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http://arctic.atmos.uiuc.edu/cryosphere/ Not only are they not melting its pretty obvious the antarctic is in growth.

E^2 = (mc^2)^2 + (pc)^2

and all that.

http://van.physics.uiuc.edu/qa/listing.php?id=1414

"Just recently the Princeton Review released its newest survey on the state of America's higher education institutes, proving a point many working in education have been trying to make for years: which colleges rank in the top tiers depends solely on the methodology the survey uses."

For those of you who are interested, you can find more technical details of how we designed and implemented malicious hardware from here

-- computer scientists from University of Illinois

As a former Electronics Technician in the Navy, I have to agree with the parent. The Navy Electricity & Electronics Training Series (NEETS) is a great series of books that teach the basic of electronics. After studying these manuals, I successfully built a Superheterodyne receiver, also known as your basic radio receiver. You can find all of the NEETS modules online here in PDF format. I still have them on CD from when I went through the training in 1998.

As for your link to electricity misconceptions, all I can say is that I find the information there disagrees with what I was taught by the US Navy. It reminds me of the old electron flow vs hole flow arguments. The important part is that electric circuits work the same regardless of what you're philosophy is concerning the movement of electrons.

Best of luck with your search. Just remember that soldering irons are HOT. I've heard good things about the Art of Electronics as well.

Aero

Well, a paper by Hess, Shanks, and Hutjens called "Accelerated Calf Growing Program" says that "ad libum" means "to appetite," which I assume means you give as much of the food/drink to the cows as they are willing to consume. So perhaps the questioner means that they made new folders whenever they got hungry instead of eating? Or that they made folders until their folder-making appetite was sated?

I'll see your "5 Interesting" with my "5 Informative" (hopefully)...

The Mosaic browser was based on the libwww software developed at CERN. They did not credit the work, but all the major intellectual components of the Web came from CERN: The URI, HTTP, HTML, 404 not found.

Well, let's check the evidence... The current sources of libwww (version 5.4.0):

• Bear MIT's and CERN's copyright from 1995;
• Aknowledge Tim's work at CERN from 1991 (Library/src/HTFile.c says: Feb 91 Written Tim Berners-Lee CERN/CN)

The (really-really) old version of libwww — still available inside xmosaic distribution also list Tim and CERN as authors — and carry CERN's 1991 copyright.

So, both Tim and CERN got their credit back then and continue getting it now.

But libwww only contained 40 '*.[ch]' files, and the entire xmosaic has 137. Of the 40 files under libwww, TBL was only responsible for 6 (HTFTP.c, HTNews.c, HTAtom.c, HTFile.c, HTAtom.h, tcp.h).

So, any claim, that Tim/CERN are the fundamental "inventors" here is wrong.

Tim's prior claim is well established, as is the fact that there were Web browsers developed before Tim met the NCSA people.

References would be useful — maybe, you are referring to Gopher?.. That was, indeed, a nifty system, but it was written in University of Minnesota — in 1991, about the same time Tim was working on the pieces of libwww. Did Tim's pre-NCSA work produce anything better than Gopher?

But I did not claim, NCSA "invented" WWW either — the term Hypertext, for example, is from 1965... NCSA merely made it widely usable by creating the first browser looking similar to what we still use today.

You could try the Firefox Accessibility Extension for your web work. The "style" option let's you quickly switch to a b/w or w/b color scheme. It's saved my poor eyes on more than one occasion!

Maybe they'll do a teapot next!!!

In common usage, threading usually implies different "streams" of execution doing independent things, at the same time. If the same function is executing in n different threads then you might call it "parallel" programming. A lot of multithreaded programming involves taking pieces of program functionality and breaking them out into separate threads, each executing independently.

Calling the latter architecture parallel computing is misnomer, it is really "simultaneous" computing i.e. things can happen at the same time, but there is a big difference between the same thread executing n times in parallel, and different threads doing different things simultaneously.

For example, a "Trivial" program which reads in a list of numbers from a file, computes something (say the sum of the magnitudes squared), and prints the result out to the screen might be implemented as follows:

while not eof
        read n numbers
        compute something from them
        print result


a multithreaded version might look something like this

Thread 1 (Disk IO): read n number from disk, write them to a queue/shared memory, repeat
Thread 2 (Outputting): wait for outputs to become available, print them, repeat
Thread 3 (Compute): wait for inputs to arrive in a queue, process them, write output to another queue, repeat



A parallel version would just have more than 1 Compute thread, and they would subdivide the work between them (for example 2 threads dividing the input array into stripes, one handling even indices, the other odd...or a bunch of threads computing different slices of the array). Note that the threads would still have to combine their results at the end of the computation, and that is not always simple to do in parallel.

Some problems or algorithms simply cannot execute in parallel. Also issues of memory access patterns, caching, branch divergence (if they threads take different code paths will this affect performance) come into play. It requires a whole new set of issues to worry about, but they are not too difficult. As the professor who teaches the course http://courses.ece.uiuc.edu/ece498/al1/ says, learning parallel programming is not hard, he could teach it to you in 2 hours. But doing parallel programming well and efficiently is difficult. You can write a trivial parallel program which uses just 1 processor and has just 1 thread, which is identical to the sequential version, and it will work logically, although the performance will be severely limited. You can then extend it to use n threads, and it will experience a speedup. But to take full advantage of the hardware on your board, you will need to know a few tricks, and understand the hardware and your program's behavior intimately.

Another issue is that programmers were spoiled by processor upgrades coming along and speeding up their programs "for free" by virtue of their higher clock speed. Now with clock speeds reaching physical limits, the only evolution in new processors will be in the number of cores they have. So the only way to coax more out of a program will be to make it more parallel, and that might be trivial or it might be difficult. We're going to have to think laterally to get more performance out of software.

You think that nobody has a real interest in parallel computing? Intel's put their money on it already - they've allotted $20 million between UC Berkeley and University of Illinois to research parallel computing, both in hardware and software.

I am a EECS student at Cal right now and I have heard talks by the UC Berkeley PARLab professors (Krste Asanovic and David Patterson, the man who brought us RAID and RISC), and all of them say that the computing industry is going to radically change unless we figure out how to efficiently use parallelism. This is the first time in history that software performance is beginning to lag behind how fast we can make our hardware. The failure of the frequency scaling to continue to improve system performance has been shown in the failure of the NetBurst microarchitecture - remember the Prescott? And the failure of the Tejas and Jayhawk? Building faster chips is over, it's a mechanical engineering issue - we can make chips put out more heat per area than the surface of the sun. Quoting professor Hennessey from Stanford:

"...when we start talking about parallelism and ease of use of truly parallel computers, we're talking about a problem that's as hard as any that computer science has faced. ... I would be panicked if I were in industry. ... you've got a very difficult situation."

To whoever is saying that parallelism is just a fad, you're really missing a lot of what's going on in the computing world. We've already switched to dual- and quad-core CPU's, and it doesn't look like it's going to stop any time soon.

And it was only 100 nm thick... http://www.news.uiuc.edu/news/05/1215silicon.html

Replying to myself, I just got a look at the technical paper.

On a browse through I don't see anything directly tied to Trusted Computing in there. So maybe I jumped the gun, but this group *is* deep into the Trusted Computing stuff, and the Palladium-esque name sure seems like more than a coincidence, and looking the paper it is exactly the sort of design you'd want to adapt into a Trusted Computing browser.

So I'm still rather suspicious of the intent and connections behind it, but I will retract my positive tagging that it *does* explicitly intend to involve Trusted Computing.

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I'm not sure if I get this. The key feature seems this:

The key feature is Trusted Computing.

So who is this product for?

The RIAA, MPAA, and all those people who want to make DRM locked websites where no one can save copies of pictures or any other content from the page, where you can't copy-paste text or anything else, where you can't run any ad-blockers, where you can't view the webpage source, where you can't "deep link", where they can securely track your identity, etc etc etc.

He's this guy's page at The Information Trust Institute (ITI).

Their definition of "secure" is securing computers against the owner.

They do Trusted Comptuting, Trusted Platform Models, DRM, they are even working on a Trusted DRM P2P system. Oh joy, I can't wait to get me some of that Trusted DRM P2P! Woohoo! Yummy! to ensure that distributed multimedia protocols' trustworthiness is enforced in terms of security... security when delivering voice, music... trusted peer-to-peer (P2P) streaming protocols in large-scale ad hoc distributed systems for efficient content distribution... Issues of digital rights management

Come on, don't tell me no one noticed the project name "Opus Palladianum" and thought, "Damn, that sounds like Palladium!" Yep, this is the scheme for a DRM locked down browser running on a DRM hardware locked Palladium system. And yeah, the article mentions that this guy came from Microsoft. Who here is surprised at that? Yeah, me neither.

Yeah, tag this article trustedcomputing. Or treacherouscomputing if you prefer.

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I'm not sure if I get this. The key feature seems this:

The key feature is Trusted Computing.

So who is this product for?

The RIAA, MPAA, and all those people who want to make DRM locked websites where no one can save copies of pictures or any other content from the page, where you can't copy-paste text or anything else, where you can't run any ad-blockers, where you can't view the webpage source, where you can't "deep link", where they can securely track your identity, etc etc etc.

He's this guy's page at The Information Trust Institute (ITI).

Their definition of "secure" is securing computers against the owner.

They do Trusted Comptuting, Trusted Platform Models, DRM, they are even working on a Trusted DRM P2P system. Oh joy, I can't wait to get me some of that Trusted DRM P2P! Woohoo! Yummy! to ensure that distributed multimedia protocols' trustworthiness is enforced in terms of security... security when delivering voice, music... trusted peer-to-peer (P2P) streaming protocols in large-scale ad hoc distributed systems for efficient content distribution... Issues of digital rights management

Come on, don't tell me no one noticed the project name "Opus Palladianum" and thought, "Damn, that sounds like Palladium!" Yep, this is the scheme for a DRM locked down browser running on a DRM hardware locked Palladium system. And yeah, the article mentions that this guy came from Microsoft. Who here is surprised at that? Yeah, me neither.

Yeah, tag this article trustedcomputing. Or treacherouscomputing if you prefer.

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I'm not sure if I get this. The key feature seems this:

The key feature is Trusted Computing.

So who is this product for?

The RIAA, MPAA, and all those people who want to make DRM locked websites where no one can save copies of pictures or any other content from the page, where you can't copy-paste text or anything else, where you can't run any ad-blockers, where you can't view the webpage source, where you can't "deep link", where they can securely track your identity, etc etc etc.

He's this guy's page at The Information Trust Institute (ITI).

Their definition of "secure" is securing computers against the owner.

They do Trusted Comptuting, Trusted Platform Models, DRM, they are even working on a Trusted DRM P2P system. Oh joy, I can't wait to get me some of that Trusted DRM P2P! Woohoo! Yummy! to ensure that distributed multimedia protocols' trustworthiness is enforced in terms of security... security when delivering voice, music... trusted peer-to-peer (P2P) streaming protocols in large-scale ad hoc distributed systems for efficient content distribution... Issues of digital rights management

Come on, don't tell me no one noticed the project name "Opus Palladianum" and thought, "Damn, that sounds like Palladium!" Yep, this is the scheme for a DRM locked down browser running on a DRM hardware locked Palladium system. And yeah, the article mentions that this guy came from Microsoft. Who here is surprised at that? Yeah, me neither.

Yeah, tag this article trustedcomputing. Or treacherouscomputing if you prefer.

-

If I was offered a browser that was able to contain flash or quicktime 0day, I would switch to it in a heartbeat. For all the security in firefox, 0day still exists, and is used frequently in the environments that I work in. These threats can be mitigated, and we really should be moving towards properly designed software.

link to the paper:
http://www.cs.uiuc.edu/homes/kingst/Research_files/grier08.pdf

Here is a link to the full research paper, we hope you enjoy it!

First off, isn't this rehashed news from 2005?

Secondly, why did they have to change the word polarization to "wiggling"? As if lay people didn't know the word polarized from experience with their sunglasses.

Perhaps I'll concede that calling orbital angular momentum to "twisting" may be a reasonable twisting of the terminology, although in earlier papers they refer to "spiraling" or "cork-screw" which seems like a much better scientific-speak-transliteration to me...

Surprised no one mentioned CaveQuake...

The use of words can make a lot of confusion. Unfortunately, the word "mass" has been used in two different ways in physics. One was the way Einstein used it in E=mc^2, where mass is really just the same thing as energy but measured in different units. This is the same "m" that you multiply velocity by to find momentum. It's also the mass that provides the source of gravitational effects. Light has this "m" because it has energy (E) and momentum (p). So it is indeed affected by gravity- not just in black holes but in all sorts of less extreme situations too. In fact, the first important confirmation of General Relativity came in 1919, when it was found that light from stars bends as it goes by the Sun.

The other way "mass" is often used, especially in recent years, is to mean "rest mass" or "invariant mass", which is sqrt(E^2-p^2*c^2)/c^2. This is invariant because it doesn't change when you describe an object at rest or from the point of view of someone who says it's moving. Obviously that's a good type of "mass" to give when you want to make a list of masses of particles. For light, E=pc, so this "m" is zero. There is no point of view from which the light is standing still!
Mike

I strongly recommend this link: http://www.welie.com/

This is a collection of design patterns for creating UI.

I was extremely impressed by this work already 8 years ago when it was presented in PLoP2K http://jerry.cs.uiuc.edu/~plop/plop2k/proceedings/proceedings.html but since then it became much much bigger.

2. Look at The Cryosphere Today: http://igloo.atmos.uiuc.edu/cgi-bin/test/print.sh

3. These guys are locked-in by ice right now!

The Trustworthy Cyber Infrastructure for the Power Grid (TCIP) group at UI-Urbana-Champaign has some applets demonstrating how the Grid works. It seems to be impossible to distribute power from any source (hydro, wind, nuclear, coal...) to any load without a connection to the external grid.

If the internet were like the grid, you wouldn't be able to use your PC unless it were connected to the internet. I personally think the future grid will have a few of these large aging doorstops like the Turkey point reactors and the enormous new coal plants being constructed in SE Wisconsin and elsewhere. But many people will choose to have their own Solar shingles, MicroWind turbines or (more likely) Heat/Electric co-generation fuel cells in their basement. You probably won't see nuclear in the house for the next 100 years, but co-generation almost makes sense now, especially in cold climates where fuel cell waste heat can be used for hot water and home heat, moving efficiency well above 90%.

Probably not what the OP was thinking of, but I did find some related literature. 2nd hit on google, actually:
Optimizing Sorting with Genetic Algorithms, by X. Li, M.J. Garzaran, and D. Padua, in Proc. of the International Symposium on Code Generation and Optimization, pages 99-110, March 2005

Gelato uses OpenIMPACT to do the same thing. From what I understand, OpenIMPACT works on both 32-bit and 64-bit code, with most of the development going into the 64-bit stuff and with most of the interest from the HPC and supercomputer groups (which is where I've most often seen the Gelato distro). Both are source-to-source "compilers" (well, since it's source-to-source, I'd look at them more as a pre-compiler). Not sure how well they do at optimizing between source files. I'm also suspicious of linking (function calls are expensive and - by definition - that's what libraries do). Not sure what you can do about optimizing system calls, which are really expensive. A batch system call would offer all kinds of possibilities for security holes.

I don't do 3D CAD, but being a biochemist type, I actually hang out with lots of folks that do work with all kinds of 3D data such as molecular models and volumetric MRI datasets. Workstation cards are especially useful for their stereo support, which many bio-folks find helpful when modelling. Most of the development is done on linux using stuff like VTK or VMD - its not just the engineering guys doing CAD in windows that want workstation cards.

As a scientist that uses linux daily for 3D applications, I would like to see an open source workstation card for 3D graphics, dangit.

Off into the distance you can see the anchoring area. All the cables except the one that goes around the horn of Africa go through this channel. Maybe now it doesn't look so far fetched?

SINGLE WALL nanotubes do no harm? That is really surprised me because single wall nanotubes are a lot thinner than multiwall and most of the worries have been about them acting like tiny katanas and slicing up cell membranes. A while back someone made an antiseptic coating using carbon nanotube set up like a tiny sharp as hell bed of nails. Another worry was that biomolecules, DNA, RNA, proteins, etc might wrap around single wall nanotubes and gum up cellular machinery. In fact someone used this property to make a nifty little mercury sensor. See more here http://www.news.uiuc.edu/NEWS/06/0126nanotubes.html Of course the nanotubes were coated with polyethylene glycol to prevent stuff like this from happening, so nanotubes might still be toxic uncoated. There definitely needs to be another study done on nanotube toxicity to confirm the results.

Here are a few publications on the process. They're not all freely available.

The original patent by Paul Baskis. (1992) Thermal depolymerizing reforming process and apparatus.

A new patent (issues about two months ago, though it was filed more like three years back) by the folks currently working at Changing World Technologies. (2007) Process for conversion of organic, waste, or low-value materials into useful products.

A research report for the Illinois Council on Food and Agricultural Research from the University of Illinois on what appears to be a similar process, if not the same one. (1999) Thermochemical conversion of Swine Manure to Produce Fuel and Reduce Waste. (There's a layman's write up at National Geographic News.)

An SAE report on recycling polyurethane foam and other plastic crap from shredded car interiors. (2005) Recycling Shredder Residue Containing Plastics and Foam Using a Thermal Conversion Process.

Another SAE report on the same topic. (2006) A Life Cycle Look at Making Diesel Oil from End-of-Life Vehicles.

I don't know if anything was published in a peer-reviewed journal; the CWT website doesn't appear to link to anything, and I don't know if that's par for the course for an engineering firm, or if they're not publishing to keep things secret, or if they're selling snake oil.

I'm going to be interviewing Phil & Kaja Foglio live this weekend about this very issue: why they decided to stop selling individual print issues of their Girl Genius comic book and turn it into a free webcomic to sell more trade paperbacks and hardcover collections. Call in with questions of your own.

Sounds cool.

For anyone interested in Phil & Kaja's business model, they talked about it at the UIUC Reflections/Projections conference last year. Video here. (It's also worth watching the Randall Munroe video while you're there.)

Current GPU designs are very poor at branching; and the the geometry acceleration structures in ray tracing (which take a big part of the time) use lots of branches to traverse.

Second that. One of the big advantages of rasterization is the cache. Raytracing is notorious for locality of memory references.

You may still be able to use the GPU to accelerate some parts of the ray tracing pipeline.

Check out The Ray Engine. This uses the GPU to parallelize ray-triangle intersections.

...at any rate you should be able to use the GPU as a postprocessor to combine the rays into the final image.

Raytracing basically gives you point samples across a 2d plane. Rasterizing those point samples is a pretty straightforward task for the GPU. Not to mention all of the other rendering layers: someone mentioned caustics... you could dedicate one CPU to photon-mapping caustics and layer those on as a rasterized "onion skin".

The science crisis has grabbed the attention of the National Science Foundation.

There is a program here in Illinois for research universities to reach out to rural high schools in chemistry (http://iclcs.uiuc.edu/). We're between our first and second years.

Whether the program is effective remains to be seen, but if it is deemed successful, the program may become a model for reforming science education in K-thru-12.

Bob Holmes' website:
http://ari.home.mchsi.com/index.htm

List of asteroids discovered this school year:
http://ari.home.mchsi.com/mp_discoveries_table_2007.htm

And some info on the telescope he uses to capture images:
http://bi-staff.beckman.uiuc.edu/~melockwo/telescopes/holmes32/holmes32.html

Bob Holmes' website:
http://ari.home.mchsi.com/index.htm/

List of asteroids discovered this school year:
http://ari.home.mchsi.com/mp_discoveries_table_2007.htm/

And some info on the telescope he uses to capture images:
http://bi-staff.beckman.uiuc.edu/~melockwo/telescopes/holmes32/holmes32.html/

Same deal as this article. He uploads pics for students at participating schools to work with.

Read the paper instead, it's linked from the TFA (here).

I don't like their proposed models. I wouldn't buy crippled hardware.

I instead propose another model.

In my model the customer would buy non-crippled hardware and use all of its cores. But at the time of the purchase seller and purchaser would sign a contract indicating that the seller would have to buy the hardware back from the buyer at a pre-agreed price if the buyer so wished after two or three years, as long as the hardware is within acceptable working condition. Then the original seller would make further money by reselling the hardware to other consumers, perhaps in developing countries, perhaps without a buy-back contract.

Or, the contract could indicate that instead of reselling the hardware the buyer could swap it for new hardware.

In fact right now that's what is happening. People in developed countries buy shiny new hardware. They sell it on eBay after a year or two. Others buy it and do the same, until the hardware reaches developing countries.

There is however much administrative overhead in managing sales through eBay etc. If the original seller (the shop or the manufacturer) could assume these overheads, I as a customer would be willing to pay some more. In that way I would retain ownership of my hardware, with all its cores, and the option to keep it forever, but if I wanted I would have the right to exercise the contract's provision and sell it back to the original seller for a preagreed price within certain time limits and acceptable hardware conditions (or I could sell it for a market price depending on the contract).

So, instead of me assuming all the administrative overhead of selling my old hardware away, the original seller where I purchased it from would do it.

At most 4 year colleges, even a CS major only really has around 6 compsci classes.

Corollary: At most 4 year colleges, CS majors aren't well-prepared for Computer Science. 6 classes in a subject sounds like a little bit more than a minor. At least I can speak for UIUC—over two thirds of my undergrad hours were spent in CS courses.

My school(http://www.uiuc.edu/) only teaches Java in it's entry level CS class (CS125). Data Structures are C++, the rest is primarily in C, though I did have programming languages and compilers course that was in Objective Camel, and a numerical methods course that used Matlab, and another course with some assembly. We also had a sequence of 3 theory courses that tend to be complained about, covering discrete math, algorithms, and automata. The large amount of languages used there enables students to pick up new languages easier after graduation.

Sorry, isn't ice cover currently up a million square kilometres (globally) compared to the average? Of course, as a skeptic (I beg your pardon, "denialist"), I'm far too stupid and evil for anything I say to have value.

HDD pales in comparison to SSD for reliability, performance, and power consumption.

There are a number of forces conspiring to make something like LLVM happen. One is Apple with its need for a simple, portable OpenGL pipeline. In that regard, LLVM isn't an academic project, it's a shipped product.

Point of clarification: heat and pressure will give you relatively pure aluminum oxide from bauxite ore, but you still need electricity to obtain aluminum metal in the electrolytic precipitation step.

I agree that using a small nuclear reactor as a heat source would make sense for big facilities.

Heat -> motion -> electricity -> heat is less efficient that using the heat directly.

Also, many large pumps and motors can be run off of pressurized hydrolic lines. Use the pressurized steam from the reactor to provide mechanical force directly, and you can eliminate the electric motors in the same facility.

To expand on this (for those reading at this deep of a level), the whole monetization of browsers is what helped push IE to be the most popular browser (given, Netscape really messed up with 4.x).

Back in the old days, browsers were pretty much non-free. There was NCSA Mosaic for a while until it was discontinued, but progress moved very fast. Netscape was the most popular replacement, and often had cool innovations that Mosaic didn't. After all, Netscape had full-time developers working on the product. As a result, it cost to use if you weren't an educational institution.

Now, Netscape was making decent money from both their browser and their web server (Netscape Enterprise Server, now Sun Java System Web Server). Companies were buying licenses for their employees, and things were going well. Microsoft rightfully saw this as a threat to their desktop monopoly, and acted.

Microsoft didn't have much time to get a competitor browser out because of the lead Netscape had on them. Microsoft thus turned to Spyglass, a company that had licensed Mosaic for commercial purposes. Under an agreement, Microsoft would pay a certain percentage of sales of their new browser to Spyglass in return for having a commercial license for the code behind Spyglass Mosaic. Thus, Internet Explorer was born. Go look at the about screen in any version of IE, even 7.0. You'll still see the Spyglass reference.

Microsoft had some tricks up its sleeve, however. The first was that Spyglass wouldn't ever see much in the way of payment. As they had agreed to a percentage of sales, their license revenue depended on Microsoft selling the browser. I guess since Netscape was selling their product, Spyglass didn't have reason to doubt Microsoft wouldn't sell their product. However, Microsoft didn't sell IE. Instead, they gave it for free to anyone who wanted it (at least with 2.0, I think 1.0 shipped only with NT 4.0). Thus, Spyglass basically gave away a huge codebase for free. Also, with Microsoft giving away IE, Netscape couldn't really sell their browser anymore. To enhance the hurt, Microsoft made sure that all the popular platforms were covered. There was even an IE for UNIX (released in 1998). Once Netscape was dying, that port was discontinued (around 2001 with the 5.0 line).

Of course, price wasn't the only reason Netscape failed. As I mentioned above, Netscape 4 was awfully buggy with some really strange bugs, where IE was more polished and worked better overall. Part of that was likely the browser wars extending extensions to HTML (embed vs object as an example) at the very least. Also, Netscape did lose a lot of their lead because of the mess of code. It really wasn't until IE 4 where you could say that Internet Explorer was honestly a better browser.

Still, had Microsoft actually charged for their browser, things could be quite different today.

Yeah, the little bitty Derringer. What could it possibly do?

My old English professor did a technical writing course almost completely wiki-based: http://www.cites.uiuc.edu/edtech/teaching_showcase/brown_bag/archive/spring06/grohens_scagnoli.html

Not to mention here (Randall answering audience questions at UIUC, including what the raptor entry points for the building are; non-torrent versions here; definitely worth downloading).

Not to mention here (Randall answering audience questions at UIUC, including what the raptor entry points for the building are; non-torrent versions here; definitely worth downloading).

Umm, that was more than a decade after the published HTTP standards included the PATH_INFO environment variable, which gives the program everything past the file pathname portion of a URL. This was essentially defined as a string that the invoked CGI program would interpret however it wishes.

And actually using this feature as part of the user interface isn't new either. In 1999, Jakob Nielsen described the nature of URLs as a part a Web site's user interface.

Umm, that was more than a decade after the published HTTP standards included the PATH_INFO environment variable, which gives the program everything past the file pathname portion of a URL. This was essentially defined as a string that the invoked CGI program would interpret however it wishes.

And actually using this feature as part of the user interface isn't new either. In 1999, Jakob Nielsen described the nature of URLs as a part a Web site's user interface.

Given that I believe most early applications had to have it after a ? and the straight text is a fairly new thing, they might have done it early enough to be the first to do it.

You might believe that, but it'd be wrong. That ? is only needed if you want to pass more than one parameter to a CGI program. From the start, the CGI standard has specified that any junk after the program's pathname is passed to the program as a CGI environment variable called "PATH_INFO". Note the last-updated date on that document.

So back in 1995, if you used a URL like "http://example.com/cgi/srch/SomeJunk", and the server had an executable called "cgi/srch, the srch program would be run, and its environment would include a PATH_INFO variable with contents "/SomeJunk". It would do as it liked with that string. If it were a search program, as you might guess from the name "srch", it would presumably search for the string "SomeJunk" in whatever database it uses. The / here is used merely as a terminator for the file's pathname, to separate it from the next field. It could be various other non-alphanumeric chars, though / and ? would be the recommended chars for obvious reasons.

The ? char is a different mechanism, implemented by the server, which parses the trailing data and converts it into a list of parameters in the programs standard input stream. It's handy, but not needed if the program only wants one parameter. The PATH_INFO mechanism is more powerful, since it allows for arbitrary data, but the program must then do all the parsing itself.