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What wifi really needs is per packet rate & power control, and for clients to select access points based on the reported QBSS channel utilisation instead of just using rssi measurements.

Not quite.

Here you have an IPCC leader saying in his own words, in the Swiss NZZ interview:

Q: Until now, many think of aid when they hear development policies.

A: That will change immediately if global emission rights are distributed. If this happens, on a per capita basis, then Africa will be the big winner, and huge amounts of money will flow there. This will have enormous implications for development policy. And it will raise the question if these countries can deal responsibly with so much money at all.

Q: That does not sound anymore like the climate policy that we know.

A: Basically it's a big mistake to discuss climate policy separately from the major themes of globalization. The climate summit in Cancun at the end of the month is not a climate conference, but one of the largest economic conferences since the Second World War. Why? Because we have 11,000 gigatons of carbon in the coal reserves in the soil under our feet - and we must emit only 400 gigatons in the atmosphere if we want to keep the 2-degree target. 11 000 to 400 - there is no getting around the fact that most of the fossil reserves must remain in the soil.

Q: De facto, this means an expropriation of the countries with natural resources. This leads to a very different development from that which has been triggered by development policy.

A: First of all, developed countries have basically expropriated the atmosphere of the world community. But one must say clearly that we redistribute de facto the world's wealth by climate policy. Obviously, the owners of coal and oil will not be enthusiastic about this. One has to free oneself from the illusion that international climate policy is environmental policy. This has almost nothing to do with environmental policy anymore, with problems such as deforestation or the ozone hole. ...

The man is Ottmar Edenhofer, Professor of the Economics of Climate Change in Potsdam, cochair of the IPCC group on mitigation.

An unassumingly looking accountant like bureaucrat, the man is a conspiracy theory all by himself.

http://www.pressestelle.tu-berlin.de/typo3temp/pics/5/575bbec734.jpg

In our recent study, that involves vantage points in more than 50 commercial ISPs and content requests for around 10,000 hosts, we observed that the location of DNS resolvers break the assumption made by CDNs about the vicinity of the end-user and its DNS resolver. Moreover, we observed that third-party DNS resolvers do not manage to redirect the users towards content available within the ISP, contrary to the local DNS ones. We do believe that this problem is not limited to iTunes but may effect the end-user experience when downloading CDNized content that is already a significant fraction of Internet traffic. You can find more about our comparison of DNS resolvers in the Wild here: http://www.net.t-labs.tu-berlin.de/papers/AMSU-CDRW-10.pdf You can find more about our study on the effect of third-party DNS resolvers in content delivery here: http://www.net.t-labs.tu-berlin.de/papers/PFASF-ICDUPADI-10.pdf To better understand DNS and its performance, we would like to scale up the experiments and for this we are seeking your help. If you are willing to participate in this effort, please go to the following link: http://www.fg-inet.de/ Download the script that can be found in the download section of the website, and run it from an Internet connection provided by a commercial ISP, e.g., at home. The typical duration of the experiment is around six hours. All major operating systems are supported (Linux, Mac OS, Windows etc.). Once the experiment is done, please upload the traces on our website: http://www.fg-inet.de/upload.php Our script performs DNS queries for a number of predefined hosts. This list is included in plain text in the download packages. The traces collected with our program do not interact with any of your browsing or download history or activity. The additional bandwidth consumption and CPU load due to the experiment are negligible. The traces collected on this website will be kept confidential within the project and will not be distributed to any third party, nor shared with any third party. You also have the option to make them accessible to the research community if you wish so.

In our recent study, that involves vantage points in more than 50 commercial ISPs and content requests for around 10,000 hosts, we observed that the location of DNS resolvers break the assumption made by CDNs about the vicinity of the end-user and its DNS resolver. Moreover, we observed that third-party DNS resolvers do not manage to redirect the users towards content available within the ISP, contrary to the local DNS ones. We do believe that this problem is not limited to iTunes but may effect the end-user experience when downloading CDNized content that is already a significant fraction of Internet traffic. You can find more about our comparison of DNS resolvers in the Wild here: http://www.net.t-labs.tu-berlin.de/papers/AMSU-CDRW-10.pdf You can find more about our study on the effect of third-party DNS resolvers in content delivery here: http://www.net.t-labs.tu-berlin.de/papers/PFASF-ICDUPADI-10.pdf To better understand DNS and its performance, we would like to scale up the experiments and for this we are seeking your help. If you are willing to participate in this effort, please go to the following link: http://www.fg-inet.de/ Download the script that can be found in the download section of the website, and run it from an Internet connection provided by a commercial ISP, e.g., at home. The typical duration of the experiment is around six hours. All major operating systems are supported (Linux, Mac OS, Windows etc.). Once the experiment is done, please upload the traces on our website: http://www.fg-inet.de/upload.php Our script performs DNS queries for a number of predefined hosts. This list is included in plain text in the download packages. The traces collected with our program do not interact with any of your browsing or download history or activity. The additional bandwidth consumption and CPU load due to the experiment are negligible. The traces collected on this website will be kept confidential within the project and will not be distributed to any third party, nor shared with any third party. You also have the option to make them accessible to the research community if you wish so.

I really liked my introductory courses at TU Berlin back in the mid-nineties (has unfortunately been javaified since...)

The two first year mandatory courses would start more or less from zero with two different paradigms: functional programming and assembler, based on a mini-cpu we'd more or less wire up from scratch.

The rationale for the functional part was:

• Give everybody the same starting point (assuming nobody was familiar with functional)
• Present programming as a manipulation of uniterpreted formal expressions (see the Dykstra article from Dec. 2nd, a very good read!)
• Introduce students to formal signatures and program verification

The rationale worked out surprisingly well (for me at least). Although not everybody was happy with that choice, the people with the most problems were those who ran into real trouble with the whole subject later on...

The "hardware" based assembler course gave some insight into down-to-the-metal imperative machine programming, and the mode of operation of a real processor. Could have been more dense, but was interesting nonetheless.

A 2nd year course with all 4 major paradigms (basically 3 programming assignments in all 4 paradigms, with subsequent analysis and comparison) was a very valuable conclusion of the "Introduction into Programming".

If I were facing the choice, I'd choose functional programming as the "best paradigm" for a first year (university) programming course.

http://user.cs.tu-berlin.de/~klischat/aptitude-hell-1.txt

http://user.cs.tu-berlin.de/~klischat/aptitude-hell-3.txt

Advantages of RPM over DEB:

• much faster for many queries (cf. rpm -qf vs. dpkg -S)
• better, more systematic and more powerful command line syntax (grouped options)

http://user.cs.tu-berlin.de/~klischat/aptitude-hell-1.txt

http://user.cs.tu-berlin.de/~klischat/aptitude-hell-3.txt

Advantages of RPM over DEB:

• much faster for many queries (cf. rpm -qf vs. dpkg -S)
• better, more systematic and more powerful command line syntax (grouped options)

Yeah, but closures and first-class functions constitute a more universal concept than OOP and weird "this" semantics. So, if you know what you're doing, you can pretty much forget "this" and JS's weird built-in OOP semantics and use the closures feature to implement your own way of doing OOP with it. Basically, the designers of JS grounded the language on a Smalltalk/Lisp-like feature set, and in the end tacked some Java syntax as well as familar-looking keywords like "this" on top of it to make the whole thing more appealing to Java people.

Don't run it on gas, run them on microwave power from balloon relays.
In that scenario you only need enough locally stored energy to land safely. Heck, assuming a small amount of local energy storage for takeoff and landing, beam power needs to be only slightly more than the average cruising power usage.
My bet is still on the flying car first.

Oh, and microwaves would work wonderfully with steam balloons.

Steam Balloon links:
http://www.ilr.tu-berlin.de/LB/heidas/HeiDAS_AIAA20032.pdf
http://www.halfbakery.com/idea/Steam_20balloon
http://www.flyingkettle.com/

Don't forget the internet/radio/tv relay capabilities of a stationary balloon (more like dirigible though).

def make_adder(number):
def adder(arg): return arg+number
return adder

Looks like this stops working when you introduce some state:

>>> def make_adder(number):
... def adder(arg):
... number = number + arg
... return number
... return adder
...
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> a2=make_adder(5)
>>> a2(8)
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "<stdin>", line 1, in ?
File "<stdin>", line 3, in adder
UnboundLocalError: local variable 'number' referenced before assignment
>>>

The lack of namespaces is a problem, yes -- but there are way to deal with that (basically, use "namespace objects"). I don't know what you mean by lack of polymorphism -- you can dynamically overwrite/replace methods all the time, so there's polymorphism all over the place.

Python bashers usually know little about Python and largely perceive it as a toy language, something like PHP with whitespace and without the deployment. The fact is, you can write fast, robust, object-oriented software in Python without losing your mind with prototypes in the process.

You don't need to use prototypes at all to do OOP in JS. In fact, closures in combination with open objects are arguably a more general concept than "traditional", class based OOP. Look here for a possible approach (I came up with this recently for a relatively large JS/AJAX project):

http://user.cs.tu-berlin.de/~klischat/mydocs/javascript/closure-based-oop.txt.html

You wouldn't believe what big leaps you can make with this :-P

No, the demo is not rigged (and it's about 11 months old).

The whole thing is based on SIFT keypoints http://www.cs.ubc.ca/~lowe/keypoints/ . These are very powerful and work indeed as shown in the video/demo. Check autopano-sift http://user.cs.tu-berlin.de/~nowozin/autopano-sift / for a real application using them.

There is only a little problem, M$ cannot use SIFT commercially. The licence says "for research purposes only" and the US Patent 6,711,293, Asignee: The University of British Columbia protects SIFT.

all the H is produced by means of Solar power

Solar isn't the only way to produce hydrogen. A Three-Step Microbial Hydrogen-Producing System shows promise in viably producing hydrogen. There's also Iceland's method of hydrogen generation, though there's not many places that can use it's method, Iceland uses their volcano. Algae can also produce biofuels: Widescale Biodiesel Production from Algae.

Please google "1994 gsm over ip"

http://goliath.ecnext.com/coms2/gi_0199-721578/ip- access-and-RigNet-deliver.html

M2 PRESSWIRE-24 February 2004-ip.access: ip.access and RigNet deliver GSM Abis over IP via satellite; ip.access and RigNet partner for implementation of GSM-over-IP-over-satellite solution; Successful trial paves way for delivery of GSM services to remote locations(C)1994-2004 M2 COMMUNICATIONS LTD

Also looks interesting:
http://kbs.cs.tu-berlin.de/~jutta/toast.html
http://kbs.cs.tu-berlin.de/~jutta/gsm/toast-igp.ht ml

Please google "1994 gsm over ip"

http://goliath.ecnext.com/coms2/gi_0199-721578/ip- access-and-RigNet-deliver.html

M2 PRESSWIRE-24 February 2004-ip.access: ip.access and RigNet deliver GSM Abis over IP via satellite; ip.access and RigNet partner for implementation of GSM-over-IP-over-satellite solution; Successful trial paves way for delivery of GSM services to remote locations(C)1994-2004 M2 COMMUNICATIONS LTD

Also looks interesting:
http://kbs.cs.tu-berlin.de/~jutta/toast.html
http://kbs.cs.tu-berlin.de/~jutta/gsm/toast-igp.ht ml

No matter. You can send family groups on together without seriously affecting the speed of boarding time. See "Robustness of Efficient Passenger Boarding in Airplanes" - http://www.vsp.tu-berlin.de/publications/airplane_ boarding/15nov04.pdf

Also note that seat by seat boarding strategies are the most effecient strategies by far - they are just impossible to implement.

Yes, it is true. I must admit that "all" is in practice only minimum ("only logs you can keep" and small company ignores this law completely (similar: I think that people in North Carolina do oral sex even if law forbid it :) ). But anyway... do you know Timemachine - software for logging huge amount of data.

Stop coal-mining,

Especially mountain top removal.

start recycling plastics rather than burn them. Use oil only for producing plastics

Originally plastics were made from cellulose, plants, and though some still are much plastics are made from petroleum. In the 1930s it was found that hemp was a good source for making plastic but Du Pont was given a patent on a process to make plastics from petro, so they joined others in pushing for the passage of the Marijuana Tax Act of 1937 which basically made hemp illegal.

not for fuel. Use bio-fuels for vehicles.

Rudolph Diesel, the inventor of the diesel engine, designed his engine to run on most any vegetable oil including hemp seed oil and peanut oil. In the '30s Henry Ford built a car on his Iron Mountain Estate that was not only partially built using hemp but was fueled by alcohol made from hemp he grew on the estate. There's some good research going on now to use alga to produce hydrogen.

Stop deforestation of the rainforests in particular.

Unfortunately this isn't going to happen until those living in rainforests, whether in the Amazon or in Southest Asia, are given an economic reason to stop deforestation. They need to be rewarded for conserving the rainforest and/or they need to be made to pay for logging.

Start massive re-forestation. Somebody should think very hard of ways to transform deserts into woodlands.

Less than an hour ago I read an item in "New Scientist" on how farmers are reclaiming the desert in the Sahel region of the Sahara Desert. What was a barren wasteland of desert on the southern edge of the Sahara is now becoming productive farm land. Comparing satellite photos of the region from now and 20 years ago show that because of the resurgence of trees in the region the desert is retreating. As many as 3 million hectares in Niger have turned green. When more farming is done more tree grow which encourages more lifestock and wildlife, which further encourages more trees to grow thus creating a positive feedback loop.

Given that this would eventually become a profitable source for wood, it would also be a way for Africa - the poorest continent, if I'm not mistaken - to achieve prosperity

Economically Africa is poor but they are wealthy in natural resources. The problem is that most African don't benefit from any economic activity related to the extraction of the natural wealth. For instance the Congo serves as a good example. Hardwood trees are harvested from the Congo and much of it ends up in Europe and while the middlemens reap profits most of those in the area the wood comes from see little income. Then there's coltan. Coltan is used in electronics, from computers to cellphoes, and most coltan comes from the Congo. Different governments and rebel groups seek to control areas with coltan so they can collect the money which they use to buy more weapons and so on. And again as with logging the local not only see little economic benefit but they are also being killed. In Angola the San Bushmen, the oldest people in the region, are being driven off their land so international companies can mine for diamonds on the land. They suffer while the companies and a few local politicans get the money. Stories like this are all over Africa.

There's a heck of a lot of things that are hard about that problem. I do, however, think we have the technology to do it. The Scale-Invariant Feature Transform algorithm is now 2 years old. There are open source implementations and many demonstrations of it being used effectively. This algorithm makes recognising parts something you can do in realtime. All the dexterity required to fiddle about with those parts and put them together has been solved a number of times, but mostly by academics who don't commercialize their research, so you'd probably have to solve that again.

Yes, there is this software: http://user.cs.tu-berlin.de/~nowozin/autopano-sift / It is GPL'ed but the problem is that it is using a patented algorithm (SIFT features) so it is not free to use in commercial applications without paying I guess.

Choose one of the distros below - Schillix, BeleniX and Nexenta all have live CDs available in order to try
things out.

Solaris Express
http://www.sun.com/software/solaris/solaris-expres s/get.jsp

Schillix
http://schillix.berlios.de/

BeleniX
http://www.genunix.org/distributions/belenix_site/ belenix_home.html

NexentaOS
http://www.gnusolaris.org/

marTux
http://user.cs.tu-berlin.de/~mbeinsx/marTux/

One of the most useful sites for finding 3d engines has always been here. There are hundreds, and they can be rearranged into chosen categories.

The Swedish mathematician who proved a convergence theorem for Fourier series. without him there would be no IPOD. :p

Without Fourier transforms, we would have used time-domain methods for processing digital audio. Shorten, FLAC, Apple Lossless, and most other lossless audio codecs make use of an autoregressive analysis of a block of audio, followed by linear prediction with entropy coding of the residuals. The GSM Full Rate codec (implemented in Toast) and the Speex codec operate in much the same way, except they add pitch analysis (to filter out the periodicity of vowels and instrumental chords) and lossy quantization.

Since I can't e-mail you, I'll post a reply here.

I remember O.G.R.E., that was a great game. Had it for the Atari ST myself. I did a little searching after reading your post, and I've found the following links:

Commodore 64 version (is there a C64 emu for Linux?):
http://www.download-full-games.com/c64/games/ogre. html

A "lite" version of the original board game:
http://www.sjgames.com/ogre/resources/
http://www.sjgames.com/ogre/resources/ogrelite.pdf

A possible connection to the Atari ST version - this page has a list of disk images, each file appears to contain several games. I don't know what to do with this file to extract the games within, but the site mentions using the STEEM emulator, so maybe that will do it for you? Anyways, OGRE is almost halfway down the page, in file A_202:
http://steem.atari.st/automation.htm

Or direct to the file:
ftp://ftp.cs.tu-berlin.de/pub/atari/games/Automati on/A_202.ST

For possible help using the file, here's a blog entry from a few months ago - this guy has been running the game from this file under a different emu (SainT), so maybe you can pick his brain for assistance:
http://scottobear.livejournal.com/tag/atari

I'm sorry I couldn't actually find the DOS version, but I know from experience the ST version is great, and the C64 will probably be easy for you to run. Good luck!

While I agree with you in fact regarding the Colossus, I don't think it gets the mark for being first, either.

Konrad Zuse was first, by a number of years, with the Z3. Fully programmable, Turing-complete -- a computer by practically any definition of the term. Unfortunately he wasn't recognized until recently (when the machine was rebuilt) since it was destroyed during an Allied aerial bombardment of Berlin. It's actually arguable whether this distinction ought not go to his earlier prototype (the Z1) in 1938/39, which embodied many of the same principles, but didn't work too well due to the method of construction. (It was electromechanical.)

It's also worth pointing out that it wasn't created for any cryptographic purpose. It was built as a general-purpose machine, my understanding is that Zuse's background was in logistics and the Post Office. The Nazis were apparently underwhelmed and didn't support the project particularly well; if they had, computing history (and all modern history) might be quite different.

More references:
http://www.epemag.com/zuse/part4a.htm Article written by Konrad Zuse's son.
http://ei.cs.vt.edu/~history/Zuse.html Bio and C.V. of Konrad Zuse, and writings on information theory.

Well, another contender for the 1st crown is the Konrad Zuse Z3, recognition being largely obscured by fact of being on the losing side of the war.

I do not know why the ENIAC myth still pops up from time to time. Anyway, Konrad Zuse built the first computer, called the Z1. Even his famous Z3 was completed two years before the ENIAC.

http://irb.cs.tu-berlin.de/~zuse/Konrad_Zuse/en/Re chner_Z1.html
http://www.computerhope.com/history/194060.htm
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Z3

(...) It becomes clear that TCP can not utilize the full bandwidth because after having transmitted a window of data, it must wait until the acknowledges come back from the receiver. Because the delay is the same as on the normal speed link, there is a long pause between sending the last segment of the window until a new window is opened by the acknowledments.

I used to use emacs SPOOK , mostly as a lark, in all my email. In particular, there was a spookmime hack for Xemacs VM that put Spook words into the MIME boundary lines of every email so that it would be unobtrusive to email users, but, supposedly, trigger NSA keyword sieves. I stopped after 2001-Sep-11, but if I were living in Canada again, I'd definitely consider using Spook again... though I'd probably have to write a plugin for Thunderbird to do it.

If every ISP found that a significant minority of all of their users always had Spook keywords embedded in all of their email and lots of other traffic, that the system would be rendered useless. This would be an effective means of peaceful protest. Ref: CSIS.

Autostitch/autopano/autopano-sift, along with Panorama Tools, PTAssembler, PTGui or Hugin (open source!) makes it possible to take a bunch of images, and automatically detect which sets of images can be merged into panoramas/photo-mosaics.

Using any of them on a set of partial scans can be used to regenerate the original page.

Terje

You're absolutely spot on here. Look at the aewm project (a good reference implementation of an ICCCM compliant window manager), and then look at how many derivatives it has:

aewm++, alloywm, evilwm, maewm, Oroborus, phluid, Sapphire, swm, Clementine, WindowLab, YeahWM, Spook, wimpwm

Some of these are genuinely innovative but how many of them would exist if their authors had had to reimplement everything from scratch?

http://users.cs.tu-berlin.de/~fcordes/fire-fox.png

Did you happen to see the link to autopano-sift? That's GPL'd, I believe.

Doing a bit more research you will find that the University of British Columbia has applied for a patent on the SIFT algorithm in the United States, although it's happy to allow non-commercial applications of the algorithm, and happy to use other open source projects in it's implementation.

Although as it's from a University, and the patenter allows fre-as-in-beer non - commercial use this looks like a defensive patent to me, this immideatly puts the kibbosh on any GNU GPL/LGPL project using it

Autopano and Autopano-sift. I have't had good experiences with the SIFT-based software. They always tend to pick the most inappropriate points, like trees/leaves (that move between shots) and the middle of objects (where there aren't many features). I almost always have to go through and remove the bad points, adding in my own reliable ones (corners, unique features, etc). I just don't use them anymore because I actually spend less time if I do all the points myself manually. The GUI of Hugin usually saves me plenty of time already. It does a good job of picking the matching point when I click on one photo. That's all I need anymore.

From one of the links: The SIFT algorithm is restricted by patents in the United States and hence this software is not completely free to use. For details see the LICENSE file included in the distribution, before you start to use this software.

Hopefully, they're liberal about the patent and will let noncommercial nonresearch applications use the algorithm. Otherwise, we would have to wait for the really interesting software to come out.

A C# implementation with support for Mono is available to play with for anyone who is interested: http://user.cs.tu-berlin.de/~nowozin/libsift/
--
Free iPod? Try a free Mac Mini
Or a free Nintendo DS, GC, PS2, Xbox
Wired article as proof

Heh, that's what I thought the first time I heard about OGRE (what seems like) several years ago.

It's decent engine. It was not quite dynamic enough for what I was looking for at the time, but looked good as a game engine.

And of course the following is a good resource for people interested in 3D engines:
DevMaster

and no one should forget the great (but long dead; bring it back!) 3D engine list.

Java and .NET compiles to bytecode.
Not sure if you can compile Java to machine language as well.
I would think there are compilers out there that can do that GCJ?
Possibly the same could be achieved with .NET.
Any both posesses a virtual machine - all pioneered originally by Xeror Smalltalk.

Also JVM and .NET are in fact enviroments where you can have other languages:

JVM
.NET

But I wouldn't recommend installing Eiffel for Visual Studio say.
Last 3x I've tried it messed up my environment - and still never worked.
Shame because I really like the Eiffel syntax a lot.

libsift and there are links to the papers on that page.

It's not just software they are changing, they got into a regular Tux frenzy and have even ordered new tux uniforms (with obligatory berets, of course) for their plainclothes female officers, they also have new firearms and even a new ASCII based special forces mascot. I would say that they've taken this a bit too far, but I'm afraid that some of them are Slashdot regulars and I'd like to not have my house raided by men with heavy duty weaponry wearing silly penguin suits.

Once again, the apocryphal tale of bumblebees flying "despite the laws of aerodynamics saying they can't" makes the rounds.

In truth, the only reason such a "proof" exists is that the laws were applied incorrectly; the scientists involved used the explanations for single-foil flight (i.e. birds' wings.)

Whether they did so accidentally or as a joke remains the domain of speculation, but the truth is that the laws of aerodynamics can account for bumblebees quite nicely.

I stopped reading your post when you made the "but .NET can use multiple languages" part.

The Java platform supports WAY more languages than the .NET platform.

http://flp.cs.tu-berlin.de/~tolk/vmlanguages.html

Oh, and Java's language support is typically much more mature. Look at Jython vs IronPython for an example.

Most new installations are "bird friendly" - larger, slower rotating blades, turbines designed to prevent birds from landing or nesting on the housing, and placement taking into account migratory patterns.

Using this as a reference, there are approximately 180 turbines in use or proposed by this provider. At full capacity, this would account for 1/3 of a percent of the US electrical demand.

Using Altamont Pass (not included in the above calcuation) as a reference, and this page for kill rates, you get about .126 kills / year / turbine. This is a worst case, since it is generally accepted that Altamont Pass has an unusually high kill rate because it was built without taking into consideration migration paths and bird friendly engineering.

So, 180 turbines * 300 (needed to supply the whole US) and you get 54,000 turbines. Which converts to:

54,000 * .126 kills / turbine year = 6804 dead birds a year

Sounds like a lot, right?

Well, according to this (note: facts from a wind energy provider), 57 million birds are killed by automobiles each year, 97 million die from "sudden plate glass deceleration", and 1.5 million die from running into things that aren't even moving.

I don't know about you, but 7000 birds a year to generate all US electricity via a renewable resource with no emissions seems to be a good deal. Especially when it only costs 2.54 cents / kWh above non-green power.

- Tony

To get things straight: I'm not a creationist and I'm certainly not a creationist as normaly the word is understood in the US. I personally think it's an extreme act of heresy and blasphemy to presume that, so to speak, a day in god's time is just as long as a day in human time. Dispelling the "10 000 years" bullshit creationists like to spread. I think your standard US bible-belt creationists are crazy nutheads that ought to be excommunicated from ever which religious organization they belong to ASAP. And that they ought to be prohibited from calling themselves 'christians'.
That being said:
The Bombardier Bug has an extremly effective defense tactic agains Frogs an the likes. He shoots two liquid components of a two-component explosive that hit each other at a distance and explode, causing an explosion simular to that of a small gunshot. He does so by timing and aiming the squirt of each component liquid in such a way that he isn't hurt himself. Timing takes place in a frame of Milliseconds. The explosion this bug causes is more than enough to instantly kill it if it happens to close or inside it. Where the two components are safely kept seperately until used.
There is no way what-so-ever that a something like this could evolve using 100% pure so-called darwinisim. (Sidenote: The most important darwinist actually says that darwinisim alone doesn't explain everything. That one being Darwin himself.)
Bottom Line:
To me it is an evident fact that - how shall we put it without sounding stupid - 'hyper sentinence' was involved in the evolution of the physical universe. That not necessarly be a god as he is usually described, and absolutely not as creationists usually describe. Maybe one could think of a kind of "hive intelligence" by all living things. But nevertheless and anyway: To me - and a lot of scientists - it is evident that the physical universe didn't come to be as it is by pure accident alone.
The Bombardier Bug being a nice little indicating evidence in case.

If he used the Java VM, he would got TCL for free. And he could have used all the other languages for the Java VM.
It's like Mono/DotNET, but with more languages.

Jutta Degener, creator of the Halfbakery (down due to hardware problems), had an idea almost exactly like this called Delay.com. According to the HTTP headers of the page, it was last updated on September 25th, 1995.

There's a serious question here as to how much performance you're willing to sacrifice just to be able to live solely under the JVM, though.

There are quite a few 3d engines out there. The biggest I guess are Crystal Space 3D, Genesis3D, OGRE, Toque (Tribes2), Quake and Quake II. Of course there are others to fill certin niches like Yeti or ExoEngine and libraries like DevLib and G3D for those who want to write their own engine, but don't feel like they need to implement yet another file loader. I'm not sure why 0.7 of Irrlicht was worth mentioning on /. as it is isn't clear what its roll is compared to those other engines.

I was at Siggraph 2004 and attended a round table on "how will you (game developers) feed next generation games". The problem is going from a Playstation1 to Playstation2 many developers found games now took roughly 2 to 3x the man years to create. But profits didn't really go up that much to compensate. This has happened every console generation and will happen again with the up coming generation. PC games don't have clear generations, but the same concept applies.

The main ideas were to reuse content. For example if you're making a Matrix game, get the 3d models from the movie instead of making your own and start from there. Or if you're making a port try to reuse as much as possible. Future games will have a lot of computer generated stuff which is artist guided instead of artist created so that one artist creates a forest instead of creating a bunch of leafs on a single tree.

A big surprise to me was open source wasn't mentioned until somebody asked. A company like id will implement something cool like unified lighting for all objects first, but a year later everybody has their own implementation of it. Every year has something like this that gets the anual lens flare award; colour lighting, ground clutter, normal mapping, rag doll physics, etc. Yawn. Every company spends all this time re-implementing the exact same technology. All developers can read the same papers from Siggraph, Eurographics, or GDC and then discuss them on the same mailing lists so there is plenty of open sharing happening already. So I was surprised to hear none of the guys at the round table thought open source would really be useful to help save them money in the future other than for rather basic things like zlib, lua, etc.

It sure would be nice to see some engines reach commercial quality to used in some good games instead of getting more and more re-implementations of the foundation, which /. apparently is finds interesting. Once it happens there will be a huge snow ball effect where it picks up a LOT of developer attention. Maybe in five years one of the existing engines will reach a level of maturity that it can start to be really used and then in another ten we'll see it catching on like GNU/Linux is now?

find /mnt/mail -name *VIAGRA* -exec rm -rf {}\;

It would miss messages that talk about V1A6R/\, especially the ones that use ISO 8859-5 to draw the R backward.

Apple Lossless wasn't really created by Apple. It's actually called ALS and is an open standard. Apple just happens to be the first to create a (high-profile) implementation of it.

And about a million other languages.