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No direct experience, but a quick search came up with Creative's official open source site as well as (from that page) an extigy driver

Ole

As a student at umass-amherst, we have MSDNAA. All OS's and development tools are FREE. Just need to pirate MS office, which is usually hanging around our LAN anyway.

check our webpage out: http://msdnaa.oit.umass.edu
Also, it is not FORCED upon us. we have a linux server available on campus that hosts just about every distro under the sun.

-n

So what you are saying is that you are a Grasshopper, not an Ant. Read Aesop's Fables if you have no idea what I am talking about.

You don't have 14 months worth of assets? What the hell are you going to retire on? Your good looks? Have you not heard of 401k? Mutal funds? Saving accounts?

Starting a job after not having one is the perfect oportunity to change your spending habits.

You were homeless because, like a lot of people, you were living at or beyond your means, and then your means dissapeared. An outage of funds won't put me on the street, it will just push my retirement back.

Got some more data on the driver? I found this one but I don't want to spend the cash on an Extigy if it's not going to work swimmingly.

I'm only interested in digital passthrough, to shove the digital audio stream into my receiver. Hell if you know of any PCI cards that are supported for full 5.1 digital out on Linux I'd be thankful, as I don't need the clean environment if it's all digital.

Suit yourself, Hanzo. Those elite schools will pass you over for avoiding math much quicker than they will looking at your overall GPA. There is a sure-fire way to avoid that C...HARD WORK. If you aren't good in math, rather than dance around it, get some help! Tutoring and other services are usually available at Community Colleges.

According to the admissions, based on whats on their websites and documentation, a Philosophy or Liberal Arts major is not required to take calculus as a prerequisite, so why should I take it if its not required? Would it really boost me up that much ?

There is a sure-fire way to avoid that C...HARD WORK. If you aren't good in math, rather than dance around it, get some help! Tutoring and other services are usually available at Community Colleges.

I cant get tutoring because I dont have a car yet, and I dont live on campus because its community college, so this isnt an option, when I live on campus then I can get tutoring.

Perhaps you might have an undiagnosed learning disability that prevents you from "grokking" math. Again, find out about resources available to you and use them.

A learning disability is an excuse, the reason I dont get math is because math is useless, to actually suggest that someone has a learning disability because they dont get math is like me claiming anyone who cant use Linux or anyone who doesnt understand C must have a learning disability.

It is utterly impossible to get a degree, anywhere, without math. That is, unless you answer one of those many spams for U.N.I.V.E.R.S.I.T.Y D.E.G.R.E.E.S F.A.S.T. You know the ones...the ones you get in the same batch as the Nigerian Scam and "free porn passwords."

Ok, check out some of these sites, look under "philosophy" as the major, and tell me where it says you need to take calculus to get a degree in philosophy.
http://www.bu.edu/
http://www.northeastern.edu/
http://www.bc.edu/
http://www.tufts.edu/
http://www.hampshire.edu/flash/index.php
http://www.amherst.edu/
http://www.umass.edu/

Math is a prerequisite for SCIENCE degrees only. Show me where it says you MUST take math to be accepted into any of these schools for a philosophy degree? At most I'll need to take an a linear algebra class or a pre calculus class, thats it.

One class is all you must pass in order to get a degree, and I can take this class during the summer and get a C, and get my degree. So tell me why you think it would be a good idea to take it now if none of the schools say its a requirement for acceptance?

If the schools DID say its a required class for acceptance into their philosophy program, I'd take the class, but that would delay me from transfering for another semester so I dont see a point, I think instead i will transfer out of community college into one of the 4 year colleges on the list I showed you, and then take the mathclass, when I actually LIVE on campus and no longer have to worry about traveling for over 2 hours to get to school via public transportation.

Hard work can avoid a C? Actually no it cant, it depends on how good you are at what you are doing. You can work hard and get a C, or you can breeze through a class and get an A, if you are doing something you never were taught in highschool, such as say a student who comes from another country and decided to take a college level english class, theres no way in hell they'd get an A, because they never learned English before, math is the same way, its unrealistic for me to believe I can make up for 12 years of not being taught something, simply by cramming 12 years of work into one semester.

Sure I can pass with a C, but I dont think I'd truely underst

A paragraph about reinforcement learning from Reinforcement Learning: An Introduction, an excellent book on the subject by Rich Sutton and Andrew Barto (much of which is online):

Reinforcement learning is learning what to do---how to map situations to actions---so as to maximize a numerical reward signal. The learner is not told which actions to take, as in most forms of machine learning, but instead must discover which actions yield the most reward by trying them. In the most interesting and challenging cases, actions may affect not only the immediate reward, but also the next situation and, through that, all subsequent rewards. These two characteristics---trial-and-error search and delayed reward---are the two most important distinguishing features of reinforcement learning.

Well, I don't know about giving up on the theory of evolution entirely, but even accepting evolution, that statement is badly out of whack. Do the authors think that 1)early humans appeared on a savannah and were able to take a single step before falling, 2) had children who were slightly better, ... and 3) later humans were thus able to walk? The analogy is so rough as to be wholly inaccurate.

This is one of the falling-down points of GAs: GAs create a bunch of random programs until one of them does roughly the right thing, instead of a single program that adapts itself based on the results it gets. Most skills aren't evolved, they're learned. GAs have a place, but not as big a place as they seem to get.

Did you miss the Java thing over the last few days?

Did you miss the update?

Or did you read the posts like this one?

Yes clarification is needed. Too many people miss the fact that the GPL (and copyright in general) governs distribution.

As in "You may not distribute GPLed binaries without supplying the source code to those binaries to recipients who request them, and you may not distribute binaries that incorporate GPLed code under any license that does not guarantee the rights guaranteed by the GPL."

As far as licenses are concerned, it is rather uncomplicated, but it allows few loopholes, which is probably where the confusion comes from. But compare the language in the GPL and another popularlicense and I'm sure you'll agree that the GPL language is much more plain.

The Homeland Security system does seem to be heading toward the sort of exceedingly low-wage system of "employment" so desired by the folks who brought us H-1B -- and the felonization of P2P file systems is exactly in line with the rest of the war of terror on the population committed routinely by the folks who call the tunes.

Even slaves get food, shelter, clothing and medical care -- which is more than a lot of tech workers are getting these days.

Someone will figure out that slavery is a superior system to the current con-game and also figure out a way to use the military against their own populations to enforce it. I think its already started in privatized prisons and their prisoner-labor programs and the exploding rate of incarceration in the Unted States -- however they really do have to figure out what to do about the prisoner rape problem before they can be considered good massah's by computer nerds who will then work not for money but for privileges in the system.

(8) Get all those Squaresoft games early!

(9) If you're into Airsoft, Tokyo Marui makes some of the best stuff. Period.

Seriously though, the language is a bitch to learn. Just read this to find out why (I don't think the author is 100% serious ;-).

Ok so meatblaster has a little chemistry problem. But so do I, methanol=methane? or a close derivative? Does this mean we can stick a tube up our arses after a particularly lentilicous meal and (with the benifit of an AC (alternate crap) adapter) run various electronics?

Or maybe this is the new cyber cafe? Possible....

My (insert close relative here) does minimal surfaces and hangs out with some of these guys. They look far too neatly dressed in the pictures. Anyway, for a good time, you might want to take a look at some of the galleries of images that these crazy minimal surfaces guys do. I remember about ten years ago, one of my (insert close relative)'s colleagues sold a few images to the Grateful Dead for their concerts.

http://www.msri.org/publications/sgp/jim/images/
http://www.gang.umass.edu/
There is another site out at Minnesota but I'm too lazy to look for it today.

Before you try to say that she's lucky, think again. Her mother immigrated to the US from Poland, she lives in a low-income part of town. She's not a child of opportunity, or luck, just someone who works her ass off to get what she wants.

Yes. They're doing it now. But not for long.

Even slaves get food, shelter, clothing and medical care -- which is more than a lot of tech workers are getting these days.

Someone will figure out that slavery is a superior system to the current con-game and also figure out a way to use the military against their own populations to enforce it. I think its already started in privatized prisons and their prisoner-labor programs and the exploding rate of incarceration in the Unted States -- however they really do have to figure out what to do about the prisoner rape problem before they can be considered good massah's.

There are alternatives of course, but they require revolution.

I studied computer science at the University of Massachusetts where we actually had a course in network security. It was pretty awesome - it was taught by the people who did the security for our school and went through things like IDSs, buffer overflows, busting stacks, ARP/IP spoofing, and encryption. We had a lab of 3 subnets of 3 linux boxes each, a router and a server (that incendentally was not hooked up to the internet or anyhting else for that matter) and did labs with SNORT and the likes - absolutely great experience and what I learned in that class helps me every day (I'm a lead tech now at a large webhosting company) Learning security and how exploits really work (versus script kiddies running ./HackThisBox.sh) really reinforces topics things like TCP/IP in ways that are really practical and gives you a much more concrete understanding of the underlying technology then the more traditional comp sci undergraduate classes.

do you really think they , mac users , will accustom them to m4 , groff , epn etc or anything built upon them?

• Texshop is a wrapper around Latex.
• cocoaspell is a wrapper around the Unix spell checker aspell
• GPG Mail is a wrapper around the Gnu PGP implementation so that Mail.app can handle PGP.

The intersting thing is that the service menu is something very Unixish, many command line utilities would make good services. For those that don't know OS X, services are components that take the current selection and apply some treatement on them. There are services that search google, do text transformation, ec...

Other universities, namely umass and rpi are known for their smb indexing utilities to share files throughout their networks. My question is why pick on Dan Peng of Princeton University for creating wake when several other universities have been doing the same thing long before the inception of wake. canofsleep being a perfect example. Also the flatlan client created by an RPI Engineering student.

And, as others have noted, calling this a "designer baby" is very misleading. The embryos are created by letting normal sperm and egg cells do their normal thing, only in glassware, and the embryos aren't modified afterwards. The lab work is to decide which embryos would be implanted, so that the resulting child (1) won't have Fanconi anemia, and (2) can be a marrow donor for the sick older sibling. (1) is pretty common now for parents who carry serious genetic diseases and know it.

Here is the full text of the Science article in PDF format. Use Google to parse this into HTML.

A quote from this article:

Lovley's group also has found that some Geobacters can convert toxic organic compounds, such as toluene, to electricity. Lovley says this suggests that some Geobacters can be used to harvest energy from waste matter, or can be included in technology used to clean up subsurface environments contaminated by organic matter, especially petroleum. Earlier studies had shown bacteria could produce electricity under artificial conditions in which special chemicals were added, but the UMass study was the first to prove that the nearly ubiquitous microbes living in a typical marine environment could produce electricity under the conditions naturally found in that environment.

"Once we know more about the genome of Geobacters, we will be able to manipulate these organisms to make them receptive to a variety of organic or inorganic contaminants. Theoretically, when they begin to degrade the contaminant, they will throw electrons on an electrode, and that could set off a light, a sound or some other form of signal," Lovely said. "An understanding of how this phenomenon operates has a number of extremely timely applications, especially in developing technologies to recognize toxins and organic contaminants." Lovley cites, for example, the potential for using such technology to develop military equipment that could alert soldiers to the presence of toxins or biological warfare agents in the immediate environment.

The Office of Naval Research funded this study.

Other uses might be to power seafloor monitoring instruments, or just to indicate that some interesting reaction is taking place.

The creek near your house might be better put to use as a hydroelectric generator.

Biological fuel cells have been around for a long time. The ones we built in high school used yeast.

Here is more information on Desulfuromonas acetoxidans. You can buy pure cultures here.

An article with more information (didn't Hemos ask?) is here.

The creek near your house might be better put to use as a hydroelectric generator.

Biological fuel cells have been around for a long time. The ones we built in high school used yeast.

Here is more information on Desulfuromonas acetoxidans. You can buy pure cultures here.

An article with more information (didn't Hemos ask?) is here.

Ole

I think the source of your confusion on this is the way Science chose to title the story. By "Small RNAs" they didn't actually mean snoRNA-sized things (for instance, go here and click on "Overview of snoRNAs"). They're talking about what have been referred to as "tiny RNAs" or most commonly "small interfering RNAs" (siRNAs) in the literature (for instance see here about siRNAs, and there's also a very good discussion of them here as well as a couple of other classes of really small RNA molecules. The sizes of all these things tend to intergrade a bit, so there's a little terminological confusion sometimes. The primary differences tend to be by definition of function.

Here's a quote from the Science article which illustrates their point:

Another crucial step came last year, when Gregory Hannon of Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory in New York and his colleagues identified an enzyme, appropriately dubbed Dicer, that generates the small RNA molecules by chopping double-stranded RNA into little pieces. These bits belong to one of two small RNA classes produced by different types of genes: microRNAs (miRNAs) and small interfering RNAs (siRNAs). SiRNAs are considered to be the main players in RNAi, although miRNAs, which inhibit translation of RNA into protein, were recently implicated in this machinery as well.

The exciting part in all of this is that function is now being assigned to what people previously tended to refer to as "all that gunk at the bottom of the gel".

You have to be careful when you say that something is "accepted at OOPSLA." I happen to have a paper that's in the technical track of OOPSLA this year (Reconsidering Custom Memory Allocation). That's where the real computer science is happening. Then there are the other sessions that are, shall we say, not held to the same standards...

But should a major world event take place in the coming months/years, the Internet is going to be the primary news source for many millions of people, particularly those without access to a quality television news service.

Please be advised that your set needs adjusting... It's pretty clear from the evidence (and from a phenomenological point of view if you observe your own reactions) that the experience of watching a major event on television as it unfolds barely qualifies as useful information, due in part to the nature of the medium, but largely due to the nature of media filters and techniques. When you see something like 9/11 going on, it's much closer to entertainment, unfortunately, than providing one with reconnaisance leading to rational behaviour. The drama of the moment helps you develop powerful emotions in relation to the event, but what kind of info do you really get?

When it comes to war, TV obscures. For instance, see this study on media and the gulf war. [Remember that? Oh wait, it's still happening.] A salient quote:

What our study revealed, in fact, is that TV news seems to confuse more than it clarifies. Even after controlling for all other variables, we discovered that the correlation between TV watching and knowledge was actually quite often a negative one.

In other words, you'd actually be better off combing through usenet than sucking on the immediacy of the glass teat.

Qualifier: I've worked in media-democracy-oriented film/video for years, I'm involved and devoted to the medium!

Like, a guy posted something about QC's being helpful in understanding protein folding; I think it could be much more than that. A good way of simulating atomic interactions, without ignoring their quantum aspects, could be revolutionary for any industry that works on the atomic-scale.

These industries include biotech and medicine, chip design, MEMS, all kinds of materials science, nanotech, superconductivity research, how-to-wind-nanotubes-into-space-elevator-cable research, and, yes, how-to-build-better-quantum-computers research.

The IPic won the 1999 Slashdot World Smallest web Server title. It is based on the world's smallest implementation of a TCP/IP stack(256 bytes) -- which is implemented on the PIC (a small 8-pin low-power microcontroller) .. using a mere 512 words of program ROM. At the time I thought this is great. At a dollar a chip, we will have this in all our toasters and light bulbs in a couple years but it has been three years and I have not heard of it since then. So, as noted in yesterday's Globe and Mail - After two decades of hype about 'smart homes' with computerized brains that control lights, stoves and stereos, The Clapper still rules the living room.

Ole

So these Cape bees just peacefully flit from flower to flower, eating to their little hearts' content, while the African Bees work their asses off and still end up getting annihilated. So much for the the grasshopper and the ant.

Security is only one issue that needs to be considered in implementing wireless networking. We identified three key issues in developing a wireless strategy: (1) security that was "good enough", (2) end-user simplicity, and (3) technical staff set-up and management.

1. For us, security that was "good enough" meant having by-user authentication, putting the access points behind a router, and being vigilant to evidence of inappropriate use. There's not much point in putting bars on the windows when you never lock the door anyway.
2. For end-user simplicity, we wanted to support a diverse client userbase while minimizing the amount of configuration and additional software required by client machines.
3. For set-up and management, we wanted to depend on open-source and free software packages that we were already familiar with and not have the administration become a burden.

We eventually decided to use Nathan Zorn's Authentication Gateway. Wireless connections are blocked at the gateway until users connect via ssh. Clients need to have ssh and know the name of the gateway: everything else gets configured automatically. The system uses iptables, PAM, and ssh and the only admininstration required is to build accounts. The system might not scale well, but works well for an entity our size (one department).

I gave a presentation about our conclusions.

Prrior art claim 1
Prrior art claim 2

If you're asking yourself, "why do we really need this," or if you're just a caucasian who likes anime and is just browsing Slashdot, here is why we need this!

This libel suit is just one part of an ongoing battle, one between the police/prison industry, and the general public.

If you are interested in Virginia's prison problem, including the so-called "supermax" prisions, and the insane shit that goes down at one of them, check out the following sites.

Committee to end the lockdown at Marion (old)

Drugsense

Human Rights Watch

November.org

In Virginia, prison is a big business, we import criminals to fill our prisons, and it's used as a source of revenue. On-duty cops are paid state funds to lobby the state legislature for harsher laws. Police, as a organized group, should not have a political voice, they are supposed to enforce the laws, not create them.

I'm no liberal, I believe in strict enforcement of sane laws. But when you have police writing the laws, to protect and expand their own industry, it does not serve the public's best interest.

Yet again, someone [this column] lists the "first modern computer" as ENIAC--yet England and Iowa State University both built predecessors:

Colossus
Atanasoff-Berry Computer

As long as you're talking about prisons in the U.S., it's probably important to mention the for profit prisons. They often manage to avoid inspection in many cases and are allowed to enforce a variety of compulsory labor activities.

As an example, the Center for Intelligent Information Retrieval at UMass is working on some DARPA projects, most notably in the area of detecting topics in a stream of news (such as a wire service feed, tv/radio broadcast, or web-spider results).

It's not difficult to see why DARPA is interested in this: can you say CIA?

License to "Be Silly": $0
Skills learned: priceless

Hands on tinckering is a good way to learn, even if the result is silly.

Yeah, but a webserver on a PIC is a much cooler thing. Yes, even your watch could have a web server. I'm thinking that building something cool and useful is even more l337. I think that a line of sight optikal ethernet link is pretty kewl (and useful!).

That's just my 10b cents.

...last year, I accidentally did some portscanning (I was getting Samba up and running and forgot the WINS server; OIT's web page didn't have that information readily available. So I scanned the entire 128.119.0.0/16 subnet for a WINS server) and got my ethernet card blacklisted (I was still able to log on to the public machines). I met with OIT and explained to/convinced their netops guys that I wasn't evil. I ended up scoring extra points by being very vigilant from then on about reporting hacking attempts from the university subnet (as OIT's detection systems are mainly designed for external attacks).

So my advice is be contrite, say you'll never do it again; if you want to do it again, ask them first (maybe going UNODIR would work, also). And if there's anything they need help with, don't hesitate to give it.

Remember, netops people have a tendency to be just like you. They've just had to deal with far too many morons who do stupid things while breaking the AUP. As a result, any violations are assumed to be the work of a moron. If you can demonstrate that you know what you're doing and can be trusted running a wireless gateway (stay away from WEP... use end-to-end IPSec), they'll be much more likely to let it slide.

The built-in Plucker instructions may be a bit advanced for the average user, but they're not that bad. However, when we found out about Avantgo's new policy a few weeks ago (a little slow on this one, eh /.?), our solution was to post our own simpler instructions on installing Plucker (in Windows) as well as links to iSilo.

BTW, if you don't like Plucker and don't want to pay for iSilo, iSilo-free is still available for download (older version with fewer features).

Since we're on the subject... why don't these offline browsers let you set different Link Depth options for on-site and off-site links? (or is there a way to do this and I just missed it?)

/.palm is a perfect example of where this would be useful... with Plucker you could set your onsite depth to a high number and offsite Depth to 1 so you could read the linked stories as well as the posts without creating a huge file.

Here at UMass, there's a course on Java (CS121, but that's mainly for CS majors with little to no programming experience). In addition, last year a semester-long seminar-type course was offered in "C++ for Java Programmers". The programming language gurus here (Professors Wileden and Moll) have each said at various times, whenever students ask about a particular language, "knowledge of any suffieciently advanced programming language allows you to quickly learn any other language that has a similar level of advancement. The languages that you learn here will probably be worthless by the time you graduate," or words to that effect.

I think this attitude towards programming languages is what separates good CS schools from not-good CS schools.

Heres something a guy that I work with gave a talk on:

Davis, J. A., Fagg, A. H., Levine, B. N. (2001), Wearable Computers as Packet Transport Mechanisms in Highly-Partitioned Ad-Hoc Networks, Proceedings of the International Symposium on Wearable Computing, Zurich, Switzerland, October 2001

http://www-anw.cs.umass.edu/~fagg/papers/2001/iswc 01_pednet.ps

...a couple scenarios and approaches to various traffic patterns and how figure out where to send a packet so that it takes the fastest route to its destination in a pure (dynamic) ad-hoc net.

The principal investigator in this study, Derek Lovley was on NPR's Talk of the Nation Science Friday (Real Audio). He really encouraged people try microbial power for themselves. He admitted that it was a bit of a trick to keep everything properly insulated in the wet environment, but offered to give tips to those who contact him.

The principal investigator in this study, Derek Lovley was on NPR's Talk of the Nation Science Friday (Real Audio). He really encouraged people try microbial power for themselves. He admitted that it was a bit of a trick to keep everything properly insulated in the wet environment, but offered to give tips to those who contact him.

The Ipic is almost certainly a hoax. This guy should *not* be taken seriously until he either:

The iPIC was not a hoax. I work for the CS dept. in question; we helped him set up the mirror because the /. effect was hosing the gadget. (Hey, you want a homebrew fingernail-sized webserver, you don't get a lot of room for scaling up the load.)

Read http://www-ccs.cs.umass.edu/~shri/iPic-demo.html

It's been down for over two years...I'll pass.

"Note: 1 Sep 1999: The iPic web-server is currently off-line, it will be back shortly. Meantime, please visit the mirror site below."

Mirror site of what's on the iPic FWIW.

Read http://www-ccs.cs.umass.edu/~shri/iPic-demo.html

It's been down for over two years...I'll pass.

"Note: 1 Sep 1999: The iPic web-server is currently off-line, it will be back shortly. Meantime, please visit the mirror site below."

Mirror site of what's on the iPic FWIW.

I'd rather have one of these...then again, it might be kind of hard to upgrade.

For more information about the research that Daniel Wang and his group are doing at UMass amherst you can visit his website.

Look here to see what I mean.

Has anyone ever done any web server for the Apple ][? (Back when Apple made good computers! Remember when Steve Jobs said "Apple ][ forever" in 1989?)