Slashdot Mirror

I remember getting a mod of Castle Wolfenstein called Castle Smurfenstein, complete with audio encoded smurf song and a bloodcurdling scream.

Not too long later I got the mod to dino eggs called Dino Smurfs. Oddly enough, I'd purchased both games retail (a rarity back then).

Interesting... I googled on it and find out today the series came out in reverse order, or at least was meant to come out in a different order - look here for Dead Smurf Software info. Apparently Tom Hall of Id thought it was the first mod too (actually the first total conversion). It seems an appropriate next step to some of the stuff that was happening at the time (I had friends that created a popular Ultima editor, and we were huge WizEdit fans [and later the better Wizardry Scenario Editor] for Wizardry).

I remember getting a mod of Castle Wolfenstein called Castle Smurfenstein, complete with audio encoded smurf song and a bloodcurdling scream.

Not too long later I got the mod to dino eggs called Dino Smurfs. Oddly enough, I'd purchased both games retail (a rarity back then).

Interesting... I googled on it and find out today the series came out in reverse order, or at least was meant to come out in a different order - look here for Dead Smurf Software info. Apparently Tom Hall of Id thought it was the first mod too (actually the first total conversion). It seems an appropriate next step to some of the stuff that was happening at the time (I had friends that created a popular Ultima editor, and we were huge WizEdit fans [and later the better Wizardry Scenario Editor] for Wizardry).

I am a co-founder of a 501(c)3 non-profit, Applied Interactives, which creates VR systems and content for artists and scientists. We have installed several passive stereo displays for Universities, corporations and individuals. Please check out our website for more info.

I am a co-founder of a 501(c)3 non-profit, Applied Interactives, which creates VR systems and content for artists and scientists. We have installed several passive stereo displays for Universities, corporations and individuals. Please check out our website for more info.

Should be interesting to see what its capable of, and if anyone is willing to go inside (considering the strength)!

This btw... is a small explaination of a CAVE.

kick 'em off the network. That's what the network guys at my school did, and within a week, we were essentially Blaster-free. They distributed CDs with fixes for the worms, as well as instructions to turn ICF on. A week later they started banning anyone trying to remotely reach RPC ports. Worked like a charm. People think "oh, I don't have a virus, I don't need to patch." Kick em off, it'll learn em.

An overview of CAVE virtual reality systems>

Multiple video outputs is definitely a step in the right direction for a lot of exciting developments is visualization. Gamers rejoice.

This is more like the railroads back in the 1800's. Railroads are now required to carry others' cars, in fact they pay rent for the cars on their track.

At one time there were hundreds of small railroads, many of which owned only a single line from PointA to PointB. Their anticompetitive tactics often included predatory pricing, delay of competitors' shipments and outright refusal to carry a competitor's engines or cars. Companies with a monopoly on routes important to others sometimes charged 10X the going rate, "because they could". For another example, railroads commonly charged farmers exorbitant rates to store and carry their grain because they had a local monopoly on storage and transportation.

According to this, this problem was the impetus for the original Interstate Commerce Act of 1887 (ICA), and also the original Sherman Anti-Trust Act of 1890. The latter act is also the basis of the federal actions against Microsoft, BTW. Some other interesting links are available here. This article briefly shows how the development of the railroad system beginning in the early 1800's was a major factor in creating the entire US legal structure we now take for granted, including racial integration, worker protection, eminent domain, elimination of 'blue laws', liability/tort law and public/private partnerships.

The ICA established the Interstate Commerce Commission (ICC), which was responsible to set standard rates for railroad passage, and required every railroad to carry others' cars at a reasonable cost.

At present each railroad pays rent for each car that is recorded as being on its tracks to the car owner, but can use it to earn revenue from a shipper. Thus every railroad is motivated to get the car filled with something and send it off to another place, to either earn money with it or stop the rent accruing. Many cars are now owned by individuals or holding companies, who buy the car and send it out on the track in hopes of receiving rent.

The Gary-Chicago-Milwaukee traffic web site gives the real-time traffic information from sensors embedded in the highways. It also tells you where the scheduled highway construction is. The only problem is that some highways, like the Illinois tollway system, don't participate.

With that all you need to see the traffic situation is wireless web access. Maybe you could use Wardriving. Ironically, then the worse the traffic backup is, the easier it would be to see the traffic map!

Or Xine will play Real with the win32 codecs installed. Some info here.

A Cave, with all the graphics systems (Linux available from SGI), will set you back a few units of currency more than 20K. I have seen a demo of Quake on this thing, so there is at least one game you can play on it.

I would recommend anyone to view these type of images on a tile display. At SC 2003, at least EVL and SGI did show dome impressive demo's (in particular, SGI did show some interesting geographic imagery software).

My school has a Sun box called icarus. I found it funny.

My school has a Sun box called icarus. I found it funny.

On the Oncolytics web site, they only list Phase I and Phase II trials. That's just to evaluate safety and dosing. In Phase III, they finally get around to testing for effectiveness, and they haven't done that yet.

I've seen lots of drugs that did this well in Phase II trials but flunked Phase III. I remember seeing Fortune magazine with the headline on the cover, "Cure for Cancer!" 20 years ago. Unfortunately not. (They got over-enthusiastic about cancer vaccines.)

Phase III is a randomized controlled trial. They randomly assign half the patients to the drug, and half the patients to a placebo. If it really works, you should see the difference. A lot of times it doesn't work and you know the drug is useless. Until the RCT you don't know anything for sure.

Another distinction you have to make is the end point. It's one thing to shrink a tumor, but the main thing most cancer patients are interested in is whether they're going to die. There are a lot of drugs that shrink tumors, but have no effect on how long they live.

Here's a discussion, "Levels of Clinical Evidence in the Primary Literature" which describes the different levels of evidence. Or look at BMJ Or if you want to search Google look for "Evidence-based medicine."

I hope this will encourage investors to throw lots of money at basic research and give us a better understanding of why cells become cancerous. It makes the New England Journal of Medicine more fun to read. Who knows? Maybe they'll come up with something useful some day. But not today.

In the case of Linux the improvement in the OS is at a much steeper trajectory than Windows.

It is starting in smaller pockets (I am talking desktop) where the requirement for compatability is somewhat lower. Pockets where only a smaller subset of functionality is needed etc. But the thing is that once in, it will not be replaced by Windows. The Niche is gone for good.

Second Linux is Circling Windows from all sides. From big iron servers to cell phones. This means that the interoperability issue will become less and less. One day you will wake up and realize that it is actually smarter to ditch Windows than try to keep it in sync with it's surroundings.

A new milestone was reached in trans-Atlantic data transmission today by researchers at the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC) who demonstrated the practicality of transferring even very large data sets over high-speed production networks ... In the test, 1.4 terabytes of astronomical data was transmitted from Chicago to Amsterdam in 30 minutes using UDT, a new protocol developed by the NCDM at the University of Illinois at Chicago.

The European Organisation for Nuclear Research, CERN, said the feat, doubling the previous top speed, was achieved in a nearly 30-minute transmission over 7,000 kms of network between Geneva and a partner body in California.

I understand there was some sort of computing conference recently, involving high-speed transfer, which had a transatlantic testbed for participants to use to run their tests. CalTech's test was part of this, and shared bandwidth with other projects (you actually see it in their Fast TCP transfer rate graphs when someone else's project starts using the fiber too). So I wouldn't be surprised if a few other organizations were testing similar high-rate schemes at around the same time.

University of Illinois at Chicago was able to achieve 6.8Gb/s a few days ago using the UDT protocol .... http://www.ncdm.uic.edu/pressrelease.html

What you are missing is that they transferred the data over UDT not FASTTCP

The press release at the national center for data mining says clearly that they used UDT. Google link to an overview of the protocol is here or the original.

What you are missing is that they transferred the data over UDT not FASTTCP

The press release at the national center for data mining says clearly that they used UDT. Google link to an overview of the protocol is here or the original.

The original press release is here.

Is TCP's performance really that poor? Some UDT presentations quote 2.4 MBytes per second. Over a low-latency WAN (few dozen milliseconds), performance is actually quite good, and sometimes, it used to be faster to fetch a file from a site a few hundred kilometers way than from the local FTP server (although the latter was connected to the LAN using a 100 MBit link).

His point, while put in a rather sneering, ranting tone, is well-taken. It is a fact that most PHBs don't get there because of merit. They get there because they went to the right prep school, Daddy knew the right people, their frat brothers (whom they used to drink a fifth a weekend with) helped them, etc. Also, there is some credence to the notion that B-schoolers don't know their ass from a hole in the ground. As a former one myself (before I saw the light,) I can tell you that they have as many classes on etiquette and protocol as they do academics. Look where business administration majors score - fifth from the bottom! Where's my major? Second from the top, even beating out comp. sci. and engineering. WOOHOO!!

I agree that social skills are necessary. I agree that one has to be able to get along to a certain extent. But social skills are one thing, getting by because you're a bullshit artist in an expensive suit is quite another. Most corporate higher-ups fit into the latter category, and we saw it in excelsis during the dot.bomb era.

Now it's my turn to rant. This proves what a lot of people suspect about CEOs and other higher-ups in companies. Namely, that they are spoiled, pampered, self-important, pompous assholes who have never worked a hard day in their lives and wouldn't know an honest day's work if it bit them in the face. They don't need the training because, hey, we're bigshots. We've people for those menial tasks. "We're too good for the mere IT mortals, we deserve private training." Yeah, along with your private dining room, private bathroom, private jet, etc., etc., etc . . .

The parent behind this lawsuit:

Ron Baiman
205 S. Humphrey
Oak Park, IL
708-445-9052
rbaiman@uic.edu>

Source of parent name: This article and these Oak Park Board of Education meeting minutes.
Source of address and phone number: This message.
Corroborating source plus e-mail address: This.

Disclaimer: This information was provided for those who wish to contact Mr. Baiman to express their opinions and/or discuss this matter in a legal manner. It is not posted for any other purpose. The contact information may be incorrect or outdated and I do not guarantee its accuracy.

If you have the equipment (a special room, several projectors, an SGI Onyx with three Reality Engine 2s, and some other junk), you can find yourself in the middle of a CAVE, and that is cool.

The description in the article sounds analogous to the way muscle fibers work. Mother nature is a great structural engineer, and she's been at it a lot longer than we have. Human technology has been inspired repeatedly by nature. One easy example is the Wright Brothers. Others may follow in replies. (I hope so, anyway. I'm sort of in the mood to hear a few more...)

An explanation here: UIC

A cool animation here: San Diego S.U.

I remember at university when SGI came around with their trailer full of cool boxes. This was around 1990 - 1991. The one thing I remember about that event was the real-time demonstration of the water tentacle effect from The Abyss.

No other machine could even come close to rendering this kind of thing real-time. These days, we're spoiled by high-end graphics cards costing only hundreds of dollars which eclipse what SGI could do back then by a factor of 10.

hmm...
In fact, although the holodeck-like CAVE was introduced in 1992 - 5 years after ST:NG's debut, VR systems had been around a few years already.

For example, Lanier's VPL had the first commercial interface gloves (1984). head mounted displays (1987), and networked virtual world system (1989).

University of Illinois at Chicago actually has Bioinformatics programs and their curriculum is available on their website.

One of the reasons is that TCP has a congestion control mechanism (it will back off if the sender doesn't get all acknowledgement back), but with such a high bandwidth-delay product, the congestion control mechanism is triggered, even when the routers are not dropping any traffic. It is currently unclear what the exact reason for this is (I've heard possible reasons from the sender floading the receiver to the random early packet dropping that most modern routers do). Scientists are looking into this right now. Problem is the sheer complexity of TCP Reno (The TCP implementation as you are using right now).

Of course, UDP can be used: that is much more aggresive then TCP, and can fill 98% of the available bandwidth, but has no congestion control, and can easily bring down a whole university network to it's knees if applied improperly. So a whole range of new TCP-alternatives is emerging, FastTCP one of them.

Currently, the Global Grid Forum (GGF), a standardization organisation is evaluating all these TCP-alternatives. You can check their most current results at: http://www.evl.uic.edu/eric/atp/ (Note that this is very much a work in progress!)

People keep telling me that SGI boxes are unique because they allow hundreds of processors to share memory. Apparently that's no longer that big an advantage.

Then you're probably out of business anyway, so what does it matter at that point?

(1) Disasters happen more often than people expect. And they can happen to you, not just the other guy. Wildpackets almost went out of business as a result of underestimating that.

(2) Being out of business anyway - well - that's a discussion I had with the owner of one small company. I pointed out to him that one of his core values was loyalty to his employees. In the event of a big disaster, he and his family would collect the insurance check and sell the site, but his (former) employees' mortgage payments would continue. He got the point and agreed to improve disaster recovery plans.

(3) "Both of our sites will never get hit at the same time". I had a friend in charge of DR for a large company who analyzed 10 years of data center disasters and came to the same conclusion. He put the backup right down the street from the primary. Ever hear of the Great Chicago Flood? Luckily for my friend he was working at another company when both his primary and backup were taken out by that event!

That's my 0.02 anyway.

sPh

Last week I stumbled upon the GameBoy Advanced development scene. I found out that GameBoy does not have an opengl port for it. I come from mainly the PC Game developer scene. So I have ported TinyGL (http://fabrice.bellard.free.fr/TinyGL/) a small free subset of OpenGL API.

It is written all over the walls. America is claiming that they want to protect all of those oil wells because they belong to the Iraqi people, and because they're banking on the oil wells to pay for reconstruction.
Conveniently, that implies that America and others will be "buying" that oil in exchange for Iraq to be reconstructed

If a US-sympathetic ruler heads Iraq, then he could collapse OPEC from the inside, and could sell cheap/free oil to the US which would upset the French and Russian oilfield stakeholders. France and Russia may get the money from oil, but at what prce will the oil be sold? Undoubtedly the Americans will bill the Iraqis for invading, like they did to the Kuwaitis. From where can the Iraqis get this money apart from their oil? No arab state has a thriving diversified manufacturing economy. If not for oil, all arab cities may be consumed by the desert from whence they came.

The decadence of their oil tycoons is astonishing, my friend in UAE told me that they buy Mercedes and Rolls-Royces, and then do a wheelie whilst leaning out of the window and lighting a match. Many of these six-figure priced cars get trashed but they don't care because there's plenty of money to go around. These stories are censored in the West because there would be race riots, they're doing this with our petrol money after all.
Good to hear from you also.

I also think that you dismiss manned spaceflight to readily. While there are some things that robotic probes can do better, there are times when decidely human qualities win out.

You lost to the friggen Haitians! Were saved twice from Germany by in no small part the US (btw the second time we saved France we were also fighting a war against Japan). Yes we lost Vietnam (formerly know as French indo-china (with Kampuchea and Laos) who also booted out the French. You lost Quebec to the English, you won the 100 years war but burned alive the woman who led you to victory. Hmm Napoleon won a few but he was Corsican.

The US defeated England in our revolution (I will grant the French were there but we did most of the fighting) and the war of 1812, we defeated Mexico (another nation that kicked the crap out of France), Beat Spain in the late 1800's, helped save you in WW1, then again in WW2 (while fighting at the same time two very powerful nations), we fought to a stalemate soviet plans and Chinese troops in Korea, lost Vietnam because we did not play to win, then won a few minor wars with Panama, and Iraq (again France cant beat Haiti so it relevant), and most recently helped the NA removed the Taliban from Afghanistan (umm Karzai is still president of that nation and the taliban is shrinking more and more every day).

Now on to what you are not trying to hide from is France Socially superior to the US??

Literacy: both France and the US have over 90% literacy
Here . The french are a whopping 2% higher than the us here . When you take into account that nearly 4% of the US population are illegal immigrants (people who want to come to this land of misery as you call it)
here and documented imigrants are around 10% of our population
here we have a much harder task in front of us than the French. There are schools in our cities with kids who speak more than 30 languages doubt France has to deal with that.

Now onto "misery, insecurity and unhappiness are more present in the USA than in France." I would like to see how you quantified that? As it's not something you can measure but Ill give it a try.

Lets start with lenght of life
People in France live one year longer than Americansas a % that is 1.3% longer (that can probably be written off to a large immigrant population who may come from a nation with a poor health care system, but even if not that's statistically insignificant as the US and Germany are tied so they must be miserable too.

Now lets look at standard of living the US GDP per capita is nearly 30% higher in the US, same source as above and also here

The US has a higher quality of life according to UN data here .

We are also a Cleaner Nation here

Now while none of this prooves the US is a more happy, and secure place than the zoo between Germany and Spain it goes allot further than your post. If you care to get into a war of wits (again be careful about being French and in a war) at least come armed next time.

Finally about most of our genius coming from abroad if you speaking to our roots as a nation (being we are 70% of European decent) than I would put it to you that you have no point as they are educated and nurtured in America. If you are referring to the # of foreign students in our universities I would ask you why are they coming here rather than going to France? I would also put it to you that your culture was started when you lost a War to the Romans and had their culture put on you, Western Culture owes more to the Italians and Greeks than the French, English, and Americans put together. There is nothing to argue we are not perfect but we are better in most ways than the French.

Note: I consider an Immigrant who comes to this nation and becomes a citizen to be the most loyal and important kind of American one who made the choice

Yeah, I love this book. What I find most amazing about it is that it was originally written in Polish, and somehow all that poetry still comes out amazing. The one you quoted goes on for another 7 verses, and each damn one rhymes. Although that's probably a much of a tribute to the translator as is is to Lem himself.

Translation is an interesting problem.

Douglas Hofstadter , of Goedel Escher Bach fame, wrote an entire book about the nuances of translation, using many, many translations of an obscure one stanza poem to illustrate his theme.

It is somewhat surprising how well translation of poems or other word play works, and even more surprising is how wildly differant translations can convey the same feel, and somehow capture the feel of the original work.

Of course, it isn't too hard to screw it up completely either.

We also have no way of proving that we are not chained inside a cave, mistaking shadows on the wall for reality, unable to turn to see the fire or the figures that cast the shadows, unable to leave the cave and go out in the sunlight.

In fact, seems like we're trying to get into the CAVE.

virtual reality == the decline & fall of western civilization (at least according to Plato).

annmariabell.com

http://www.math.uic.edu/~burgiel/Tetris/explanatio n.html Has a great article about this. Essentially, in a truly random Tetris game, getting a long sequence of alternating Z and S pieces will make it impossible to complete the board; they're thicker in the middle than the sides, meaning you'll build up a little tower in the middle, no matter how good you are.

The page has links to a version of Tetris with only those pieces, if you want to try your luck on it.

A lot of "Paper MCSEs" understand this because the networking exam covers the OSI model. The same thing goes for those "Paper CCNAs".

Here's how it works. When I do a net send "Message", the following occurs. Once the data portion of the net send information is formatted by the appropriate layers, it's handed down to the protocol layer and wrapped in a UDP header with a port number. UDP is the protocol responsible for maintaining a communication session between hosts. The port number is like an apartment number in a street address. A lot of services have to talk using the UDP protocol, so it's divided into port numbers (As an FYI, the same is done for TCP). This in turn is handed down to the network layer where it will get a source and destination address stamp (The IP addresses). That in turn is handed down to the data link layer which stamps on the source and destination MAC addresses (Your computer and the default gateway). From there, it hits the physical layer and is on the wire. Along the way, the data link layer changes every hop that is made because the MAC addresses involved change at each router hop. Once it gets to the destination IP address, the recipient strips off the layers to reveal the data. It knows to hand that data up to the NetBIOS services because they're the ones listening on UDP port 138. Finally, you get a little window trying to sell pr0n. Here's a picture that shows the different layers of a TCP packet and their function.

Here's a rundown on NetBIOS port usage.

UDP port 137 is used for NetBIOS name resolution.

UDP port 138 is used for browsing, domain authentication, and datagrams (This is what the messenger service uses).

TCP port 139 is used for the actual session. This is what you transfer files through.

TCP port 135 is the RPC service. Some people often confuse it with the NetBIOS ports. I don't know why.

So, technically, you'll want to block UDP ports 137 and 138 and TCP port 139. Unfortunately, a lot of home equipment is geared towards the novice and they don't separate the UDP and TCP protocols. You are forced to block both TCP and UDP for any given port number. Because of this, you end up blocking more than is required.

For those interested in this brief tutorial, I highly encourage you to get a CCNA study guide even if you're not going to get the certification. Lots of valuable networking info.

Lucas
MCSE, CCNA, Ex-Microsoft NT Networking and Security Support Rep

(And here I was looking for a tarball, heh.)

Can you explain how they're using this for a distance learning project? Do they have identical labs set up, or what?

Just curious.

And is anybody doing something like this with an Open Source license?

The prohibition doesn't apply in this case because this anti-fax-spam law has been on the books since 1991, so all of fax.com's supposed violations clearly would have taken place while the law was already in force.

As you may know, Bayes Theorem (actually a statement of fact in probability theory) says:

Post-test odds = Likelihood Ratio * Pre-test odds

(Where the likelihood ratio for a positive test is the sensitivity/(1-specificity), or TP rate / FP rate)

If your pre-test odds of being a terrorist are very low (and when you consider how many terrorists fly compared to how many non-terrorists fly, they must be exceedingly low), you're going to need a very, very powerful ("highly specific" in medical terms) test if you want to reliably determine that a given person ought to be treated with greater care.

On the other hand, if they were planning to spend a lot of time and money screening people anyway, and they could improve their sensitivity (TP rate), facial recognition might be a (statistically) sound approach to screening *out* suspects. That is, one you pass a face-detection screen that has a high TP rate, you don't need to be subjected to as much extra screening; but if you fail the face-detection screen, it's not really diagnostic.

Normally, you could use my diagnostic test calculator to fool around with numbers yourself and see what the impact would be, but it appears to be down until I can get to the server (dratted dist upgrade!)

I'd be a lot more realistic (but much more difficult to implement) than the "CAVE" projects that I've heard about. Also, If the sphere were some sort of a mesh, you might even find a way to project peripheral background images onto the inside of the sphere (cloud texture, ground texture, etc), so that it seems to better fill your peripheral vision.

_Yes
_No
_I only fuck the dead

And of course we need a "Cave" environment to run it in ...

Ok, here we go again.

Look here for the answer.

Also, the favorite science scam poll has some interesting comments about this. Look it up.

Sex with animals does not always involve cruelty.

RMS would say he's not for Open Source, he's for Free Software

The model was around long before RMS, he just successfully described & codified it in the GPL

CAVE technology in general is making rapid advances, and *home versions are in the making, particularly for gaming. Up until now the Beckman Institute had a 4 screen version, which is great. Although a 6 screen version is better, that too will be outdated within years.

Anyone attending SigGraph 2000/01 probably couldn't miss the elumens "little" home caves that you sit in [it looks like a big soup bowl sitting on its side and it ROCKS!!. check it out here Although it only provides a 180 degrees, the immersive effects are great, and there are no corners. This was also created by a former NCSA employee of the Immersive Environments Group. For 20k you can own the technology today.

People like Rajlich who created the multiusr quake are also exploring bringing CAVE/immersive tech. to the home gamer.

VRCO.com has already ported the CAVEGL to linux, allowing you run VR apps using the cave graphics library on top of OpenGL. 6 screens is great, but in several years this wont be a big deal.

As the Legendary Donna Cox puts it, the future is in multi-user VR immersive environments in which avatars congregate for business and pleasure. Multi-user gaming is also driving the technology very quickly, so dont be surprised to see more posts on VR and its uses...

VRdot.org???

***GREATfirewalls are so hard to find***