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Maybe, just maybe, I could get Apple to replace my defective Titanium powerbook with the new model... I hope it doesn't have the paint issues that mine did....

Here's the link for it too:

3D User interface

The IntelPlay site has a good QX3 FAQ as well as the product's 3/29/02 obituary. We can only hope they are clearing out stock before introducing the new improved version, but I doubt it - Intel is discontinuing ALL Intelplay toys, not just the microscope. With MTV style advertising like this it's no wonder it failed to find a continuing market niche as a classic toy - it takes longer than a 10 second attention span to do science. Some gross-out photos are here, as well as a comparison of a QX3 vs.Zeiss dissection scope as well as a comparison of the QX3 and another "inexpensive educational toy" called the Pocketscope. The main Pocketscope site talks about how to add video and lighting to their superior optics. Tinkering with, adjusting, modifying and using the QX3 is discussed here, here and here. More places to buy a QX3 before they go universally out of stock are GlobalMart, Erwincomputers, and Amazon.

Is called VisIT. It produces a graphical representation of how sites link together, based around any given query. It was used quite sucessfully to demonstrate how Scientology had spammed Google, by creating multiple domains all linking back to their main web page.

It's a freebie download and you can get it here.

Here's yet another one: the "Platinum" IA-32 Linux cluster at NCSA in Urbana, Illinois. I'm lucky enough to have an account on this monster.

Quoting from their page (a more general overview is here):

The concept of "rate-limiting" is to allow residents to download large files without getting turned off. However, the more you download in a 24 hour period, the slower your connection may get. The connection will then be restored back to full speed when the total count falls under the limit in a 24 hour period. This is still based on the previous 750MB limit for each resident per day. Currently, all halls have Rate-Limiting. The numbers and traffic patterns will be watched and some of the numbers can be adjusted for better performance and service if needed.

Their system uses four different classes: unrestricted, and restricted(A,B,C). They also have a CGI available which will display your current use. It's rather interesting, IMO.

Quoting from their page (a more general overview is here):

The concept of "rate-limiting" is to allow residents to download large files without getting turned off. However, the more you download in a 24 hour period, the slower your connection may get. The connection will then be restored back to full speed when the total count falls under the limit in a 24 hour period. This is still based on the previous 750MB limit for each resident per day. Currently, all halls have Rate-Limiting. The numbers and traffic patterns will be watched and some of the numbers can be adjusted for better performance and service if needed.

Their system uses four different classes: unrestricted, and restricted(A,B,C). They also have a CGI available which will display your current use. It's rather interesting, IMO.

Quoting from their page (a more general overview is here):

The concept of "rate-limiting" is to allow residents to download large files without getting turned off. However, the more you download in a 24 hour period, the slower your connection may get. The connection will then be restored back to full speed when the total count falls under the limit in a 24 hour period. This is still based on the previous 750MB limit for each resident per day. Currently, all halls have Rate-Limiting. The numbers and traffic patterns will be watched and some of the numbers can be adjusted for better performance and service if needed.

Their system uses four different classes: unrestricted, and restricted(A,B,C). They also have a CGI available which will display your current use. It's rather interesting, IMO.

Lol, what an extra open-bracket can do to slash.

Except that draconian colleges such as Georgia Tech has too strong "honor codes". The "honor code" system is quite good, and I support it, but it cannot detract from learning.

My school (http://www.uiuc.edu/), manages to have a top-notch CS department (and a very respected undergraduate CS program), while still enouraging learning . People are actually encouraged to seek out help from others. I seriously hope Ga Tech changes what seems to be a horrible code.

Except that draconian colleges such as Georgia Tech has too strong "honor codes". The "honor code" system is quite good, and I support it, but it cannot detract from learning.

My school (), manages to have a top-notch CS department (and a very respected undergraduate CS program), while still enouraging learning . People are actually encouraged to seek out help from others. I seriously hope Ga Tech changes what seems to be a horrible code.

I used to work for the local (independent) college bookstore (Illini Union Bookstore), and we had access to Books in Print in both dead tree (very old) and web-based (shared a login with our university's library) formats. While the information was usually very good and very reliable, there were many problems.

Do you have any old books? BIP can be very unreliable when trying to find books published before 1980. Even still, BIP doesn't include information on all the different editions of a particular book, so your ISBN may not yield any results.

Speaking of no results, the search feature on BIP is incredibly unreliable. You can search for an ISBN, not find a book, then search for the title and come up with a book with the ISBN you just searched for. Try putting that ISBN back into the search box and it doesn't work! Sometimes you get what you want, sometimes you don't.

Aside from searching for basic bibliographic information (title, author, illustrator if any, publisher info, etc.), pricing and availability information (available for most books in BIP's database) are not up-to-date as they report them to be. Many times we ordered books and the publisher told us the books were priced very differently from what BIP told us. Good luck getting an accurate estimate of how much your book collection is worth!

In the end, a book database like cddb's cd database or even better, like imdb's movie database including reviews and ratings would help people organize and maintain their private collections, and would help bookstore employees get their job done. If only the book database software our bookstore used had the ability to access an outside database like that!

I'm surprised UIUC hasn't been mentioned for our present endeavors in HCI. There's a lot of money and work flying around here.

The huge building known as the Beckman institute houses AI and HCI research with primary intermingling occurring among the CS and Psychology departments. Human-Computer Intelligence Interaction
...and then there's my favorite baby project on campus, Active Spaces. Active Spaces is just a part of the CS department, separate from Beckman, and is researching ways to gadgetize the new CS building, aka the Siebel center (currently-under-construction).

I'm surprised UIUC hasn't been mentioned for our present endeavors in HCI. There's a lot of money and work flying around here.

The huge building known as the Beckman institute houses AI and HCI research with primary intermingling occurring among the CS and Psychology departments. Human-Computer Intelligence Interaction
...and then there's my favorite baby project on campus, Active Spaces. Active Spaces is just a part of the CS department, separate from Beckman, and is researching ways to gadgetize the new CS building, aka the Siebel center (currently-under-construction).

I'm surprised UIUC hasn't been mentioned for our present endeavors in HCI. There's a lot of money and work flying around here.

The huge building known as the Beckman institute houses AI and HCI research with primary intermingling occurring among the CS and Psychology departments. Human-Computer Intelligence Interaction
...and then there's my favorite baby project on campus, Active Spaces. Active Spaces is just a part of the CS department, separate from Beckman, and is researching ways to gadgetize the new CS building, aka the Siebel center (currently-under-construction).

Old Crays also make cool sofas, which adds a lot of value to their multi-million dollar price tags. =)

We have two of them (a Cray-1 and a X/MP) here at LiU

I am a programmer. I too have extremely weak eyes. How bad? Two summers ago, I went to summer intern at a company that bought us brand new 17" SONY trinitron monitors and I ended up in the doctors'. I spend over 50% of my computer budget on monitors. (which is what EVERYONE should do.) I have spent a lot of time on this subject. Let me tell you what I find.

1. Lighting is VERY important. make sure you have ambient light.

2. the size of the monitor is also very important, but CRISPNESS is more important. You must make sure that the monitor is CRISP. You cannot really tell if a monitor is CRISP without looking at it. Two monitors with the same pitch distance can be very different when you actually look at them.

3. You MUST get them with full 3 year warranty. Monitors are so fragile, that it may be already broken during shipment, before you open the box. Monitors, especially big ones, have an extremely high lemon rate. If you spend money on a monitor and you are not satisfied with the image quality, insist on taking it back. You must move it *very* carefully.

4. LCD vs. CRT. Well. LCD technology is simply not there yet. When IBM shows me the 300dpi monitor I'll take a close look and maybe change my mind. The truth is, For the price you pay for a LCD with high quality digital signals, you'd be so better off with two beautiful 20" high end monitor. Another thing is, in Linux, you can configure 10 different resolutions, all the way from 1200x1600 to 400x600. LCDs cannot scale good. When a LCD is displaying any size that is different from it's own, it interpolates. This anti-aliasing kills your eyes because your eyes tend to think that it is out of focus.

5. Video card counts. You must get a Matrox. Make damn sure that it doesn't get under 85MHz. Better get higher rates. Hand tune your monitor carefully.

6. Monitor cables counts a lot, too. Best is high quality BNC cables, they are about $100.

7. Do yourself a favour, use OPERA as your browser. you can zoom in any size you want with your numeric keypad. Right now I'm typing in half-inch letters.

8. one thing great about two huge monitors is that you can set one of them at really low resolution, so when you switch to windows. *shame* like VC++ you can see BIG letters.

9. Picking a monitor is likely shopping for fruit. You must hand pick yours. Even the exact same model have different crispness. Pick a good one.

This is what my room looks like.

My school have 20" Trinitron monitors everywhere, but they tire my eyes. If you set up your monitor configuration correctly, you are not likely to be tired for a long long time.

What's the best CRT monitor? Well I really dislike Trinitron tubes because many of them actually flashes due to the little string that holds the grills turned lose. I heard many many good words about high end EIZO, but they are at $2000 range.

I know that you are a student, and this sounds very expensive. You must sacrifice everything else to get a good monitor setup if you want to still see in 10 years. It's also a great investment because it last longer than any other parts of your computer, Good luck.

Another huge earth quake hit Taiwan. Let's pray for them.

• Professor Thomas Mackin, who currently teaches Failure Mechanisms in Engineering Materials class, made this short presentation (attached) after the World Trade Tower tragedy. This presentation was made in response to the Chancellor's request for teachers to discuss with their classes the recent events. Mackin was clearly as shaken up about the events as were the rest of us. He only had a short response to his final question: "As engineers, what can we do to prevent this from happening. - Nothing."

  Attached was a .PDF file, "ME 346 - Engineering Analysis of Tragedy at WTC."

The engineers did their job. They did it well. World Trade Center 1 & 2 were good buildings -- I stood on top of one just over 10 years ago. I can hardly believe I never will again.

Osama bin Laden and his cronies are the ones -- the ONLY ones -- responsible for this outrage. Please, let's try to remember that.

Department of Energy (DOE) is working to interconnect the first two computers which...

From here

It surprises everyone by announcing
There is another system.
which turns out to be Soviet system named "Guardian" designed for the exact same purpose as Colossus...

No, Mosaic was developed at NCSA, and the Marc Andreesen convinced some of the other programmers that the higher-ups were against them, and they went off and founded Mosaic Communications Corp. Then they had to change names to Netscape. I don't think they ever actually licensed the Mosaic code (whereas Microsoft did, check the "about" box in MSIE).

This was my final year project thesis. Just remember the golden rule unstructured 2 structured == convert 2 XML I wrote a [very bad] program in C++/Perl/tcsh IPC=pipes to add XML tags to English, and then index them into a search engine which would use the lingual data stored in the XML tags to help the search.

NIST does a MASSIVE competition on this annually. I don't want to be an XML-buzzword whore <Arnold Schwarzenegger accent> (XML commando eats Green berets, C++, Java, Perl, COBOL for breakfast)</Arnold Schwarzenegger accent> but you can't beat XML for easily converting anything that you can make sense out of into computer readable format. Real h3cKoRs use SGML, but us underlings have to stick with things we can understand like XML. As for expandability, if we want to encode something else into the document, then just tag-it-and-go

It took me 200 hours to fish out all these links (before the Google days), I don't want anyone to have to waste as much time as I did feeding the search engines exotic foods. It's a year old so pardon me for the odd broken link, armed with these you could probably turn jello into XML ;-)

My favourite bookmarx
PROJect[21 links]
Beginners' Guide[13 links]
Berkeley Linguistics Dept. Course Summaries, general stuffzzzzzzzzzzzzzzCryptic IR Vocabulary defined
Explanations of weird words like hypernym zzzzzzzzzzzzzzHow do we produce and understand speech
How Inverted Files are Created - Univeristy of Berkeley zzzzzzzzzzzzzzNLP Univ. of Indiana, very good basics e.g. word sense d
Simple langauge - useful.... zzzzzzzzzzzzzzWhat is Natural Language Processing, links
What is POS tagging........ zzzzzzzzzzzzzzWord Sense Disambiguation defined
Word Sense Disambiguation in detail, scroll down far zzzzzzzzzzzzzzWord Sense Disambiguator - LOLITA (tested at MUC-7 and SENSEVAL competition as best)
XML for the absolute beginner

HTML, XML stuff + parsers[19 links]
Apache plug-in that uhhh does stuff with XML zzzzzzzzzzzzzzConvert COM to XML
convert XML, HTML to Unix pipeable formats zzzzzzzzzzzzzzconverters to and from HTML
expat XML parser zzzzzzzzzzzzzzHTML Tidy - converts HTML 2 XML + source code!!
Parse DB (RDBMS, whatever) to XML zzzzzzzzzzzzzzPerl-XML Module List
PHP Manual XML parser functions - what the hell are they talking about, PHP Virtual M... zzzzzzzzzzzzzzPublic SGML-XML Software
Pyxie - XML Processor for Python, Perl, etc. zzzzzzzzzzzzzzSGML+XML tools.org
The XML Resource Centre - massive number of links zzzzzzzzzzzzzzW4F wrapper - wrapper converts XML to HTML
XFlat - convert flat file into XML zzzzzzzzzzzzzzXML Parsers and other XML stuff
XML.com - Parsers, etc. zzzzzzzzzzzzzzXML-Data Catalog System - uhhhh looks close
XTAL's general converter - convert anything 2 XML

other Background[8 links]
Is Linux ready for the Enterprise, scalable... zzzzzzzzzzzzzzLinux reliability
Linux Versus Windows NT, Mark(sysinternals bloke) zzzzzzzzzzzzzzPC reliability (pcworld)
SPEC - Standard Performance Evaluation Corp. zzzzzzzzzzzzzzSystems benchmarks
TPC - Transaction Processing Performance Council zzzzzzzzzzzzzzUnix Beats Back NT In EDA Workstation Arena
Proper TREC(-8) QA systems[2 links]

pg. 387 LIMSI-CNRS pretty deep parsing[2 links]
More links....
NLP, IR links - lots to corpii, etc.

pg. 575 U. of Ottawa and NRL (shit system, got 0%)[1 links]
LAKE Lab
pg. 607! University of Sheffield (crap system, but OPEN SOURCE!)[2 links]
GATE - FREE IE app w`source code
LaSIE - ER, coreference, template (cv)

pg. 617 Univ of Surrey (inconclusive matches)[2 links]
System Quirk - Or is this their search system..... Hmmmmmm
Univ of Surrey - pointers (hopefully this is their WILDER search system...)

SMU - Pg. 65[1 links]
Natural Language Processing Laboratory at SMU

Textract[2 links]
Cymfony - Technology
Textract - State of the Art Information Extraction

Xerox uhhhhh maybe[1 links]
Xerox Palo Alto Research Center
(OVERVIEW) 1999 TREC-8 Q&A Track Home Page
NLP bloke, Univ Sussex


Tcl-Tk[4 links] Tcl tutorial
Tcl-Tk Contributed Programs Index
Tcl-Tk Resources, sources
TclXML - manipulating XML using Tcl-Tk
Artificial Natural Language - Is this what I'm trying to parse into...
Comparison of Indexers - Prise vs. Inquery vs. MG, etc.
Eagles - Language Engineering Standards
Language Technology Group - lots of modules!
LDC - Linguistic Data Consortium, lots of corpora
Lexical Resources
Links 2 resources, indexers.....
Lots of IR stuff, University of uhhh
Managing Gigabytes Indexer
Managing Gigabytes Manuals and stuff
Htdig search system
NLP & IR (NLPIR, NIST) Group
OVERVIEW OF MUC-7-MET-2
Perl XML Indexing - XML search engine type thing
Phrasys Language Processing Software Components (money)
QA HCI bullshit
SIGIR - TREC-type thing, resources
SMART indexer system documentation
Text REtrieval Conference (TREC) Home Page
The Natural Language Software Registry
Thunderstone IE and IR products
WordNet - FREE DOWNLOADABLE lexical English database

Page created with URL+, nice utility for working with internet shortcuts

i'm not the one who implemented it, you can post your questions to our new web board http://smithers.acm.uiuc.edu/3dosx/webboard/ i've already created a thread

Yes, the Scientology Google ranking is well covered here: Operating Thetan

Big thanks to the Beckamn Institute at the University of Illinois for creating the VisIT software for the graphic demonstrations.

No mention of Marc Andreessen in NCSA's Mosaic history.

• Drag-and-drop support was the #1 feature that didn't make it in time for this release. We are currently deciding whether to continue to work on this (say, for an updated release at MacHack). We would add dragging, more file management functionality like renaming, and themes (support is ready, theme creation tools are not).
• If you are having performance problems: Make sure that the window is small enough that the dock, and any other translucent windows you may have open, do not overlap the GL context. Also, if you have less than 16MB of VRAM, reduce the window size (preferences) and relaunch the app. OS X appears to fall back to software rendering if the hardware is inadequate.

The most complete pilot program in this topic is the Interspace I think. This project would lead the whole internet into another new pahse where Abstract content would classify the concepts ( not the pages) and provide another model for distibution media across the Interspace ( future of the Internet) IEEE computer society magazine suggest that this interspace would be online from 2005 Then all what we know bout Online info would chage :) Please have a look at The Interspace Currently I am working on a smilar model for Arabic culture. .Bil

...can now have a cheap Beowulf Cluster super computer...

I know this post was a joke, but clustering of PS2s using Linux is something that actally *has* been attempted with some moderate success. Rumor has it that NCSA had a working two-node cluster as a proof of concept. I can't find any links to pictures or anything, but maybe someone else here has more info on it, or was even there for this.

IIRC, the biggest issues with using PS2s in this sort of an application was the extremely limited bandwidth between them. Having powerful, dedicated graphics processors running in parallel could lead to some interesting things, though!

He spoke at UIUC's Reflections/Projections conference last year, and he showed us a bit of the Crunchbox. As far as we could tell, it was essentially a box with snort running to drop packets from anyone who tried an attack. Secure, yes, but also overly paranoid for most systems. Also, it pulls the CVS snort rules daily, so that's a potential weakness. It looked like it allowed you to view changes to the rules, but you didn't have to approve them in any way. I wasn't impressed.

He spoke at UIUC's Reflections/Projections conference last year, and he showed us a bit of the Crunchbox. As far as we could tell, it was essentially a box with snort running to drop packets from anyone who tried an attack. Secure, yes, but also overly paranoid for most systems. Also, it pulls the CVS snort rules daily, so that's a potential weakness. It looked like it allowed you to view changes to the rules, but you didn't have to approve them in any way. I wasn't impressed.

Sorry have a degree in Biology not being a dick, but last time I checked those two eyepiece things we used to use for dissecting was called astereoscope. As for not knowing what I was talking about, last time I checked iridium was an EXTREMELY hard substance, and plating it with gold would help with corrosion. But you are right I by no means have a degree in archiving or whatever the proper field is, figured I would get something a wee bit more useful.

As for your response, other then simply nay-saying mine it really doesn't seem to offer much in the way of substance. Maybe you should go back to remedial socialization or have a nice time out in the corner.

The Biology WorkBench moved to SDSC along with Subramaniam. I briefly considered working at his lab when I first came here (I'm a MD/CS PhD student at UIUC), but as it eventually happened I'm working on parallel performance analysis now.

I'd volunteer, naturally, but I've been to central Illinois in the winter before and nearly froze to death :-)


Hey! It snowed here yesterday for the first time in YEARS! It's blowing around a bit now, but I don't think the weather is all that bad here.

There's a detailed description and diagrams here. The process is referred to as the Grotthuss "hop-turn" mechanism.

Kind of like the old-style ski turns, though I think those are called stem-christies. (OK, it makes more sense if you've read the article and looked at their little sidebar image...)

University of Illinois has a very good article (with pictures!) about Proton conduction, proton channels, proton wells on water.

This page about Victor Petrenko, a little more technical than Slashdot's article

This one is brief, but says: "PROTONIC CHIPS NEVER FORGET Researchers at the University of New Mexico and Sandia National Laboratories are investigating the use of protonic memory for making cheap forget-me-not computer chips. In 1995, they noticed during experiments on silicon wafers that protons deep within the wafers were responding to electrical signals on the surface. "Nobody had seen these moving protons before," says one scientist. Further research showed the protons can be precisely controlled with standard microcircuits -- and are thus able to store data. Protonic chips won't need the fancy processing used in "flash" and other so-called nonvolatile memory chips, and can operate at very low power levels, thus prolonging battery life in laptops. Protonic chips currently are being tested at Texas Instruments.

This PDFexplains the Mechanism of proton diffusion in the solid state protonic conductor Rb3H(SeO4)2, wich I assume is somewhat equivalent to the ice (haven't read the whole article yet) This

I maintain a ms cluster which is a high availablity cluster. It runs exchange and works well. In looking for computational clusters, I found Top 500 cluster list. Most of the machinces are none intel based and can't run a ms cluster.

Alliance Supercluster Ranked as the World's Most Powerful Intel-based NT Cluster is a press release showing that a NT based cluster broke into the top 500 list in 207th place.

The microsoft site lists the cluster toolkit as a tech preview. It look to me that MS have found a new source of revenue and is now trying to get people to use it.

They are giving it away to students apparantly. The CS Dept. here at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign will soon be receiving a machine donated by Microsoft that allows students to develop .NET Web services on.

We are all truly overjoyed about this, of course.

I only wish I could predict the kinds of computers we'll have in the year 2000.

3.)Wouldn't provide students with the knowledge of computers to succeed in the real world I.E.

Again, this is a very valid point. Unless you're aspiring to be a coder, it is much more advantageous for someone to learn Windows, Office, and IE than it would be for them to learn Linux, StarOffice, and Opera. Face facts: Windows owns the world out there, and no matter how much you despise MS, that isn't going to change anytime soon. People will, MUST acquire skillsets that are actually valuable to whatever they're planning on doing. Pie in the sky OSS stuff just isn't going to cut it when HR starts sorting through resume's.

Universities are not a place to learn how to use computers. For CS students, their education can include learning CS concepts, CS calculations, programming languages, and the hardware that applications run on. For business students, it is a place to learn the market, the economics, finance, etc. There is a reason why "using Windows" isn't a major: because there is no learning curve, esp. for the young ones, on how to use a computer. Training the youth how to use very intuitive applications is highly overrated in an era where most students have been exposed to personal computers either at dorms, or at home. It is rediculous to claim that removing Windows from Universities would impair students valuable education of Windows usage skills.

All you need is keep a small lab full of Windows.

In my school, the computer labs are split half & half with Windows PCs and iMacs. This has benefits: (a) exposing students to multiple OSes, and (b) reducing overall licensing costs.

I couldn't wait 'til Monday.
Here's the link
Thanks for pointing it out - it might come in handy.

You can find other compilers for Itanium, check out this. Im sure other universities have research into Itanium compilers that might also surpas intel's compiler.

Ah, but the current threshold for killing a person is somewhere between 70 and 100 mA. Under the right circumstances, a plain old wall socket has enough juice to toast your ass. :-)

I don't know anyone with MP Durons, but I love my MP Athlons (w/Tyan MB). After testing my MP system using ScienceMark, the same program the author of the recently released 1.2GHz Celeron vs. Duron article used, I scored higher than the program's creator utilizing only one proc. If the same type of architecture is employeed in the MP Duron system, I'd recommend it highly.

It just depends on how you look at it. There can be significant advantages in going OO. One is that it can simplify parallelization of the code if written correctly. Take a look at the molecular dynamics program NAMD and you will see what I mean.

Being a licensed radio amateur (holding a General ticket), this post interested me in that respect.

A quick google search for "dish array" took me here which explains some of the basics of dealing with dish arrays.

One thing I was considering is not using the dishes to look randomly to space hoping to sniff some martian communications, but to somehow extract some known low level signal from somewhere - how about the moon? Amateurs sometimes bounce signals off the moon for communication. Really! Do a search for moon bounce, find out the frequencies often used, and see if you can construct an array.

I know I made that sound _really_ simple, but I'm sure it wouldn't be. I think the frequencies involved would significantly complicate using those small dishes and the supplied LNBs (or whatever the receiving elements they use these days are called). Anyway, it's something to look into.

I'd also suggest looking into ways in which you could turn an array into some sort of radar receiver. Lay them out correctly pointing to the sky and bathe some clouds with radar signals. Try to image the cloud densities, determine their height, etc.

Put them on the wall of a high building for weak-signal microwave receive.

Just some ideas...

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***

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***

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***

See their HOWTO for building up your own setup at


http://www.isl.uiuc.edu/ClusteredVR/szg/doc/Para me terExamples.txt

That seems like pretty doable by any geeks with enough boxes.

That would say if the 3D immersion has any usability to it at all, it will be in common use in 10 yrs. It might become the next big thing in living rooms like TV became 40 years ago.

However, what makes a new technology break through is not what it enables, but what you get with it. TV would have had no use whatsoever without the television programs made to be watched with it. Computers only broke through when there were programs for it.

Umm, I sense a great opportunity for all people who can really do great 3D graphics.

Not to mention what I already said about getting 3D GUIs off the ground at


http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=25035&cid=27 18 945

Well not only the TCP/IP-Stack, but when you open IE and look at the about box, you'll see that MSIE is based on NCSA Mosaic, which was at least somewhat open-source (look at the initial announcement and the README).

Potentially humorous, but factually incorrect.

Purdue's estimated cost for 1 year (for in state students) is $12,000. That's tuition + room + board + books + misc. fees.

UCLA costs about the same.

You could sent two students to either Purdue or UCLA for less than the cost for 1 student at Duke.

The University of Illinois is also more expensive.

80% of the web.

when my dad got out of college and was hired by dupont, where he continues to work today, his first project was to replace the entire electrical accessory system in a car with fiber optics. turn signals, headlights and things of that sort.

i guess the idea turned out to be not as useful as thought because he was moved to management soon thereafter (isn't that the story with all engineers?) and has been there since and i have yet to see a fiber optic car.