (2) 98. S. Chakrabarti, B. Dom, D. Gibson, S. Ravi Kumar, P. Raghavan, S. Rajagopalan, and A. Tomkins. Experiments in topic distillation, Proc. ACM SIGIR workshop on Hypertext Information Retrieval on the Web, 1998.

Chakrabarti, Gibson, and McCurley 99. S. Chakrabarti, D. Gibson, and K. McCurley.Surfing the Web backwards, Proc. 8th WWW, 1999.

Cho and Garcia-Molina 2000 J. Cho, H. Garcia-Molina Synchronizing a database to Improve Freshness . To appear in 2000 ACM International Conference on Management of Data (SIGMOD), May 2000.

Faloutsos, Faloutsos, and Faloutsos 99. M. Faloutsos, P. Faloutsos, and C. Faloutsos. On power law relationships of the internet topology, ACM SIGCOMM, 1999.

Glassman 94. S. Glassman. A caching relay for the world wide web , Proc. 1st WWW, 1994.
Harary 75. F. Harary. Graph Theory, Addison Wesley, 1975.

Huberman et. al. 98. B. Huberman, P. Pirolli, J. Pitkow, and R. Lukose. Strong regularities in World Wide Web surfing, Science, 280:95-97, 1998.

Kleinberg 98. J. Kleinberg. Authoritative sources in a hyperlinked environment, Proc. 9th ACM-SIAM SODA, 1998.

Kumar et. al. (1) 99. R. Kumar, P. Raghavan, S. Rajagopalan, and A. Tomkins. Trawling the Web for cyber communities, Proc. 8th WWW , Apr 1999.

Kumar et. al. (2) 99. R. Kumar, P. Raghavan, S. Rajagopalan, and A. Tomkins. Extracting large scale knowledge bases from the Web, Proc. VLDB, Jul 1999.

Lukose and Huberman 98. R. M. Lukose and B. Huberman. Surfing as a real option, Proc. 1st International Conference on Information and Computation Economies, 1998.

Martindale and Konopka 96. C. Martindale and A K Konopka. Oligonucleotide frequencies in DNA follow a Yule distribution, Computer & Chemistry, 20(1):35-38, 1996.

Mendelzon, Mihaila, and Milo 97. A. Mendelzon, G. Mihaila, and T. Milo. Querying the World Wide Web, Journal of Digital Libraries 1(1), pp. 68-88, 1997.

Mendelzon and Wood 95. A. Mendelzon and P. Wood. Finding regular simple paths in graph databases, SIAM J. Comp. 24(6):1235-1258, 1995.

Pareto 1897. V Pareto. Cours d'economie politique, Rouge, Lausanne et Paris, 1897.

Pirolli, Pitkow, and Rao 96. P. Pirolli, J. Pitkow, and R. Rao. Silk from a sow's ear: Extracting usable structures from the Web , Proc. ACM SIGCHI, 1996.

Pitkow and Pirolli 97. J. Pitkow and P. Pirolli. Life, death, and lawfulness on the electronic frontier, Proc. ACM SIGCHI, 1997.

Simon 55. H.A. Simon. On a class of stew distribution functions, Biometrika, 42:425-440, 1955.

White and McCain 89. H.D. White and K.W. McCain, Bibliometrics, in: Ann. Rev. Info. Sci. and Technology, Elsevier, 1989, pp. 119-186.

Yule 44. G.U. Yule. Statistical Study of Literary Vocabulary, Cambridge University Press, 1944.

Zipf 49. G.K. Zipf. Human Behavior and the Principle of Least Effort, Addison-Wesley, 1949.
___

Referances by Money__ · 2000-05-16 05:50 · Score: 2 · on Bow Tie Theory: Researchers Map The Web

Adamic and Huberman (1) 99. L. Adamic and B. Huberman. The nature of markets on the World Wide Web, Xerox PARC Technical Report, 1999.

Adamic and Huberman (2) 99. L. Adamic and B. Huberman. Scaling behavior on the World Wide Web, Technical comment on Barabasi and Albert 99.

Aiello, Chung, and Lu 00. W. Aiello, F. Chung and L. Lu. A random graph model for massive graphs, ACM Symposium on the Theory and Computing 2000.

Albert, Jeong, and Barabasi 99. R. Albert, H. Jeong, and A.-L. Barabasi. Diameter of the World Wide Web, Nature 401:130-131, Sep 1999.

Barabasi and Albert 99. A. Barabasi and R. Albert. Emergence of scaling in random networks, Science, 286(509), 1999.

Barford et. al. 99. P. Barford, A. Bestavros, A. Bradley, and M. E. Crovella. Changes in Web client access patterns: Characteristics and caching implications, in World Wide Web, Special Issue on Characterization and Performance Evaluation, 2:15-28, 1999.

Bharat et. al. 98. K. Bharat, A. Broder, M. Henzinger, P. Kumar, and S. Venkatasubramanian. The connectivity server: fast access to linkage information on the web, Proc. 7th WWW, 1998.

Bharat and Henzinger 98. K. Bharat, and M. Henzinger. Improved algorithms for topic distillation in hyperlinked environments, Proc. 21st SIGIR, 1998.

Brin and Page 98. S. Brin, and L. Page. The anatomy of a large scale hypertextual web search engine, Proc. 7th WWW, 1998.

Butafogo and Schniederman 91. R. A. Butafogo and B. Schneiderman. Identifying aggregates in hypertext structures, Proc. 3rd ACM Conference on Hypertext, 1991.

Carriere and Kazman 97. J. Carriere, and R. Kazman. WebQuery: Searching and visualizing the Web through connectivity , Proc. 6th WWW, 1997.

Chakrabarti et. al. (1) 98. S. Chakrabarti, B. Dom, D. Gibson, J. Kleinberg, P. Raghavan, and S. Rajagopalan. Automatic resource compilation by analyzing hyperlink structure and associated text, Proc. 7th WWW, 1998.

Chakrabarti et. al. (2) 98. S. Chakrabarti, B. Dom, D. Gibson, S. Ravi Kumar, P. Raghavan, S. Rajagopalan, and A. Tomkins. Experiments in topic distillation, Proc. ACM SIGIR workshop on Hypertext Information Retrieval on the Web, 1998.

Chakrabarti, Gibson, and McCurley 99. S. Chakrabarti, D. Gibson, and K. McCurley.Surfing the Web backwards, Proc. 8th WWW, 1999.

Cho and Garcia-Molina 2000 J. Cho, H. Garcia-Molina Synchronizing a database to Improve Freshness . To appear in 2000 ACM International Conference on Management of Data (SIGMOD), May 2000.

Faloutsos, Faloutsos, and Faloutsos 99. M. Faloutsos, P. Faloutsos, and C. Faloutsos. On power law relationships of the internet topology, ACM SIGCOMM, 1999.

Glassman 94. S. Glassman. A caching relay for the world wide web , Proc. 1st WWW, 1994.
Harary 75. F. Harary. Graph Theory, Addison Wesley, 1975.

Huberman et. al. 98. B. Huberman, P. Pirolli, J. Pitkow, and R. Lukose. Strong regularities in World Wide Web surfing, Science, 280:95-97, 1998.

Kleinberg 98. J. Kleinberg. Authoritative sources in a hyperlinked environment, Proc. 9th ACM-SIAM SODA, 1998.

Kumar et. al. (1) 99. R. Kumar, P. Raghavan, S. Rajagopalan, and A. Tomkins. Trawling the Web for cyber communities, Proc. 8th WWW , Apr 1999.

Kumar et. al. (2) 99. R. Kumar, P. Raghavan, S. Rajagopalan, and A. Tomkins. Extracting large scale knowledge bases from the Web, Proc. VLDB, Jul 1999.

Lukose and Huberman 98. R. M. Lukose and B. Huberman. Surfing as a real option, Proc. 1st International Conference on Information and Computation Economies, 1998.

Martindale and Konopka 96. C. Martindale and A K Konopka. Oligonucleotide frequencies in DNA follow a Yule distribution, Computer & Chemistry, 20(1):35-38, 1996.

Mendelzon, Mihaila, and Milo 97. A. Mendelzon, G. Mihaila, and T. Milo. Querying the World Wide Web, Journal of Digital Libraries 1(1), pp. 68-88, 1997.

Mendelzon and Wood 95. A. Mendelzon and P. Wood. Finding regular simple paths in graph databases, SIAM J. Comp. 24(6):1235-1258, 1995.

Pareto 1897. V Pareto. Cours d'economie politique, Rouge, Lausanne et Paris, 1897.

Pirolli, Pitkow, and Rao 96. P. Pirolli, J. Pitkow, and R. Rao. Silk from a sow's ear: Extracting usable structures from the Web , Proc. ACM SIGCHI, 1996.

Pitkow and Pirolli 97. J. Pitkow and P. Pirolli. Life, death, and lawfulness on the electronic frontier, Proc. ACM SIGCHI, 1997.

Simon 55. H.A. Simon. On a class of stew distribution functions, Biometrika, 42:425-440, 1955.

White and McCain 89. H.D. White and K.W. McCain, Bibliometrics, in: Ann. Rev. Info. Sci. and Technology, Elsevier, 1989, pp. 119-186.

Yule 44. G.U. Yule. Statistical Study of Literary Vocabulary, Cambridge University Press, 1944.

Zipf 49. G.K. Zipf. Human Behavior and the Principle of Least Effort, Addison-Wesley, 1949.
___

Here, this is FREE! by Anonymous Coward · 2000-05-15 21:09 · Score: 1 · on Object Oriented Perl

Free Open Source Examples

Re:UIs at Xerox PARC by VAXman · 2000-05-13 05:25 · Score: 1 · on What GUIs Came Before X11?

It's sad how many people don't realize that prety much ALL of "modern" computing was invented at Xerox at least 20 years ago!

Even sadder is the ignorant people who believe all that stuff was invented at Xerox!

Please see this link: MouseSite. The mouse, windows, and some of the basic concepts of the GUI, were invented by Engelbart at Stanford in 1968. Xerox had absolutely nothing to do with this.

Furthermore, Xerox had absolutely nothing to do with the invention of networking! They did invent _ethernet_ in the mid-1970's, but networking did exist way earlier. My DEC timeline states that in 1965 there was a network between a PDP-6 between Boston and Australia over a telex link. This was way, way before ethernet.

Of the remaining item on your list, bit mapped displays, I don't know about that, but I'll let you have that one.

Re:why a mouse by grl · 2000-05-13 00:10 · Score: 3 · on What GUIs Came Before X11?

It's ironic that Doug Engelbart is most widely known as 'the inventor of the mouse', but specifically created it to be used in combination with a chord keyset so that you could (with practice) point, click with one hand, and type content or CLI commands very rapidly with the other.

On this subject, Alan Kay said:

Looking back I think that one of the paradoxes is that we made a complete mistake when we were doing the interface at PARC because we assumed that the kids would need an easy interface because we were going to try and teach them to program and stuff like that, but in fact they are the ones who are willing to put hours into getting really expert at things - shooting baskets, learning to hit baseballs, learning to ride bikes, and now on video games.

I have a four-year old nephew who is really incredible and he could use NLS fantastically if it were available, he would be flying through that stuff because his whole thing is to become part of the system he's interacting with and so if I had had that perspective I would have designed a completely different interface for the kids, one in which how you became expert was much more apparent than what I did. So I'm sorry for what I did. The Brown/MIT Vannevar Bush Symposium, Oct 1995

See

Mouse Site's Augment demo page
The chordset + mouse video clip
A key Augment paper on its CLI
Doug's work in context Much more than a 'mouse'

Re:why a mouse by grl · 2000-05-13 00:10 · Score: 3 · on What GUIs Came Before X11?

It's ironic that Doug Engelbart is most widely known as 'the inventor of the mouse', but specifically created it to be used in combination with a chord keyset so that you could (with practice) point, click with one hand, and type content or CLI commands very rapidly with the other.

On this subject, Alan Kay said:

Looking back I think that one of the paradoxes is that we made a complete mistake when we were doing the interface at PARC because we assumed that the kids would need an easy interface because we were going to try and teach them to program and stuff like that, but in fact they are the ones who are willing to put hours into getting really expert at things - shooting baskets, learning to hit baseballs, learning to ride bikes, and now on video games.

I have a four-year old nephew who is really incredible and he could use NLS fantastically if it were available, he would be flying through that stuff because his whole thing is to become part of the system he's interacting with and so if I had had that perspective I would have designed a completely different interface for the kids, one in which how you became expert was much more apparent than what I did. So I'm sorry for what I did. The Brown/MIT Vannevar Bush Symposium, Oct 1995

See

Mouse Site's Augment demo page
The chordset + mouse video clip
A key Augment paper on its CLI
Doug's work in context Much more than a 'mouse'

Re:why a mouse by grl · 2000-05-13 00:10 · Score: 3 · on What GUIs Came Before X11?

It's ironic that Doug Engelbart is most widely known as 'the inventor of the mouse', but specifically created it to be used in combination with a chord keyset so that you could (with practice) point, click with one hand, and type content or CLI commands very rapidly with the other.

On this subject, Alan Kay said:

Looking back I think that one of the paradoxes is that we made a complete mistake when we were doing the interface at PARC because we assumed that the kids would need an easy interface because we were going to try and teach them to program and stuff like that, but in fact they are the ones who are willing to put hours into getting really expert at things - shooting baskets, learning to hit baseballs, learning to ride bikes, and now on video games.

I have a four-year old nephew who is really incredible and he could use NLS fantastically if it were available, he would be flying through that stuff because his whole thing is to become part of the system he's interacting with and so if I had had that perspective I would have designed a completely different interface for the kids, one in which how you became expert was much more apparent than what I did. So I'm sorry for what I did. The Brown/MIT Vannevar Bush Symposium, Oct 1995

See

Mouse Site's Augment demo page
The chordset + mouse video clip
A key Augment paper on its CLI
Doug's work in context Much more than a 'mouse'

Take it to the Supreme Court or Cut the comments by Often_Censored · 2000-05-10 23:36 · Score: 5 · on Microsoft Asks Slashdot To Remove Readers' Posts

First let me say, MS is what happens when corporations endorse unethical behavior and reward it hansomely with great stock options. I looked into possible defenses for a summary judgement to save the comments posted on Andover-owned servers.

I'm so frustrated, MS might as well have written the law -- it's damn near airtight (even though its application here has to be unconstitutional). Stanford Law's archives were somewhat reassuring in this "fair use" of copyrighted materials quote.

"The framers of the constitution maintained that a free exchange of knowledge is essential for the good of society, and it is from this assertion that both copyright law and the fair use doctrine find their roots." *

Now here is the relevant excerpt MS can bury Andover with (notice, I said Andover):

"(2) No person shall manufacture, import, offer to the public, provide, or otherwise traffic in any technology, product, service, device, componenet, or part thereof, that --
"(A) is primarily designed or produced for the purpose of circumventing a technological measure that effectively controls access to a work protected under this title;
"(B) has only limited commercially significant purpose or use other than to circumvent a technological measure that effectively controls access to a work protected under this title; note:"(A) to 'circumvent a technological measure' means to descramble a scrambled work, to decrypt an encrypted work, or otherwise to avoid, bypass, remove, deactivate, or impair a technological measure, without the authority of the copyright owner; and
(B) a technological measure 'effectively controls access to a work' if that measure, in ordinary course of its operation, requires the application of information, or a process or a treatment, with the authority of the copyright owner, to gain access to the work."

Does anybody see anything that would help here? Just making information to circumvent the liscence makes Andover guilty as hell of making information available to more-easily cirumvent the software liscence. A serious crime.
* http://fairuse.stanford.edu/articles/
If anybody asks me, I'll say: "you mean there is a liscence on that .pdf? I open all my .exe files with Winzip -- Don't you!?!?"

Important to understand Fair Use doctrine by dave_aiello · 2000-05-05 01:36 · Score: 5 · on Judge Rakoff Explains MP3.com Ruling

I think it's great that a story about the details of the judges ruling made the cut as a Slashdot story. I have gotten myself into discussions with lawyers about this issue, and they keep pointing me back to the "Fair Use" Doctrine.

When I started to read about it, I realized how many factors have to be weighed in order to make a legal decision like this one. As much as many of us would like to believe it, the issue cannot be boiled down to "mp3 format good, media companies bad.".

If you are interested, check out the Copyright and Fair Use Web Site at Stanford.

--

Dave Aiello

Re:Does anyone here understand the purpose of this by adam · 2000-05-04 02:23 · Score: 1 · on Ensuring Permanence Of Online Scientific Journals

What you say is true for some large journal publishers, but certainly not for all. Remember that while many major journals are for-profit and have the interests you describe, many other journals (possibly more) are actually published by non-profit academic societies who have more interest in disseminating their information than in profit (although many of them still have serious issues with the control of their content, of course).

In fact, as it happens, LOCKSS is being worked on in association with HighWire Press at Stanford (disclosure: also my employer :), which publishes the online versions of nearly 200 major scientific journals and has a _very_ good relationship with a large number of publishers. They also list the Journal of Biological Chemistry and Science Online as "partners".

I wouldn't be so quick to dismiss the interest that the non-profit academic societies have in preserving this information.

The "Total Access Port" project at Stanford by jp93023 · 2000-05-03 09:49 · Score: 1 · on Interfaces For The Handicapped?

There is a cool project going on at Stanford to develop a Total Access Port - a device which intermediates between a user and any computerized device (computer, ATM, microwave). The TAP consists of three parts: A set of user interfaces suitable for the individual user (from braille interfaces to blow-tubes), a bit of smart technology in the middle, and a "port" specification for the destination device. Read more at the Archimedes Project

Re:Wow, looks good to me... by dalamb · 2000-05-02 20:16 · Score: 1 · on Software Carpentry Project's First-Round Winners

Of course, however, all those tools assume that your approach to documentation is placing specially formatted comments (Javadoc-style or otherwise) above each of your module/type/function definitions ... but it surely isn't the only approach.

Knuth's Literate Programming is the complementary approach -- putting the code inside the documentation. There was some clunkiness in the original tools, but that has probably improved by now.

Both approaches are great for encouraging programmers to keep code-level documentation in sync with the code (though, of course, they can't guarantee it). Unfortunately IMHO this undervalues documenting your analysis and design -- you CAN put such documentation in your code, but I'd guess that most people don't.

Re:(Don't) try this at home by sredding · 2000-05-01 23:48 · Score: 1 · on Metallica Wants To Ban 335,435 Napster Users

According to the RIAA, you have still violated the Audio Home Recording Act. According to United States Code, Title 17 - Copyrights, they might be right. The EFF says otherwise, but Sec. 107 does not specifically identify home copies as fair use.

As near as I can tell, fair use for home users has not been defined by current law. For more information try the Stanford University Library Copyright and Fair Use Site.

IANAL. My advice is that you hire one if you intend to take on Lars Ulrich.

Re:This is fantastic! by costas · 2000-05-01 06:39 · Score: 2 · on GPS Civilian Signal Degradation Turned Off

Yes, it's reliable enough to fly an aircraft by... a Stanford team demonstrated this with a model aircraft circa 1996. And later, they encored by driving a tractor around...

engineers never lie; we just approximate the truth.

Moog filter by TimoT · 2000-04-24 19:52 · Score: 2 · on Brilliant Careers: Robert Moog

There's a digital version for music DSP nuts in the article by Tim Stilson called "Analyzing the Moog VCF with consideration to digital implementation". You can find the paper somewhere around Stilson's homepage HINT: it's really simple to implement (~10 LOC), you can get my implementation from deja.com by searching comp.dsp.

IMPORTANT: Who is Billington, really? by orpheus · 2000-04-19 00:41 · Score: 5 · on Library Of Congress Will Not Digitize Books

I admit the article in this story (and worse, Mr. Billington's standard publicity shot) make him seem like a smug priggish pedant -- the kind of geek even geeks don't like, even though they bathe.

However, as someone who has always lusted after the vast intellectual ocean of the Library of Congress, I've been following his work, not closely, but at least enough to instantly recognize his name...

Anyway, this particular "National Librarian" (a title I find distasteful, and of questionable provenance) is a reform librarian. He's one of the good guys, folks. [Well, at least as far as this office goes -- let's not forget, only twelve men have held the post in 200 years and it didn't open it's doors to the public until almost 1900. It's not a hotbed of change.]

Back in the late 80's I recall being very excited by his intent to increase access to the Library's many collections, and his ideas for updating the Library (including electronic access) I also recall that his publicity has tended to go in cycles -- often beginning with what seemed like a almost Luddite conservative stance (that always disappointed me) and refining and clarifying it in succesive articles and interviews until I had to admit he was pretty sensible (albeit on the conservative end of sensible)

A few times he made some public-pleasing comments that were almost startlingly progressive, but was forced to back down. I have to admit (from my experience in professional organizations) that it is much more painful to have to back off on a promise (due to politics or finance) than it is to be criticized as stodgy for years, and accomplish more than you promised.

Anyway, while I was infuriated by the article linked to this story, I give Billington the benefit of a doubt, based on past experience. He has spent many millions of dollars each year (and raised an equal amount from the private sector) for electronic initiatives, test beds, local library electronic archival/publication projects, and national and intenational 'digital library' initiatives and contests. That may not seem like much, but when you consider how tightly strained the LoC's budget is, it's really pretty good.

"The unleased, unlimited pursuit of truth may be the last frontier and the ultimate proving ground for our American ideal of freedom. In a world of increasing physical restraints and limitations, it is only in the life of the mind and spirit that the horizons of freedom can remain truly infinite. We must rediscover what we should have known all along, that the pursuit of truth is the noblest part of Jefferson's legacy."
- James H. Billington, The Librarian of Congress

Here are a few of his writings on the subject of 'digital libraries', while in his current office. They aren't the best ones, but alas, I don't have time to dig up and scan the printed articles I have on file (ironic, eh?):

and to be fair, there have been some embarrassing episodes:

Withdrawing a travelling show of slavery-era photographs

__________

These are common heat pipes? by kurthr · 2000-04-17 22:45 · Score: 3 · on Water-Cooled Laptops From Toshiba

"Water cooled" makes it sound like these Toshibas are the Porches of the laptop world (as opposed to the air cooled VWs). What we're probably talking about here are heat pipes based on water (it happens to have a really high heat of vaporization, the right viscosity, and a big change in contact angle- for the meniscus). They've been used in laptops for years, mostly to get heat up on that big fin called a screen that you flip up whenever you use one.

Check out: http://www.cheresources.com/htpipes.shtml
for more info on how these guys work. The key deal is that they don't require a pump to move the water, 'cause the heat does that work itself :^)

My experience is with the silicon micromachined versions of these. There are all sorts of problems they can develop (angle sensitivity, vapor lock...), but comercial versions work well, and have been around for decades, though they're not as small as you'ld like.

Currently folks at Stanford are working on electro-osmotic pumps for these exchangers to increase their efficiency/size ratio:
http://www.stanford.edu/group/micr oheat/hex.html
(use google if stanford fails to load like it did for me).

enjoy,
Kurth

Move fast. Find destination. STOP. by laborit · 2000-04-17 16:25 · Score: 1 · on Faster

We've gotten very, very good at going faster. The next step is to get where we want to go very fast, then stop.

Empty, harried multitasking can certainly reduce quality of life. One great problem is that it fosters a sense that one always has to be doing something, that relaxation and mindfulness in everyday activities is decadent. Humans were not built for constant stress and mental occupation, though, and a shame-driven call to utilize every moment can lead to dangerous levels of stress. Physical health becomes frankly involved when one applies this ethic to sleep, as Americans (myself included) often do. Sleep debt is not only dangerous, it can impair memory and alertness to the detriment of the very things we skimp on sleep to accomplish!
Another unfortunate outgrowth of our ever-bustling society is the feeling that simple things are no longer worth doing well. Too many people live on fast food, have cheap and shallow relationships, and neglect to exercise, read, or think because there is always so much work to do, so many places to shop, so much web to browse. After a certain point, quantity is a poor replacement for quality.
So Gleick is doing a valuable service in pointing out how driven we've become. However, we must not take his reaction too far. I maintain that the technological genie is out of the bottle, that we don't even want it to go back, and that the only solution is to become intelligent and well-informed information consumers. Because all the negative things that technology does have positive counterparts.
If one is properly discriminating, multitasking doesn't necessarily mean important tasks will suffer -- it simply requires the discipline to recognize them. I was opening my mail while reading /., but when I thought I had something to say about Faster I put it down and gave the computer my whole attention. Here, the ability to do many things at once helped me find the one thing I wanted to do right.
Similarly, the modern profusion of books, magazines, journals, websites, television programs, experts, expert systems, entertainers, celebrities, commercials, politicians, fortune cookies, religious leaders, and weatherpeople who want to tell us what to think can lead to an endless, indiscriminate information grazing which doesn't really enrich or enlighten. The ease of pulling up a page on the Ames test for carcinogens allows thousands of recreational browsers to waste their time, feeling like they're learning something useful... but for a few biologists, it may be just the right information, at just the right time.
Technology is only dangerous if we try to adapt ourselves to it. Just because we can live lives divisible in nanoseconds doesn't mean we have to.

- Michael Cohn

The bad do bad because the bad is rewarded. The good do good because the good is rewarded.

Re:Tuition-Free Education by Weasel+Boy · 2000-04-17 01:42 · Score: 1 · on ArsDigita University

To go to a good colledge (really good one) will cost you around $30,000 a year.

If only! I see that the cost now to attend Harvard is $35000 + travel expenses. MIT weighs in at about the same. Stanford is $1k cheaper (Bargain!), and you pay a meager $30,000+ for a year at CalTech.

No wonder going off to college feels like an Expedition - they cos t about the same! Makes me thankful for the "paltry" $10K/yr I paid a decade ago (compare at $20,000 for Stanford).

Of course, $20,000 to $35,000 in 10 years is only 6% per year, or twice the rate of inflation. If the stock market keeps growing at 15% like it has for the last decade, the $125,000/year our kids will feel like $5500 today. That's only a little bit more than my freshman tuition was. Go, bull, go! ;-)

Re:Not serious by blakestah · 2000-04-16 02:40 · Score: 2 · on QNX Crypt Cracked

Good systems use shadow passwords. So the real passwords go in /etc/shadow, which is unreadable by anyone but root and anyone but root can't even look at the encrypted passwords.

Shadow passwords are only a small advance in security. A better hash function would work better. See The Srp Project for more details on this important consideration.

Still, QNX looks pretty pathetic by todays standards.

upteen pages of intro by bobv-pillars-net · 2000-04-14 01:25 · Score: 1 · on Proposal For Open-Source Benchmarks

You wasn't kiddin! Skip past the fluff and start reading here.

To eliminate hardware bias, write all the benchmark code to the lowest common denominator, perhaps Knuth's MIX/MMIX architecture. If you want to know how much your particular hardware is being under-optimized, run the benchmarks under HP's Dynamo or the equivalent.

The Stanford Nanofabrication Facility by pvirdone · 2000-04-13 04:02 · Score: 2 · on Social/Technological Implications Of Nanotech?

If you want to read about some real-world research, check this out.

(I don't work there, just listened to a lecture from someone who does)

Stanford Nanofabrication Facility

Time for Slashdot to take a stand... by Anonymous Coward · 2000-04-05 03:12 · Score: 4 · on MPAA Files Another Injunction Against 2600

The following is a list of all the mirrors from the 2600 site.

Re:Why a PC gamer might sign up.... by pabs · 2000-04-04 05:55 · Score: 1 · on Sega Dreamcast: $0

Anyhow, one thing he brought up was how well designed the MediaOne network was, by comparing the latency to the speed of light.

Hate to burst your bubble, but that's not really that big of a deal; most ethernet networks come within an order of magnitude of the speed of light.

Stewart Cheshire (of Bolo fame) has wrote an excellent article on latency and bandwidth called "It's the Latency, Stupid." Check it out here.

--
odds of being killed by lighning and

Re:Here's an idea - Already in development! by jp93023 · 2000-04-01 07:41 · Score: 1 · on Linux PDA w/Voice Recognition

This concept is in development through a project at Stanford. The "Total Access Port" (TAP) allows one to use whatever UI they prefer (voice, eye track, chordic keyboard, etc) for any device. The user portion of the device translates their input into UI commands which are interpreted through the TAP port on a device, such as a computer, ATM, microwave, etc. It's primarily designed for the disabled, but holds promise for wider application as well. See Archimedes Tap Project for more details.

Haskore does not support notation by hanwen · 2000-03-31 18:53 · Score: 1 · on Making Music With Linux : Notation And Alphabet Soup

Haskore is a small library for representing music written in Haskell. Haskell is a non-strict purely functional programming language. The Haskore tutorial (last update: 1997) used to contain some music notation fragments, but its author, Paul Hudak, explained to me that they were from a time that Haskell-implementations still ran inside LISP interpreters. This made it easy to snarf notation functionality from Common Music Notation (a LISP package). Now that the Haskell community moved to stand-alone compilers and interpreters, the notation functionality of Haskore is defunct.

Haskore would best be described as a `music representation formalism', and not a music notation program. If you want to produce music notation, you should consider lilypond which, incidentally, has an input grammar that closely resembles the grammar of Haskore.

Re:I'm sick of you uninformed idiots by Dman33 · 2000-03-31 01:36 · Score: 1 · on Copyright Comments Redux

Man, you are lame! I hope you are full of sarcasm in your post, if not then just listen to yourself here...

You have the audicity to claim that you should have some kind of "fair use" nonsense. Let me explain something, these media companies work their arses off to provide you with top notch, affordable entertainment. If they want to limit how you view their media, then by golly they have that right.

If it were not for 'fair use', the internet would not exist as we know it. In fact, network admins like myself would not be able to make tape-backups every night!
If you want to read about how wrong you are, please read this article.

Just because you geeks have can't accept a "real" OS and need some kind of command line only junk doesn't mean you have to right to break laws.

Command line only? X-windows? WTF are you talking about? Ignorance aside, do you really think that the world revolves around what you decide you like? I happen to dislike Windows, but I am not going to tell you that you cannot use it.

you don't "own" a DVD you buy, you just get to listen to it. The only people who would want to make copies are criminals, and DeCSS is ONLY GOOD FOR MAKING COPIES.

You are really showing your true intelligence now. First off, I do own about 10 DVDs. I can light them on fire, I can play frisbee with them, and I can watch them. I bought them. I want to watch them, but I do not want to buy the software to watch them when it exists for free. MPAA should be happy that DeCSS exists because I bought some DVDs to watch on my Linux workstation at home as a result!
Next point is that DeCSS has N-O-T-H-I-N-G to do with solely copying. That is like saying that the CD-Player in Windows is for copying. DeCSS just unencrypts the data. I can copy the data with or without DeCSS if I wanted to. If you know anything about digital media, it is all 1s and 0s, and you can copy those.

I read somewhere on ZDnet that all you guys do is break encryption laws and pirate MP3's anyway, it makes me wonder if Linux even has legimate uses! I hope the DMCA gets you all for this kind of ungrateful, illegal, nonsence.

I read somewhere that on Jan 1, 2000 the world was going to come to an end. Watch what you read boy, because it is not always true. Do you know anything about Linux? Have you ever used Linux? Have you ever used Star-Office or Gimp? Did you know that I can pirate CDs in Windows 95, NT, 2000? In fact, Adaptec made burning and ripping audio CDs really easy with EZ Cd Creator 4.0! Did you know that there is (was) a program last summer called DVDrip (or something like that) that ran only in Windows.

Makes me wonder if all you guys do is pirate MP3s and DVDs and break copyright laws too!

Re:I thought we were protected from this nonsense. by gclef · 2000-03-31 00:42 · Score: 2 · on Copyright Comments Redux

Yeah, I know it's bad form to follow-up on your own posts, but I read a little farther in a few of the links that google came up with and found this from stanford. It's aimed at educational folks, though, so it isn't entirely applicable to the DeCSS stuff, for instance.

What is fair use?

Fair use provisions of the copyright law allow for limited copying or distribution of published works without the author's permission in some cases. Examples of fair use of copyrighted materials include quotation of excerpts in a review or critique, or copying of a small part of a work by a teacher or student to illustrate a lesson.

How can I tell if my copying is allowed by fair use provisions of the Law?

There are no explicit, predefined, legal specifications of how much and when one can copy, but there are guidelines for fair use. Each case of copying must be evaluated according to four factors:

1.The purpose and nature of the use. If the copy is used for teaching at a non-profit institution, distributed without charge, and made by a teacher or students acting individually, then the copy is more likely to be considered as fair use. In addition, an interpretation of fair use is more likely if the copy was made spontaneously, for temporary use, not as part of an "anthology" and not as an institutional requirement or suggestion.

2.The nature of the copyrighted work. For example, an article from a newspaper would be considered differently than a workbook made for instruction. With multimedia material there are different standards and permissions for different media: a digitized photo from a National Geographic, a video clip from Jaws, and an audio selection from Peter Gabriel's CD would be treated differently--the selections are not treated as a equivalent chunks of digital data.

3.The nature and substantiality of the material used. In general, when other criteria are met, the copying of extracts that are "not substantial in length" when compared to the whole of which they are part may be considered fair use.

4.The effect of use on the potential market for or value of the work. In general, a work that supplants the normal market is considered an infringement, but a work does not have to have an effect on the market to be an infringement.

Pascal's Wager by mdecerbo · 2000-03-28 03:49 · Score: 1 · on Anti-Gravity Research Confirmed

"You can invest a little money in far-out projects if they have some chance of success - it's called Pascal's Wager," says the guy from APA.

Actually, that's stretching the definition of Pascal's Wager and making it sound really mundane.

Pascal was a smart guy and his Wager is one of the most interesting questions in the philosophy of religion.

See what the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy has to say about it.

Re:?? by peterb · 2000-03-26 22:50 · Score: 2 · on Richard Stallman Audio Interview at Wired

No, no, no, it's Stallman that can go fuck himself. :-) Sorry. I couldn't resist. At least we should be glad that he didn't start singing "The Free Software Song" (gee, "thanks," Jamie Zawinski) in the middle of the interview.

Re:Yabut by Mike+Wilson · 2000-03-23 09:00 · Score: 1 · on HPs Dynamo Optimizes Code

A better reference to this Lisp history is John McCarthy's History of Lisp paper.

Another way to show that LISP was neater than Turing machines was to write a universal LISP function and show that it is briefer and more comprehensible than the description of a universal Turing machine. This was the LISP function eval[e,a], which computes the value of a LISP expression e - the second argument a being a list of assignments of values to variables. (a is needed to make the recursion work).
...
S.R. Russell noticed that eval could serve as an interpreter for LISP, promptly hand coded it, and we now had a programming language with an interpreter.

It's also interesting to see the similiarities of HP's dynamo with The Dynamo Project at Indiana University. I assume there's some connection.

Re:Yabut by Mike+Wilson · 2000-03-23 09:00 · Score: 1 · on HPs Dynamo Optimizes Code

A better reference to this Lisp history is John McCarthy's History of Lisp paper.

Another way to show that LISP was neater than Turing machines was to write a universal LISP function and show that it is briefer and more comprehensible than the description of a universal Turing machine. This was the LISP function eval[e,a], which computes the value of a LISP expression e - the second argument a being a list of assignments of values to variables. (a is needed to make the recursion work).
...
S.R. Russell noticed that eval could serve as an interpreter for LISP, promptly hand coded it, and we now had a programming language with an interpreter.

It's also interesting to see the similiarities of HP's dynamo with The Dynamo Project at Indiana University. I assume there's some connection.

Try snd by Anonymous Coward · 2000-03-16 22:56 · Score: 0 · on Making Music With Linux: We're Getting There ...

Here

Slashdot Mirror

Domain: stanford.edu

Comments · 4,853