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How can people remember Galileu and not Saint Thomas Aquinas, author of the Suma Theologica?

How can people remember Linus Torvalds and forget Donald Knuth, author of I-don't-know-how-many-wonderful-stuff-besides-TeX?

Boy, that list will always be incomplete.

I dunno about the top 10, but Donald Knuth has made excellent contributions to the theory side of computer science. It's all about algorithms, baby!

It strikes me that Dvorak missed many of the most important events and/or people of the year by ignoring the advances in technology and science that took place this year. By focusing nearly entirely on the 'biz' side of things, he has a myopic view, especially for importance. Although I'll be the first to admit that the business side of a company is critical, when one looks at the past and attempts to judge importance, inventions and discoveries seem to rank right up there with savvy business dealings.

What about the first realization of a quantum computer (here)? Or IBM's advances in chip technology? Or any of a number of similar advances that are almost certainly important for the future direction of technology?

For that matter, I think leaving out the continued successful rise and development of cellular phones and the like is quite a mistake. When he puts network PCs and ubiquitous computing on the 'flop' list, he misses the most successful of the network ed appliances, the cell phone. The important future of cell phones (which I already had some good ideas about) was made utterly clear to me when, on Christmas this year, I ordered a book from Amazon on my new Sanyo-4000 using the mini-browser on the phone. Took about 4 minutes (including searching for a few things), and was amazingly easy.

Cheers,

David Andre

Granted, if I were building a search engine, it might take me a few tries figuring out the best ranking algorithm to use, but anyone would assuredly brainstorm this one sooner or later.

It'd be a shame to give up Google just as I hated giving up Amazon.com after ten thousand dollars' worth of business.

Now's the time to implore Google to use their patent wisely, assuming they get it. It's cool to have a patent just to be sure you yourself can continue to use an idea. It's a Really Bad Thing(tm) to use it to stop others from using it with so simple a concept.

Write their press contact. You can be sure they're listening to that address.

The relevancy of hits in Google seems to be pretty good, but the "I'm feeling lucky (TM)" thing IMHO is a dumb feature.

The relevancy of hits in Google seems to be pretty good, but the "I'm feeling lucky (TM)" thing IMHO is a dumb feature.

Since we're going to discuss PageRank and it's patentability, You might want to read about it first.

I agree, emulating a keyboard with this would be unimaginative and wasteful. Fortunately there is a much better approach--thumbcode. I can chord, but it's just not as satisfying as having a keyboard, but a suspect signing would be even better with practice. Not to mention the looks you would get when you wire your office, home and virtual pets to respond to gestures.

Now, a set of these and some display contacts with a resolution of at least 80 by 25 characters and my life would be complete. I could Angband right through meetings.

do you understand the problem of address aliasing and how it affects what code optimizations can and cannot be done by a compiler? People that use FORTRAN do so for a reason.

Here are two references:

• http://www.hpcc.gov/pubs/tech_transfer.html

  In November 1990, CONVEX Computer Corp. announced its new applications compiler, giving substantial credit to the compiler group at Rice for ideas underlying the system. The Convex applications compiler analyzes and transforms whole programs to eliminate errors and improve execution efficiency. The underlying implementation technology, called "interprocedural analysis and optimization," was first implemented in a practical compilation system in the ParaScope programming environment by researchers at Rice.

• http://suif.stanford.edu/papers/mhall95a/node20.ht ml

  A few commercial parallelizing compilers have initial interprocedural analysis systems. Most notably, the Convex Applications Compiler performs flow-insensitive array analysis and interprocedural constant propagation and obtains some path-specific information through inlining and procedure cloning Applied Parallel Research has demonstrated good speedup results on some of the programs presented here; these programs were parallelized with programmer directives that instruct the compiler to ignore dependences and to privatize certain variables. We know of no commercial system that currently employs any flow-sensitive array analysis, particularly interprocedural array privatization.

So do I ... what's the problem? Here are your darn Slashdot and Stanford links.

(Mutter, mutter, young people today don't know their HTML tags, or what?)

Regards, Ralph.

I can't dispute the choice because I don't know the reasons. However, I would be inclined to vote for Knuth when Volume 4 of The Art of Computer Programming comes out. Admittedly, the book won't be a contribution to free software, per se, but it would be an appropriate time to recognize Prof. Knuth, if for no other reason than the fact that the first three volumes inspired his work on TeX and Metafont.

The basic idea seems to be to use a MASER to generate a microwave signal, somehow coupled up to a power line, which is a big solid conductor. Somehow, the power line's electric field around the conductor is supposed to act as a waveguide and funnel the microwave signal. Microwaves don't behave that way for anybody else, so they probably don't behave that way for this guy. Also, "electromagnetic waves" don't have "atomic populations". Getting a piece of solid copper wire into an inverted population state like a LASER would be a neat trick, too. (Yes, copper vapor can be lased, but that's not what he's talking about here.) Why the "acoustic wave" stuff is in there I have no idea.

The guy has a nice web site. A bit too nice; great images of a little wall-outlet device with data connections, as if the thing were a shipping product.

There's been considerable real work on data over power lines. You can buy wireless LANs that work over local power lines, and there have been schemes for Internet access over power lines. They involve a router or bridge at the pole transformer, and the router connects to a fibre optic backbone. Only the last few hundred feet are over the power line. There's some interest in this in 220VAC countries, where there are more houses per transformer than in US practice. Interest in this has declined since DSL started working.

Donald Knuth has also had a profound impact on spiritual side of computing and programming. Programming wouldn't be what it is today without him, and he has always kept the ``Art'' of programming foremost in his mind, in front of the ``technique''.

He gave a lecture series entitled God and Computers at MIT from 6/10/99 to 17/11/99. Dr. Dobbs is carrying the Real Audio version of it on their technetcast site. Definitely worth a listen!

--

Urban legend? Have a look at Stanford's fair use site before you go making those claims.

Although you are right that erasing within 24 hours is no defense. Warez is Warez, and fair use is fair use.

If fair use is suddenly thrown out, on the grounds that the RIAA can't guarantee people won't be able to prevent 'pirating' of music, it sets a horrible precedent for the academic world. Remember the legal issues with hyperlinks almost being considered copyright violations a few months ago? Imagine every bibliography for any text ever written being illegal. It's absurd and morally WRONG.

Although I suppose I'm preaching to the choir. Most slashdotters would probably agree with me that fair use is necessary and justifiable for personal backups, quotes, links, bibliographic references, and similar purposes. It's definitely time to move our rants from the slashdot choir into letters to our technology and common-sense impaired representatives...

Just as soon as I finish finals.

GB stands for "Government and Binding" theory; it is the outgrowth of Noam CHomsky's model of Universal Grammar from the beginning of the 80's, and possibly the theory on which most theoretical syntax has been done.

GPSG stands for "Generalized Phrase Structure Grammar"; it was developed in the late 70's, initially by Gerald Gazdar. Basically, it is an enhanced form of context-free grammar, that is more suitable for description of natural language syntax.

HPSG was derived from GPSG in the mid-80's at CSLI in Stanford, by Pollard and Sag. It incorporates ideas from other theories of syntax like LFG and GB. HPSG, in comparison to GB, is concerned with making its grammars as useful as possible for computational linguistics. Therefore, many HPSG researchers work in projects like LinGO, trying to apply HPSG to computational projects.

LFG, which I mention above, is another theory of syntax (if you have guessed by now that theoretical linguists are an unagreeing bunch, add 100 points to your total). It is also used in computational projects, like the Xerox NLTT.

I hope people find this info useful.

---

GB stands for "Government and Binding" theory; it is the outgrowth of Noam CHomsky's model of Universal Grammar from the beginning of the 80's, and possibly the theory on which most theoretical syntax has been done.

GPSG stands for "Generalized Phrase Structure Grammar"; it was developed in the late 70's, initially by Gerald Gazdar. Basically, it is an enhanced form of context-free grammar, that is more suitable for description of natural language syntax.

HPSG was derived from GPSG in the mid-80's at CSLI in Stanford, by Pollard and Sag. It incorporates ideas from other theories of syntax like LFG and GB. HPSG, in comparison to GB, is concerned with making its grammars as useful as possible for computational linguistics. Therefore, many HPSG researchers work in projects like LinGO, trying to apply HPSG to computational projects.

LFG, which I mention above, is another theory of syntax (if you have guessed by now that theoretical linguists are an unagreeing bunch, add 100 points to your total). It is also used in computational projects, like the Xerox NLTT.

I hope people find this info useful.

---

GB stands for "Government and Binding" theory; it is the outgrowth of Noam CHomsky's model of Universal Grammar from the beginning of the 80's, and possibly the theory on which most theoretical syntax has been done.

GPSG stands for "Generalized Phrase Structure Grammar"; it was developed in the late 70's, initially by Gerald Gazdar. Basically, it is an enhanced form of context-free grammar, that is more suitable for description of natural language syntax.

HPSG was derived from GPSG in the mid-80's at CSLI in Stanford, by Pollard and Sag. It incorporates ideas from other theories of syntax like LFG and GB. HPSG, in comparison to GB, is concerned with making its grammars as useful as possible for computational linguistics. Therefore, many HPSG researchers work in projects like LinGO, trying to apply HPSG to computational projects.

LFG, which I mention above, is another theory of syntax (if you have guessed by now that theoretical linguists are an unagreeing bunch, add 100 points to your total). It is also used in computational projects, like the Xerox NLTT.

I hope people find this info useful.

---

GB stands for "Government and Binding" theory; it is the outgrowth of Noam CHomsky's model of Universal Grammar from the beginning of the 80's, and possibly the theory on which most theoretical syntax has been done.

GPSG stands for "Generalized Phrase Structure Grammar"; it was developed in the late 70's, initially by Gerald Gazdar. Basically, it is an enhanced form of context-free grammar, that is more suitable for description of natural language syntax.

HPSG was derived from GPSG in the mid-80's at CSLI in Stanford, by Pollard and Sag. It incorporates ideas from other theories of syntax like LFG and GB. HPSG, in comparison to GB, is concerned with making its grammars as useful as possible for computational linguistics. Therefore, many HPSG researchers work in projects like LinGO, trying to apply HPSG to computational projects.

LFG, which I mention above, is another theory of syntax (if you have guessed by now that theoretical linguists are an unagreeing bunch, add 100 points to your total). It is also used in computational projects, like the Xerox NLTT.

I hope people find this info useful.

---

I am always suspicious when scientists take elegance into account in their analysis of data.

Yes, of course.

But isn't it interesting when things do turn out to be elegant? Why?

This is one of the great problems in the philosophy of mathematics - it's nice in itself, but why so generally applicable?

See Indispensability Arguments in the Philosophy of Mathematics.

In one 90-minute presentation at the Joint Computer Conference in San Francisco on 9 December 1968, Doug Englebart and his team from SRI simply turned the computing world upside-down. Not only did that demo introduce the computing world to many great Englebart innovations, but it presented an even more radical concept: the computer as a tool to augment an individual human being's ability to manage the increasing complexity of his/her world. My vote for the top 10 great hacks of all time.

Donald Knuth to comment on this.

I'm sure it's pretty expensive, but it certainly isn't some hokey Buy-A-Degree!

Here's a link to the Spring Quarter course offerings: Continuing Education

I'm sure it's pretty expensive, but it certainly isn't some hokey Buy-A-Degree!

Here's a link to the Spring Quarter course offerings: Continuing Education

I suspect most religions see it as worse to worship a false god than no god at all, so if any of those religions is right, but you don't know which one, atheism (or agnosticism) is the safest choice. It's not necessarily the best choice, though (even if you're unsure which god to believe in). See a discussion of Pascal's Wager (which argues that believing in God is the rational thing to do) if you're interested and haven't already.
You can find one at the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.

Hmmm. Most of the *old* software licenses I remember (especially for products that came out on a single 5.25"...) specified that the user had the right to make *one* copy for archival purposes only. Those that were copy-protected, like "GATO" and "Silent Service", often included a "coupon" for ordering a backup/replacement, usually to the tune of $10.

OTOH, I don't remember that on any recent software licenses... so that may have only been a custom. I certainly don't remember it popping up in, say, the MS WinNT EULA...

A Stanford site seems to imply that "fair use" doctrine only covers educational and research purposes. There are also special provisions for libraries...

Judging from that, the "right" to make a backup may only have been a privilege granted explicitly by the licensing terms -- one which may be increasingly rare nowadays.

All these sore heads remind me of the unwarranted attacks on Ross Biro, the original author of the Linux networking code. Those a-holes bitched at Ross so much when the code wasn't ready in a week, Ross Biro dropped out completely. It is one of the darker uglier events in the history of Linux. People who can't code should get a clue or shut up.

For people interested in tests of general relativity...

Gravity Probe B is a satellite that will be launched in a few years' time. It plans to check for one untested prediction of general relativity (the frame-dragging effect of massive spinning objects like the earth) by placing several hyperaccurate gyroscopes in orbit and measuring the change in the rotation axis of those gyroscopes from this effect.

It's been under works for 30 years now... here's the website for the project.

The whole system has to be incredibly accurate... I worked with this over the summer, and the technical details are scary (for example, the gyros used are the smoothest spheres ever made by man... if they were expanded to the size of the earth, the greatest height difference between valleys and peaks would be about 16 ft)

I agree with you that two-factor authentication is necessary for any real security. However, if you can't get that, insist at least that real password security is used, and that means using Secure Remote Password or SRP. This protocol is not patent encumbered and has an open source implementation; it provides a remote password login protocol immune to dictionary attacks, various forms of spoofing, and password equivalence problems.

I believe it is the *only* way to do networked passwords without nasty security flaws.

Also, passwords should always be subject to key stretching: see Schneier et. al., Secure Applications of Low-Entropy Keys.

SRP can be securely combined with two-factor authentication for best security. Good luck - and don't look to the banks for examples of how to do things right!
--

Well, a few things:

1. You need to draw a distinction between offline and online attacks. Offline attacks allow the attacker to try a password without the system knowing it; this allows a brute-force attack to be carried out without detection. Any scheme where the attacker has access to the encrypted password allows offline attacks. Online attacks require interaction with the authentication server; consequently, an attacker usually only gets a few tries before being detected. ATM machines (as long as their connection to central offices are secure) are an example of a system where attacks are online; a 4-digit pin number would be trivial to brute-force (it's basically a 10-bit secret key), but because you can't mount offline attacks against it it's still fairly secure. There are password protocols that aren't vulnerable to offline attacks; SRP (The Secure Remote Password protocol), available at http://srp.stanford.edu, is an excellent example.

2. You can make offline hacking attempts arbitrarily difficult once you have out-of-band information--in SSL, you have a public key pair and hence have done a key exchange before the password needs to be entered. By sending some randomly generated per-session salt over the line you can make it much more difficult to execute an offline attack. Consult a security expert for details.

3. There's a fair amount of evidence to suggest that proactive password checkers (e.g. running "crack" against the password when it is set and rejecting "weak" passwords) doesn't buy you that much. It gets you something, but not as much as you'd expect.

Sumner

Where did you hear this? Firstly, this has nothing to do with illegal distribution of MP3's. Even if you *were* legally entitled to a 24-hour "evaluation" period, that CERTAINLY would never give you the right to duplicate or re-distribute duplicated copies.

Additional ramifications of this assumption include (but are not limited to):

Video rentals. Why rent when you can buy, watch it, and return it within 24 hours FOR FREE?

Magazine sales. Buy a mag, read it, return it the next day. Consider that $2.99 a refundable deposit!

Fast reader? Why rent from the library when you can get a 24-hour rental from the book store?

Fair use has NOTHING to do with "evaluation" of a copywritten work. Fair use is meant to allow people limited reproduction rights for certain research and educational purposes and to grant certain exemptions for libraries.

An excellent web site that explains copyright and "fair use": http://fairuse.stanford.edu/

In my opinion, the journalizm community has a deep understanding and commitment to copyright and fair use issues. If the comments were not given due credit, it is probably because it was not clear enough what comprises due credit. The reputation and continued success of a journalist depends on his fair treatment of sources. If we make it clear exactly what the Slashdot community considers fair treatment, I beleive that most reporters will respect it.

Here are some thoughts for possible fair use guidelines:

• If your article is largely based on a slashdot discussion thread, please give the URL for that thread in the text of your article, or porvide a link at the end. The format for such a URL is
  • http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=99/11/08/1226 255&mode=thread
  (where the date/unique number is replaced with the appropriate value).
• If you quote a slashdot post, give the real name or nickname of that poster. It is generally inappropraite to refer to "a Slashdot poster" if that person's name could reasonably be used as well. In an online article, please link the user's name to his or her slashdot "User Info" page. Such a link appears below each post, and has the format
  • http://slashdot.org/users.pl?op=userinfo&nick=cm drtaco
  (where the text following "nick" is replace by the user's nickname). Please do not link to the poster's email address, even if it appears in the post.
• If you wish to cite a slashdot discussion, use the format
  • "Discussion title." Slashdot Discussion. [Accessed date].
  For example,
  • "Mainstream Media on Slashdot and Microsoft." Slashdot Discussion. http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=99/11/08/122625 5&mode=thread [Nov 8, 1999].
  
  To cite a post, use the format
  • Poster Name, "Post Title," opinion expressed in Slashdot Discussion "Discussion title." [Accessed date].
  For example,
  • Homunq, "Two words: Fair Use," opinion expressed in Slashdot Discussion "Mainstream Media on Slashdot and Microsoft." http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=99/11/08/122625 5&mode=thread [Nov 8, 1999].
• If you wish to report the representative sense of the slashdot community, please note the mechnaisms by which the community assigns trust to opinions. Posts that have been moderated up, and those by users with high karma, should be given higher weight and maybe considered representative. It is a disservice to the truth and to slashdot to reprint the flamebait ramblings of an anonymous coward as representative views.
• Anonymous Cowards are a necessary evil, but their comments are neither authoritative nor accountable. If you repeat the opinions of an AC, please make it clear that those opinions are in no way representative of the slashdot community. Before you choose to repeat the posts of an anonymous poster, strongly consider whether it is appropriate. (An exception may be made if an AC post has been strongly moderated up, to +2 or above; such a post may be considered representative).
• Keep in mind that comments are owned by the poster. It is fair use to quote them, in context, in a story or paper. For deeper questions on the copyright limitations and freedoms, see Stanford's copyright FAQ.

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. New issues about fair use have arisen with the increased use of the
Internet. At the time of publication, a bill is pending in Congress concerning whether fair use provisions will be extended to
appropriate users/uses of copyrighted Internet materials.

Also, some guy named Kynn will be speaking too.

You can watch this live in streaming media, or archived once the event is over, by going to the InterLab page at SLAC. It starts in just less than a half hour, so that may be too short of notice for some of you -- my apologies!

--Kynn

PS: Neither I nor Cynthia have direct control over the streaming multimedia aspect of the session, so I am not sure if the presentation will actually be accessible to users with disabilities! Oh, the ironies of the web...

One of several strategies is to place a value on each page in accordance with how important the page is to other users. One way of determining this criteris is by analyzing the links between pages. It is assumed that important ones are linked to more often than the non-important ones. In turn, documents that important pages point to are deemed as being more significant than ones linked to by, say, my home page.

As time goes on and the engine develops a more accurate representation of the networks, it is able to evaluate these kinds of interrelationships in useful ways. All the end user sees is that the page at the top of the search list was the one they were looking for, but in the background there are a lot of powerful mechanisms to make that happen.

I've spent the last year or so working on a search engine as an academic project, and have come to really admire what Google does for the users. Take a look at some of the research that went into it some time, it's quite impressive. These people thought of everything and much more besides.

I could go on but am a little too tired right now to be more coherent. Rambling and asskissing aside, the point I've so studiously skipped around is that there aren't really artificial mechanisms to insert results anywhere in Google. It does a lot of work to make sure that doesn't happen (no cheating on <META> tags, or adding "sex sex sex sex" 1001 times in white on white text in order to fool the engine -- Google sees right through that nonsense). And it doesn't rework this information for each search: the data creates it all in the background, and you perform the query on the database as it exists at a snapshot in time. Very elegant design, all around.

Maybe I can talk them into hiring me after this...

Doubtless Knuth will be able to turn it into an engaging book; a followup of sorts to 3:16 would be a very nice thing to see; I'm sure I'll acquire it once available...

Although I still have to say that I'd put higher priority on at least a preprint Vol. 5/6 of TAOCP. That would provide at least draft form for all of the series, what with The Stanford Graphbase at least providing the flavor of Vol. 4.

There were actually two chips announced this last week. The drug diagnosis chip from Argonneand a research-based expression chip from Peter Small's lab at Stanford.

The Argonne chip is a competitor to Affymetrix/BioMerioux's TB chip which is also still in development. What these gizmos are designed to do is DNA sequencing by hybridization. The TB genome is sequenced and we roughly understand how many of the antituberculosis drugs work and what genes mutate to confer drug resistance (mostly). The traditional (and only FDA approved) way is to grow the patient's TB specimen in the presence in each of these drugs and see if growth is inhibited. For strains that are multi-drug resistant (MDR), that can take many weeks or even months to correctly diagnose. In the early days of the MDR outbreak in NY city in the early 90's, many of the patients were dead before the results were available (aggrevated by HIV/AIDS in the pre-protease inhibitor days).

Peter Small's chips are designed to understand which genes are turned on/off under different conditions. Their paper in the Oct 26th issue of PNAS is their results using these chips on TB treated with isoniazid (the first anti-TB drug).

So molecular diagnostics is a goal of everyone's. Here in our lab we use both the traditional methods and then direct DNA sequencing as an experimental program. Direct DNA sequencing is a bit tedious and can get expensive for each hunk of the TB chromosome you need to sequence to cover all the potential sites for drug-resistance conferring mutations. Arrays let you "do it in one shot".

And Argonne's reported ability to reuse these things 50x would be a huge thing. George Soros is probably footing some of this bill since he's been donating a ton of cash to try to check the expansions of TB in post-cold war Russia. Their prison system is a real nightmare and their "tough on crime attitude (much like the US!) doesn't mind if these prisoners give each other TB and they end up dying. But at least a few of these prisoners do get released and then the problem goes into the general population. The TB we're seeing from Russian immigrants now is really strange. It's not always resistant to the first line of drugs used (safer and more effective) but resistant to many of the second line drugs (full of nasty side effects, less effective, and much more expensive). Wealth individuals in Russia seem to be assuming they have drug resistant TB and just starting in the on the second line drugs.

Our prison system was caught a bit off guard when TB resurfaced in the 80's. They've *vastly* improved now and while TB is still diagnosed in prisons, the transmissions seem to be checked. Here in NY about 20% of our prison population is HIV+ so keeping TB checked is really important.

Problems with these chips arise when you have mixed populations of TB in a patient. Some cells have the mutation that causes resitance, and some don't. Since all these arrays start off with a PCR amplification reation, if the susceptable cell's DNA gets amplified over the mutant ones, you might get the wrong diagnosis. Or if a patient has two different strains of TB in them (can happen but mostly in immunocompromised individuals). But this is much less a concern than in the situation of HIV where these molecular diagnostics sometimes run into trouble.

With 1 billion people in the world infected with TB (and here in NY, it's nearly 1 out of 15...though most will never come down with "active" disease even untreated), don't assume it's a Russia/third world/poor thing!

Cheers!

Perhaps you wouldn't mind explaining this?




http: //wwwmed.stanford.edu/center/communications/Pressr el/October97/glow.html - labmice

http://www.promega.com/pnotes/49/ 2788d/2788d.html - pictures of glowing fruitflies and plants.

So, the short answer to your question is, "I don't know." However, when google had only indexed about 24M webpages, their database was 53G compressed (at about 3:1, or 140G uncompressed).

It's pretty fascinating stuff.

-Dave

So, the short answer to your question is, "I don't know." However, when google had only indexed about 24M webpages, their database was 53G compressed (at about 3:1, or 140G uncompressed).

It's pretty fascinating stuff.

-Dave

...those academic physical models keep getting better. There's some research being done at least at the CCRMA at Stanford and the acoustics lab at the Helsinki University of Technology and probably other places too.

Sampling technology can't imitate all instruments well enough. This is where physical modeling comes in. Consider the guitar... every string can crossmodulate the other strings as you play it causing subtle differences in the sound. You can slide a note and it won't sound realistic if you just play the sample faster; the effect is different. Realistically to get a good guitar sound on a sampler you would need too many samples and extremely complicated logic to select the sample being played.

IMO traditional computer music instruments are getting a bit boring and unexpressive (TB-303, TR-{808,909} anyone ?). I'd really like to see (and hear) something more subtly expressive catch on.

They are still keeping the internals "secret," in the sense that if you ask The Lego Group for documentation on opcodes, hardware, etc., you'll get nothing from them. However, Kekoa Proudfoot tortured his RCX until it talked, which gave the community the data it needed for the various open OS's now available. The page detailing his work is here.
Once that work was done, the information was available, and the OS's were done. However, even then TLG nearly sued to keep the OS's off the web, according to Forbes. They did stop short of that, but still aren't at all cooperating. Poor business decision on their part- like Dell and other HW folks, they should learn to be OS agnostic, knowing that variety in OS leads to more HW sales. Oh well...
~luge

"Anybody know of an OSS equivalent of the Mindstorm stuff?"

Yep. Check out NQC or Forth(no links at the moment, sorry) or legOS. All are free (legOS is MPL) and reasonably well supported by their communities. If you want something reminiscent of the "good old days," you might do well to remember that reverse engineering is just as hard if not harder than DIY, and then take a look at kekoa's page. If he hadn't destroyed his bot, there would be no open source anything for the mindstorm. Very good geek stuff.
~luge

(Whoops, should have previewed)

No, because it doesn't need to. What is important in a High Energy Physics process is the collision energy. How you get to that energy doesn't matter (to first order) - you can collide light electrons against positrons (as at SLAC, where I work for example) or heavy nuclei together.

It is easier to get a higher energy with a heavier particle, since your relativistic energy comes in part from the mass of your collision particles. (But the collisions themselves are then messier, making detection more difficult). So, in short, we *have* (providing they exist) had Quark-Gluon plasmas formed in the upper atmosphere.

So why don't we do our experiments in the sky? Because with cosmic rays we have no control over the flux (number of particles per unit area) or energy, both of which we need in order to do detailed experiments. Cosmic rays are not without their uses however; with our detector, we use them to calibrate our systems before moving the detector to the "beam pipe", where collisions occur. This is standard practice.

Dan Azzopardi (too lazy to log in)

(Whoops, should have previewed)

No, because it doesn't need to. What is important in a High Energy Physics process is the collision energy. How you get to that energy doesn't matter (to first order) - you can collide light electrons against positrons (as at SLAC, where I work for example) or heavy nuclei together.

It is easier to get a higher energy with a heavier particle, since your relativistic energy comes in part from the mass of your collision particles. (But the collisions themselves are then messier, making detection more difficult). So, in short, we *have* (providing they exist) had Quark-Gluon plasmas formed in the upper atmosphere.

So why don't we do our experiments in the sky? Because with cosmic rays we have no control over the flux (number of particles per unit area) or energy, both of which we need in order to do detailed experiments. Cosmic rays are not without their uses however; with our detector, we use them to calibrate our systems before moving the detector to the "beam pipe", where collisions occur. This is standard practice.

Dan Azzopardi (too lazy to log in)

No, because it doesn't need to. What is important in a High Energy Physics process is the collision energy. How you get to that energy doesn't matter (to first order) - you can collide light electrons against positrons (as at , where I work for example) or heavy nuclei together. It is easier to get a higher energy with a heavier particle, since your relativistic energy comes in part from the mass of your collision particles. (But the collisions themselves are then messier, making detection more difficult). So, in short, we *have* (if such a thing exists) had Quark-Gluon plasma's formed in the upper atmosphere. So why don't we do our experiments in the sky? Because with cosmic rays we have no control over the flux (number of particles per unit area) or energy, both of which we need in order to do detailed experiments. Cosmic rays are not without their uses however; with our , we use them to calibrate our systems before moving the detector to the "beam pipe", where collisions occur. This is standard practice. Dan Azzopardi (to lazy to log in)

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In a related development, neuroscientists found that if they simultaneously stuck sharp electrodes under the skin of a human and of a cat, the sensations produced were remarkably similar.

Seriously - I find this to be a very disturbing study. I'm not going to cop a holier-than-thou attitude here; I myself have done painful neurological experiments on living rats for no better reason than to satisfy a course requirement. And scientifically, this study is tricky work, well done. However, you really have to question the motives here. This is the ultimate in gee-whiz graphics, and by posting it on slashdot for a bunch of non-neuroscientists to ooh and ahh at, we're really buying into that.

Donna Haraway has written about the importance of vision in science (Before you dismiss her as just another of those postmodern feminist theorists who of course don't know what they're talking about, like Randy's overstereotyped ex in Necronomicon, you should read her
"Cyborg Manifesto"). She's arguing that no picture, not even natural vision, is as direct and honest as it seems to be. As science strives (rightly) for true objectivity, it tends towards several kinds of false objectivity. Pictures are one such method. They seem natural - it's easy for the layman to say "Oh, that's what a cat sees," rather than "That's a picture constructed by scientists as an educated guess about what a cat sees". This is not as bad as the false objectivity that says "Who are you to challenge my objectivity? You're not white and male, so whatever you say is obviously biased.", but it's a step in the wrong direction.

The way to fight this kind of false objectivity is to appreciate what went into making the image. When you see something, appreciate that it's actually being projected upside down on your retina, multiplied by three color/response curves, broken down into shapes and movement, and so on; the mechanisms of your vision bias you to pay attention to some attributes and unavoidably ignore others. And when you see a picture, appreciate how constructed that is. In this case, that means that the picture came to you through a very unhappy cat, into some electrodes, through some statistical software, and through the web. Anyone who can look at these pictures without feeling some real suffering in sympathy with that cat is not truly objective enough to be a scientist.

[Of course, most

Yes, there are women in open source. Yes, there are female hackers. (And I mean hackers in the true old-guard sense of the word for people who love to write code for its own sake and are very good at it, not people who break into someone else's box.)

Normally I don't go too overboard in the ubergeek oneupsmanship, but I think it's called for here to counter the prevailing winds.

I've been hacking open source since before that phrase was fashionable, we used to just call it "free software". Or even "public domain" if we felt like using big words. Most of it runs on Irix (although some has been ported to Linux) because I got addicted to SGIs when they were the only game in town for fast graphics.

I started playing with computers when I was ten, wrote software on my own time for a while, got my first paying computer job when I was 16. I was the youngest employee at ETA systems, a supercomputer company that's now bankrupt (like all the rest of them). I literally remember when I thought Unix was for wimps, an insane waste of expensive supercomputer cycles. If batch job control was good enough for me, it should be good enough for everybody! (So I did see the light on that one, now I'm a rabid Unix fanatic.)

Got a CS degree at Stanford (while taking quite a few feminist studies classes along the way). Went off to work at The Geometry Center, a research group where developing free software was a major part of our mission. Came back to Stanford to get a PhD in CS. Along the way I adapted some research software for use in a free SGI visualization product.

I am used to almost always being the only or one of the few women in the room. One of the few sports I enjoy doing is kickboxing, which is at least as male dominated. I probably wouldn't have chosen to either start or continue with that if I hadn't built up reserves of confidence from my experiences in CS.

I do believe the low percentage of women in CS is due to cultural conditioning, and that the gender imbalance causes professional difficulties ranging from extreme to subtle. Ellen Spertus has several essays on this (which are worthwhile enough that I'll add yet another pointer to them). In my case most of the difficulties have been subtle, and I've benefitted from many mentors from many people over the years. Most of them have been male, but it's worth pointing out that at my first computer job my boss was female as was hers.

-- Tamara

http://Boole.Stanford.EDU/thumbcode

One idea is for the machine to recognise the Thumbcode via switches placed at "...twelve contacts somewhere on the palm or thumb side of the phalanges and one the tip of the thumb."