Slashdot Mirror

This year from Friday, October 8 to Sunday, October 10, ACM will be holding its fifth annual Midwest student computing conference, Reflections | Projections. Reflections | Projections offers students from all over the Midwest a chance to interact with computer industry professionals and peek into the future of computing. In past years such noteworthy speakers as Steve Wozniak, co-founder of Apple, and Bjarne Stroustrup, inventor of C++, have spoken at the conference.

This year conference once again is hosting many great speakers. This year's keynote speaker is Larry Tesler. Tesler is the founder of Stagecast Software, which makes interactive simulation software. Previously, he was the Vice President of Internet Platforms at Apple Computer. At Apple he made significant contributions to the OpenDoc Object Model, Applescript, the Newton, along with a number of other major products. Previous to his time at Apple, Tesler was a researcher at the Xerox's Palo Alto Research Center, where he and his fellow researchers set the stage for a large amount of what is now modern computing. In addition to Tesler's keynote address, several other extremely noteworthy speakers will be attending the conference. Included amongst these speakers are Michael Abrash, one of the original authors of Quake, Eric Allman, inventor of Sendmail, Theo de Raadt, head of the OpenBSD project, Guido van Rossum, creator of the Python programming language, Astro Tellar, Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning expert and author of the novel "Exegesis", and many, many more. In addition to the talks, there shall be several panels, a programming contest, and a very large job fair to be held on Friday the 8th in the Illini Union.

For complete information about the conference, take a look at http://www.acm.uiuc.edu/conference. Online registration is available there. The registration fee is $15, which includes entrance to all conference events, meals for the weekend, inclusion of your resume in the conference resume book, and a t-shirt.

Sponsored by Trilogy.

One of the first major battles of, what are now called, the clan wars occurred within a small star system located in neutral space between clan territories. Each of the 16 Clans were separated by a highly toxic nebula, and located near the center was a rouge star system. The star of this system was highly unstable and the shield technology of the day could not stop the harmful array of cosmic rays. In such harmful conditions space battles had to be short and few. But within this star system was a lone forest planet?

Immediately each clan staked out territorities on this planet starting a new type of warfare, MechWar. The war continued for several years until a new breed of Mech was introduced. Warriors were adapted with major amounts of cerebral implants, leaving them more machine then human.

After over 50 years of war, all remaining members of the clans were driven out of known space. Most areas of clan space were terraformed and colonized within five years, leaving large amounts of scrap metal piling up in the nebula. One company decided they could make a killing by fitting ships with heavy shielding and collecting the scrap metal for recycling.

Everything was perfectly fine till they uncovered a warehouse buried under the sand on that small war-stricken planet. Still operating on backup power a signal was broadcast on all bands announcing the intrusion into the clan warehouse. None of the salvage team was ever seen again.

For more information see: http://www.acm.uiuc.edu/mechmania/

This year from Friday, October 8 to Sunday, October 10, ACM will be holding its fifth annual Midwest student computing conference, Reflections | Projections. Reflections | Projections offers students from all over the Midwest a chance to interact with computer industry professionals and peek into the future of computing. In past years such noteworthy speakers as Steve Wozniak, co-founder of Apple, and Bjarne Stroustrup, inventor of C++, have spoken at the conference.

This year conference once again is hosting many great speakers. This year's keynote speaker is Larry Tesler. Tesler is the founder of Stagecast Software, which makes interactive simulation software. Previously, he was the Vice President of Internet Platforms at Apple Computer. At Apple he made significant contributions to the OpenDoc Object Model, Applescript, the Newton, along with a number of other major products. Previous to his time at Apple, Tesler was a researcher at the Xerox's Palo Alto Research Center, where he and his fellow researchers set the stage for a large amount of what is now modern computing. In addition to Tesler's keynote address, several other extremely noteworthy speakers will be attending the conference. Included amongst these speakers are Michael Abrash, one of the original authors of Quake, Eric Allman, inventor of Sendmail, Theo de Raadt, head of the OpenBSD project, Guido van Rossum, creator of the Python programming language, Astro Tellar, Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning expert and author of the novel "Exegesis", and many, many more. In addition to the talks, there shall be several panels, a programming contest, and a very large job fair to be held on Friday the 8th in the Illini Union.

For complete information about the conference, take a look at http://www.acm.uiuc.edu/conference. Online registration is available there. The registration fee is $15, which includes entrance to all conference events, meals for the weekend, inclusion of your resume in the conference resume book, and a t-shirt.

Sponsored by Trilogy.

One of the first major battles of, what are now called, the clan wars occurred within a small star system located in neutral space between clan territories. Each of the 16 Clans were separated by a highly toxic nebula, and located near the center was a rouge star system. The star of this system was highly unstable and the shield technology of the day could not stop the harmful array of cosmic rays. In such harmful conditions space battles had to be short and few. But within this star system was a lone forest planet?

Immediately each clan staked out territorities on this planet starting a new type of warfare, MechWar. The war continued for several years until a new breed of Mech was introduced. Warriors were adapted with major amounts of cerebral implants, leaving them more machine then human.

After over 50 years of war, all remaining members of the clans were driven out of known space. Most areas of clan space were terraformed and colonized within five years, leaving large amounts of scrap metal piling up in the nebula. One company decided they could make a killing by fitting ships with heavy shielding and collecting the scrap metal for recycling.

Everything was perfectly fine till they uncovered a warehouse buried under the sand on that small war-stricken planet. Still operating on backup power a signal was broadcast on all bands announcing the intrusion into the clan warehouse. None of the salvage team was ever seen again.

For more information see: http://www.acm.uiuc.edu/mechmania/

OK, let's see how many people aren't familiar with Scott Pakin's automatic complaint-letter generator, and start counter-flaming....

I am a junior in mathematics and computer science. IMHO this is the place to be for the best overall education. Stanford, MIT, CMU and UC berkely are also outstanding. It depends on what you do though. U of I seems very intently focues on the theories of computation, which is where my interests lie. NCSA is a resource that cannot be denied though. I live in an apartment 2 blocks from the beckman institute which houses NCSA and various other research groups. Beyond gaining truly incredible experiences there, its also a source of huge inspiration for me. There is an endless supply of opportunities here for those that want to take advantage of them. If you're interested in the NCSA, visit their site at A www.ncsa.uiuc.edu. The CS department can be found at www.cs.uiuc.edu. If you want more personal experiences, let me know. Take Care....

I am a junior in mathematics and computer science. IMHO this is the place to be for the best overall education. Stanford, MIT, CMU and UC berkely are also outstanding. It depends on what you do though. U of I seems very intently focues on the theories of computation, which is where my interests lie. NCSA is a resource that cannot be denied though. I live in an apartment 2 blocks from the beckman institute which houses NCSA and various other research groups. Beyond gaining truly incredible experiences there, its also a source of huge inspiration for me. There is an endless supply of opportunities here for those that want to take advantage of them. If you're interested in the NCSA, visit their site at A www.ncsa.uiuc.edu. The CS department can be found at www.cs.uiuc.edu. If you want more personal experiences, let me know. Take Care....

The loss of George Koopman was a tremendous blow, but the failure of their Single Engine Test vehicle on 10/5/89 was not a consequence of his accident. Decisions and circumstances unrelated to the engine technology pretty much doomed the proof of concept vehicle. Of course, we didn't recognize that until after the thing burned up like a stack of tires on the pad and sent a thick cloud of black smoke over Santa Maria, CA. (At least we proved the safety of hybrids - a solid or liquid rocket would have exploded spectacularly.)

AMROC spent a lot of effort optimizing their 75,000-lb thrust hybrid engine. I'm still bound by an NDA, but I can tell you that instabilities and resonances in the combustion flow occupied most of their attention. (The early ones would sputter and rumble and drone and even pop the casing or spew chunks of flaming rubber - it wasn't pretty.) I'm curious as to how this is affecting the current development of the 250,000lbf engine (the press releases mention nothing). Interestingly, SpaceDev of San Diego acquired AMROC's intellectual property last year, and they are not a member of the Hybrid Propulsion Demonstration Program consortium. Some of the AMROC principals helped establish the hybrid division at HMX, and they aren't involved, either. (It's hard not to jump to the conclusion that Lockheed and co. didn't intentionally ignore AMROC's legacy.)

But yes, AMROC went out of business just a few years ago. It was an amazing company to work for: the President, George A. Koopman, was ex-CIA, ex-Hollywood, and co-author of Neuropolitique with Timothy Leary. James Bennet, VP and later president, penned seminal commercial space policy, and acquired for AMROC one of the first commercial launch licenses. Investors in AMROC in the late 80's included the Belushi family, Robby Kreiger, the Leary estate, and many other counterculture and fringe culture venture capitalists.

Oh, yeah - and once Koopman once gave me the most awesome buds I have ever tasted in my life! George was extremely charismatic, terrific at drumming up investment money, and an inspiration to everyone who worked for him. Aside from demolishing our morale, his death effectively marked the end of investment money for AMROC...

Most of the officers and technical gurus at AMROC came from Bennet's and Koopman's earlier hybrid company: Starstruck. Starstruck, based in the SF Bay Area, launched a hybrid demonstrator in 1984, called the Dolphin. It was a sea launch concept, implemented >10 years before Boeing's Sea Launch. The vehicle was towed out to sea, buoyed only by collars of balloons. Before launch, the aft balloons were purged, the vehicle righted itself, the torch was lit, and it leapt out of the ocean. Regrettably, there's very little info available on the web regarding Starstruck.

You guys are sick. Here's another jerk-off picture for you.

I agree that open review should happen, in fact, I think its inevitable. The Internet IS bringing more power to the individual. No longer should we expect to see so many top-down pre-established hierachies of power, we should get used to the bottom-up emergent organization fostered by the massive connectivity of the Net.

Examples of publishing include the already mentioned physics archive and JAIR which is published online. It is still reviewed in a traditional manner but has plans for an open review process.

Also see the Interactive Paper Project for some technology that already allows open review (I think its a better approach than slashdot for papers) Another option would be that company that allows user to "post" messages to websites.

My point is that the only real barrier is the established publish-or-perish publishing-house culture and, like any culture, it is just a matter of time before it evolves to match the available technology.

--Books used to be only for monks, then came the printing press--

Of course, I have no idea how long it will take. Soon, I hope.

Jose

A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace: http://hobbes.ncsa.uiuc.edu/sean/ declaration.html

The news article motivating this thread arises from this article in yesterday's issue of Science: "Visible Cone-Beam Tomography With a Lensless Interferometric Camera," by D. L. Marks, R. A. Stack, D. J. Brady, D. C. Munson Jr., and R. B. Brady, Science Jun 25 1999: 2164-2166 There is a better news article in describing the work in Science itself: "3D Camera Has No Lens, Great Depth of Field," by Daniel Radov, Science Jun 25 1999: 2066-2067. These are available through Science's web site, but a subscription is required. Science offers a 1 day subscription to the web site.

The paper uses a combination of interferometric imaging algorithms (which image with infinite depth of field ) and computer tomography algorithms ( which combine infinite depth of field images to produce 3D models) to produce a 3D image of a plastic toy. Opacity is not a problem due to the linearity of the imaging process.

As several posters have noted at this site, pinhole cameras also have infinite depth of field. We wrote an paper about using pinhole cameras for tomography in Optics Letters last year. Unfortunately, the depth of field of a pinhole camera comes at the expense of resolution. This is not true of interferometric cameras.

"Interferometric" refers to measurements of cross-correlation functions to isolate intensity contributions from different points in the object space. The algorithms used are very similar to those used in radio astronomy.

"Tomography" means slice (tomo) plotting. "Computer" is the C in CAT scan or CT. Current usage applies tomography to most 3D imaging schemes. "Coherence tomography" is a point by point scanning scheme which, ironically, is not tomographic at all. Tomography allows parallel data acquisition, which ultimately leads to real-time 3D video and holodecks. Real-time 3D was not demonstrated in the Science article, however, because it requires a dense sensor array. See http://www.phs.uiuc.edu/Beowulf for progress on this front.

Concern about DARPA and big brother issues is unnecessary. A sensor array has no better chance of seeing inside opaque objects than a single camera. Anyway, why should big brother waste a lot of effort to get information people will volunteer in exchange for supermarket dicount cards.

The news article motivating this thread arises from this article in yesterday's issue of Science: "Visible Cone-Beam Tomography With a Lensless Interferometric Camera," by D. L. Marks, R. A. Stack, D. J. Brady, D. C. Munson Jr., and R. B. Brady, Science Jun 25 1999: 2164-2166 There is a better news article in describing the work in Science itself: "3D Camera Has No Lens, Great Depth of Field," by Daniel Radov, Science Jun 25 1999: 2066-2067. These are available through Science's web site, but a subscription is required. Science offers a 1 day subscription to the web site.

The paper uses a combination of interferometric imaging algorithms (which image with infinite depth of field ) and computer tomography algorithms ( which combine infinite depth of field images to produce 3D models) to produce a 3D image of a plastic toy. Opacity is not a problem due to the linearity of the imaging process.

As several posters have noted at this site, pinhole cameras also have infinite depth of field. We wrote an paper about using pinhole cameras for tomography in Optics Letters last year. Unfortunately, the depth of field of a pinhole camera comes at the expense of resolution. This is not true of interferometric cameras.

"Interferometric" refers to measurements of cross-correlation functions to isolate intensity contributions from different points in the object space. The algorithms used are very similar to those used in radio astronomy.

"Tomography" means slice (tomo) plotting. "Computer" is the C in CAT scan or CT. Current usage applies tomography to most 3D imaging schemes. "Coherence tomography" is a point by point scanning scheme which, ironically, is not tomographic at all. Tomography allows parallel data acquisition, which ultimately leads to real-time 3D video and holodecks. Real-time 3D was not demonstrated in the Science article, however, because it requires a dense sensor array. See http://www.phs.uiuc.edu/Beowulf for progress on this front.

Concern about DARPA and big brother issues is unnecessary. A sensor array has no better chance of seeing inside opaque objects than a single camera. Anyway, why should big brother waste a lot of effort to get information people will volunteer in exchange for supermarket dicount cards.

Read my speculations on how it works:

• http://slashdot.org/comm ents.pl?sid=99/06/25/1553203&cid=6
• http://slashdot.org/com ments.pl?sid=99/06/25/1553203&cid=10

Hrm; I just discovered these people's site on a post below, too... it looks like my conjectures were pretty dead on:

http://www.phs.uiuc.edu/4Is/
---

The group has a site at http://www.phs.uiuc.edu/4Is/

It includes a pretty spiffy mpeg of one of their scans. Cool.

The group has a site at http://www.phs.uiuc.edu/4Is/

It includes a pretty spiffy mpeg of one of their scans. Cool.

Not that faked results aren't a headache for the seti people, but anything that might be good they'll check against the original data and if it's good enough, check it with the telescope again. As far as signatures, I'm just starting to learn about encryption, and have nothing good to say about it, except go here and here!

I am currently enrolled at the University of Illinois, going for a BA in computer engineering. When applying for college, I found it very hard to choose what I wanted to do... and I finally decided that I would be most interested in either psychology or computers. I finally chose computers because I had always been interested in them, and spent a good deal of my free time in high school fooling around with my pc.

I love my course material, and find it all very interesting, but one of the hardest things to deal with is that my hobby will become my job. It sounds like a dream come true at first... doing what you love every day and getting paid. But after meeting many fellow students here and going on a co-op last fall, I've become very frustrated because so many in the industry don't have any passion. I work on computers, and I love it. But so many work on them because they did well in math in science in high school and knew it would be a hot job market. They're just in it for the money, and don't hold any real interest in computers.

To quote JWZ, "You can divide our industry into two kinds of people: those who want to go work for a company and make it successful, and those who want to go work for a successful company." I'm definitely in the former group, and I wish more people in the industry were. It's hard to work on something when other's don't have the same passion.
-------------------------------------------

Kaa made this point in a prior comment which was (IMHO)unduly moderated downward. I think in this modern age, we should not forget that a significant heritage was gifted to us by Alan Kay and company (indeed mice, GUI, modern oops and perhaps even the fundamental notion of a dedicated personal computer).

I confess that I did not truly appreciate the scope and quality of this work (though I did understand from a textbook point of view the substance and historical importance of it) until I saw how virtually complete was even a slavish recreation of the bare naked Smalltalk 80 system (found among the superb work at Apple and now Disney with the open source Squeak Smalltalk project.

Following Squeak's development made me appreciate more and more the significance of the building blocks for which these guys had poured the mortar.

Horror Stories

Everyone here agrees Linux is great. If we didn't we wouldn't be here. However there's this subset of the community that wants to conquer the desktop. While that's a noble idea (As one post put it, "Since when do you have to pass an IQ test to gain freedom?".), this "user-friendly" approach is the wrong way to go. Infact I think this is the most likely cause for a balkinization of Linux.

I chose the word "balkinization" carefully. In the Unix world for the most part its, "Oh it's Solaris", "Oh it's Irix", "Oh you're running AIX". Sure there's the hardcore users ("Solaris Sucks! Linux Rulz!"), but most people don't care that much. (I for one use Solaris at work, and Linux at home. I don't really care. It's all UNIX to me.) However this "user-friendly" vs "hacker" distributions is a volatile issue. (Just look at this thread.)

Some have said, "Let the newbies have thier own distributuion and we'll have our own.". Let's say this happens, now which one do you think is going to be more popular distribution? Sure for a while, "Hacker Linux" simply because that's who the current users are, but with the exposure Linux has gotten recently, do you really think the masses are going to pass up "Mr. Roger's Linux Neighborhood"?

In a year, Linux reaches critical mass and all of a sudden all the big vendors port their flagship products to Linux. Hell even Microsoft, knowing that a Linux user's money is just as good as the next guy's, ports Office and even makes the win95 shell a window manager. (The new users, gobble it up, because they don't share the anti-Microsoft feelings of the rest of us.)

Undoubtedly the commercial vendors of the future will behave like the new commercial vendors of today. Which means distribution-specific ports. (There's many example of this, most recently "Code Warrior for RedHat") I imagine this distribution requirement would go beyond linking only with a certain library, or only making the the program available in a certain package format, but to require the toolkit for "Mr. Roger's GUI". After all, we all want the programs to look-and-feel consistant (unlike today's X enviroments (Just compare Netscape and Ghostview)).

The "Hacker" community get's upset at vendors and the "Mr. Roger's" community (or would "neighborhood" be more appropriate here :)) saying that they are forced to support the the "Mr. Roger's" toolkit because that's what all the new apps are for. They're upset at the new users, because they innudate the newsgroups and sites like /. with comments like "How do I change my background?" and "STOP IT! I'M NOT AN ENGINEER!!!", making them completly unusable by the "Hacker" camp. The "hackers" eventually say, "Go to Hell losers! We're going this way!" and the new users say, "Good! You're just a bunch of nerds anyway! Linux is OUR OS now!", and the two groups never talk again. So you see Linux isn't just fractionalized, but balkinized, because of the extreme hatred each camp feels for the other one.

The main problem I have with the "Linux for the Masses" camp is, theire just a little too eager to spread the word. Is there any real reason why the hairdresser across the street needs to be running Linux instead of win98? All she does is run AOL and occasionally types something in Word. That's all she wants. She doesn't want to be playing around with /etc/fstab and /etc/rc/rc.local files.

I started running Linux in Nov94, because I was a CS major, and I wanted a UNIX on my desk so I didn't have to telnet to the bogged down server when I had to do projects. I got into UNIX, and pretty soon, I had my mail routed to my machine, and was serving my own web and ftp site. (Yes, I was running NCSA httpd back in 94 and whatever the new version of NCSA Mosaic was available. It was UIUC after all.)

What the Linux community needs is to make a bit easier to mainatin Linux. The package tools step in this direction, but we really don't need every man, woman, and child running Linux. We need to keep the open friendly community feel, but not at the expense of removing the right-of-passage (installation woes) we've all gone through. After all, when you've finally gotten Linux working, it feels good, and you know you've crossed into a new world.

Sure this is long, and it may ramble a bit, but everything I've said has come out of my love for the community.

--
Coaxial
(a.k.a. Jonathan Koren)
koren@cig.mot.com
(If you really think I'm talking for Motorola, you've got another thing comming.)

We ought to have some kind of automatic mirror system at slashdot -- if just to take any page directly pointed at and have it at slashdot for a day or so.

-Lars

Oh, puhlease.

We don't need to "dominate the world" to keep MS from destroying our standards. I agree with the other guy, who says only fools care about world domination. Let the sheeps use MS crap, we developers don't need them using our free software.

See Figure 1.

Alejo.

Growing up, I had seen bits and pieces of Star Wars on television once in a while, but I always got so bored watching it that I always went away. Three years ago, when I was a sophomore at Purdue, my roommate made me sit down and watch the trilogy. When it was over, I had one comment -- "Wow. That was dumb." I don't understand what the cult following of those movies is all about. I'm not trying to be a jerk, I'm just being honest. Maybe someone can explain it to me.

atgraham@uiuc.edu
http://srh0569.urh.uiuc.edu/

Growing up, I had seen bits and pieces of Star Wars on television once in a while, but I always got so bored watching it that I always went away. Three years ago, when I was a sophomore at Purdue, my roommate made me sit down and watch the trilogy. When it was over, I had one comment -- "Wow. That was dumb." I don't understand what the cult following of those movies is all about. I'm not trying to be a jerk, I'm just being honest. Maybe someone can explain it to me.

atgraham@uiuc.edu
http://srh0569.urh.uiuc.edu/

Somehow, I think you are thinking of java and its ilk when you talk about dinky little 3d animations on a web page.

I wrote a weblication to convert molecular structure files to VRML-1 in order to be able to display them in a platform independent manner. Unfortunately the sorry state of VRML on Linux isnt helping the platform independence, but that is for another thread.

You can see some of the molecules I converted off of my page (click on the molecules button), or more directly off of the quickie weblication page for those with frames/graphics impaired browsers. I used either my tool (genVRML) or the wonderful VMD program which runs great on the SGIs and reasonably on the Linux machines.

I have also seen virtual museum walkthroughs on the web which allow visitors to get a feel for how they want to plan their visits. I have seen virtual astronomy and anatomy labs.

VRML is actually quite a good technology. Unfortunately you need a rather powerful machine with excellent graphics to do a good job at visualizing anything that is moderately complex. Your machine needs a fast OpenGL implementation and hardware texturing. This means once again, an SGI box or a nice Linux box with the accelerated X servers and the hardware stuff with Mesa.

Hmmm. I sent private email to Sengan about the domain name squabble. I did not expect to have my name broadcast so prominently, when I post followup comments to slashdot, I just call myself trb. I am not the Minix guy, and neither of our names is spelled Tannebaum. I'm Andrew Tannenbaum, I've been hacking UNIX for over 20 years, I was more active on the net/usenet before it got so crowded. The Minix guy is Andrew S. Tanenbaum. We both worked at Bell Labs at the same time around 1980, and the mailroom found it somewhat confusing. If want to be ambiguous in a different way, call me trb.

Squeak

Free/Open-Source Software.

VisualWorks

Non-commercial deployment version available now, commercial versions announced for release at LinuxWorldExpo.

Both Squeak and VisualWorks will that do write once, run anywhere thing. Write on Linux deploy on NT, Unix-flavour of your choice, (Squeak does Mac's and various bare-hardware type stuff too)

-- Kapusniak, Stefan m