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I have unlimited bandwidth at school, try me:

Skycutter Vid Link

I really want to piss off OIT, maybe even bring down the outbound router. Do your worst.

On the same lines, a user's complete travel plans can also be reconstructed, as a user browses from motels and inns during his halts, using a notebook for example. Ofcourse there is P3P(Platform for Privacy Preferences) to control such kind of usage. But rarely do people use it. For those interested in knowing more: http://www.csee.umbc.edu/~kolari1/iswc/iswc/ might be of interest. It details a possible direction to privacy protection, by letting users share knowledge about websites and their privacy reputation.

I wonder why Intel is unable to use this functionality in conjunction with the current version of Windows to prevent introducing executable code via stack overflows?

I couldn't agree more with this poster. I think education of programmers in our Computer science educational instutiutions is lacking severly in teaching new programers about what dangers poorly written code can result in. I did a semester research project on the subject for my masters. (http://www.csee.umbc.edu/~cress1/cmsc791.html) All the educators I included in my project had very little if any clue about secure programming issues and after being presented with teaching alternatives were interested to include them in their curriculum. Does anyone else have any experiece where their professors hammered home the point that insecure and poorly written code can have catestrophic results?

Isn't it amazing that we just happened to evolve on a planet that supports life?

To paraphase from memory The Stand: This is how the world ends, not with a bang but a wimper.

> $150,000 is not enough for four years at my
> local comunity college.

Community colleges offer 4 year degrees?

At any rate, the community college I went to before I transferred to the university, irrc, offered courses at $50/credit. So a minimum full time workload (at least 12 credits) was about $600 for tuition. Add a couple of hundred for books (or maybe not .. I always waited until I was absolutely sure I needed the book), bringing the total up to maybe $800. Certainly not much more than $1000 per semester. I highly recommend to anybody whos strapped for cash to spend the first two years of college at the local junior college (just make sure all of your credits transfer to the 4 year school). You save a crapload of cash that way.

Plus, more than likely, all of your high school friends will be there too! So it'll seem like 13th and 14th grade.

You have it almost right. "Merced" was the code name for what is now known as the Itanium CPU from Intel. The code name for the joint IBM/SCO Unix was "Monterey".

You have it almost right. "Merced" was the code name for what is now known as the Itanium CPU from Intel. The code name for the joint IBM/SCO Unix was "Monterey".

I slapped MD5 into Google and looked on the first result page, which said 128-bits in the quote near the top. I knew there were other sizes, but since that matched the message I was replying to, I kept it ;-)

Of course the point generalizes to all hashing or error correcting algorithms; for n bits, 2^n+1 messages are guarenteed to collide.

I'm an idiot. Never mind.

Tip O'Neill, a Democratic Senator from the great Commonwealth of Taxachusetts who was responsible for this pork barrel project.

I thought he was Speaker of the House of Representatives. Wouldn't that make him a Congressman? But what do I know, I am just a foreigner.

Lets see some of the images in "various competitors" and what do we get?

THIS crap:

---
Security AlertSecureIIS Application Firewall Security Alert

If you feel that you have received this page in error, please contact the administrator of this web site, reporting the following reference ID:

20031201946923

SecureIIS Evaluation Version
SecureIIS offers websites running Microsoft Internet Information Server a broad range of protection from common vulnerabilities, both known and unknown. Because SecureIIS does not protect against specific vulnerabilities, but classes of vulnerabilities, it allows for a much more far reaching layer of security.

For more information on SecureIIS, please visit http://www.eeye.com/SecureIIS/

eEye(TM) Digital Security - Vulnerability Is Over...

---

"Secure IIS" is an oxymoron and not letting casual visitors view your images is ridiculous. "Protecting agains unknown threats. I'm the surfer. I threat your webserver!"

Now at a station near you !
Windows : Linorg Projeto Brasil ISC | IndianaU | BinaryCode | ibiblio.org | PAIR | SecsUp | Telentente | Umbc Vienna UT

Linux : IndianaU | ISC | BehrSolutions | BinaryCode | ibiblio.org | pair | SecsUp | Telentente | Umbc Vienna UT Belnet | KULeuvenNet CVUT Sunsite FUNET

Now at a station near you !
Windows : Linorg Projeto Brasil ISC | IndianaU | BinaryCode | ibiblio.org | PAIR | SecsUp | Telentente | Umbc Vienna UT

Linux : IndianaU | ISC | BehrSolutions | BinaryCode | ibiblio.org | pair | SecsUp | Telentente | Umbc Vienna UT Belnet | KULeuvenNet CVUT Sunsite FUNET

MD5: Introduction
MD5 was developed by Professor Ronald L. Rivest of MIT. What it does, to quote the executive summary of rfc1321, is:

[The MD5 algorithm] takes as input a message of arbitrary length and produces as output a 128-bit "fingerprint" or "message digest" of the input. It is conjectured that it is computationally infeasible to produce two messages having the same message digest, or to produce any message having a given prespecified target message digest. The MD5 algorithm is intended for digital signature applications, where a large file must be "compressed" in a secure manner before being encrypted with a private (secret) key under a public-key cryptosystem such as RSA.

In essence, MD5 is a way to verify data integrity, and is much more reliable than checksum and many other commonly used methods.

MD5: Introduction
MD5 was developed by Professor Ronald L. Rivest of MIT. What it does, to quote the executive summary of rfc1321, is:

[The MD5 algorithm] takes as input a message of arbitrary length and produces as output a 128-bit "fingerprint" or "message digest" of the input. It is conjectured that it is computationally infeasible to produce two messages having the same message digest, or to produce any message having a given prespecified target message digest. The MD5 algorithm is intended for digital signature applications, where a large file must be "compressed" in a secure manner before being encrypted with a private (secret) key under a public-key cryptosystem such as RSA.

In essence, MD5 is a way to verify data integrity, and is much more reliable than checksum and many other commonly used methods.

I work at the IT office of a state-run public university that focuses on research. UMBC's 24-hour student computer labs contain hundreds of terminals with a variety of hardware/OS configurations (PCs, Macs [ranging from G3/4s to eMacs] and a smattering of SGI Indigos/Indys dating back to the mid 90's, when the state budget allowed for such purchases).

Gradually, our student terminals -- PCs and Mac -- are shifting towards a "common platform": Unix. Our Macs are being upgraded to OSX, and each PC (most are Dell Optiplex GX-110s, GX150s and newer 270s) can be booted into either Windows 2000 or a customized RedHat lab image.

I work at the IT office of a state-run public university that focuses on research. UMBC's 24-hour student computer labs contain hundreds of terminals with a variety of hardware/OS configurations (PCs, Macs [ranging from G3/4s to eMacs] and a smattering of SGI Indigos/Indys dating back to the mid 90's, when the state budget allowed for such purchases).

Gradually, our student terminals -- PCs and Mac -- are shifting towards a "common platform": Unix. Our Macs are being upgraded to OSX, and each PC (most are Dell Optiplex GX-110s, GX150s and newer 270s) can be booted into either Windows 2000 or a customized RedHat lab image.

[for e][or ex][r exa][ exam][examp] and so on.

Using n-grams this way helps with things like mis-spellings. Mr. Metlin (parent of this) used the character definition is his paper. N-grams are widely used in Information Retrieval Research.

ive never been much on museums, but this looks like it would be interesting.

then again... probably not.

They've also been infecting students' machines on university networks, which have high bandwith. Also, some students have been agreeing to relay spam through their machines in 'spam-for-pay' schemes. Both of these occured at my school, causing SMTP servers to be banned on the residential network. This is forcing our Tech department to implement brash solutions such as an outright ban on SMTP until they get the resources for a more elegant solution. We are amidst a state-wide budget cut.

They've also been infecting students' machines on university networks, which have high bandwith. Also, some students have been agreeing to relay spam through their machines in 'spam-for-pay' schemes. Both of these occured at my school, causing SMTP servers to be banned on the residential network. This is forcing our Tech department to implement brash solutions such as an outright ban on SMTP until they get the resources for a more elegant solution. We are amidst a state-wide budget cut.

what a sad world we live in.

I hope the screen on the SL-5600 is better than that on the SL-5500, which was absolutely horrible.

No such luck. The screen is an identical part. 100% the same. I think the keyboard and front-panel buttons are identical too.

(no, IQNotes or DrawPad don't do the job)

My long dead Agenda VR3, underpowered as it was, at least had better freehand note-taking software than the Zaurus.

at least the character recognition got less sucky

Besides speed, the Zaurus character recognition could be improved with some simple UI enhancements- things to let the user focus his gaze at one place on the screen, instead of flipping back and forth from the application up top to the HWR area at the bottom. Simply printing the recognized ASCII character in the input area would help a little. Even better would be dispensing with the input area, and allowing HWR input to happen overlayed on the current application. Microsoft PocketPCs do this, and additionally recognize linked characters. But even the Agenda could accept block-letter HWR on the entire screen surface (they removed that feature in later software upgrades, because their CPU just couldn't handle the recognition fast enough to be reliable)

Apparently some information in an e-mail list archive became publicly available by accident. Unfortunately this information contained the names and ssn of several students. 9,505 students to be exact. Oops.

Scary thing about this was that it was found out by some students who accidently ran across a cached page of this on google. If you wanna check out the stories that ran in the school newspaper you can click here and here

Apparently some information in an e-mail list archive became publicly available by accident. Unfortunately this information contained the names and ssn of several students. 9,505 students to be exact. Oops.

Scary thing about this was that it was found out by some students who accidently ran across a cached page of this on google. If you wanna check out the stories that ran in the school newspaper you can click here and here

Sharks and rays were among the first animals to be identified as having electroreceptive organs. The following description is taken from a paper by Andres and vonDuring from 1988. The main structure involved in electroreception in elasmobranchs is the Ampullae of Lorenzini. It consists of one or more alveoli at the blind end ofa jelly-filled canal. The canal opens to a pore on the skin surface.

...The organ acts as an insulated core conductor.

Great Whites have those pores on their noses. In an old (70s?) TV documentary, they try to keep a juvenile White in captivity, but it keeps banging its head into the wall of its circular loop of a tank -- because some wiring's giving off an electrical field near the tank wall there, IIRC.

Wonder if this is a problem for commonly kept species, like Brown sharks or Nurses? Maybe it's more your pelagic species that rely on this sense so much that they get distracted in a tank? Those'd be the ones that would need it for navigation more...

(Maybe our dream of sharks in the walls of titanium laptops will go forever unfulfilled.)

I have to agree that some AI (expert systems, etc.) has not progressed very far, but creating human like intelligence is not something that's going to happrn overnight. There have been tremendous leaps forward over the past few decades in things such as agents, however. Have patience.

This guy got RH9 on it but it wasn't perfect or painless. Linkage

one of the supposed benefits of Dvorak is that it puts the most frequently used letters on the right, under the "dominant" hand. But that ain't my dominant hand :-)

So if the Dvorak proponents are correct, the layout would actually be an impediment to me ....

These statements are incorrect. Two of the significant benefits of Dvorak are:

• The most frequently used letters are on home row for both hands.
• Characters alternate about 50% left hand and 50% right hand on average.

Thus there is no disadvantage for either right-handed or left-handed typists. It doesn't matter that all of the vowels are on the left hand and most of the consonants are on the right. Most of the time when typing in English, letters of words alternate between the five vowels and all of the other letters. The layout could be mirrored horizontally without favoring either dominant hand.

Qwerty is garbage, plain and simple. I don't have kids yet, but if I do, they will learn to type efficiently from the beginning using Dvorak. That's one way to implant the superior standard more firmly.

Here is my ergonomic typing page, on which I chronicle my experiences with Dvorak and the Kinesis contoured keyboard.

Incidentally, my first personal UNIX machine had a 20MHz processor, 4M of RAM, and ran X11 plus many command line tools we still get today.

The first thing you notice about the performance of the VR3, is that it is a little on the slow side when opening applications or drawing menus once they're tapped with your stylus. It might be a second or two before you see your Datebook or Contacts list fully drawn on the screen and ready to accept events.

The whole Agenda VR3 experience goes okay right up to the point you want to start doing more than one thing at a time. Depending on how many applications are already running, you might be waiting anywhere from a few seconds to around a minute for your other application to start up or register your input. For instance, at one point I've run Launchpad, the Status Bar, a couple applications, and a terminal window. Trying to switch back and forth between applications with the status bar proved to be unnaturally slow. Menus would take tens of seconds to appear, and by that time, I had already pressed the menu a second time, which would cause it to collapse.

I will admit that the minute-wait scenario does not happen ALL the time, but it's occurred often enough for me in the last few days that I've had to swallow my Linux pride, turn the device over, and press the reset button.

Read Vaughn Pratt's evaluation report on Cyc. This is from 1994, and the database is bigger now, but it's not much smarter.

Expert systems people used to claim that if only the knowledge base was big enough, intelligence, or something like it, would emerge. Cyc demonstrates the falsity of that idea. It's big, but still dumb.

This guy is the man to ask...

but I think the general consensus is that its all about group synchronization.

Killer whales maintain pod cohesiveness through diving and respiratory synchronization
(humans may have a vestige of this tendency in contagious yawning... quoted from What's new in neurofeedback

I think yawning is also an important way of telling your companions "Time to GET OUT OF MY HOUSE."

I highly recommend that you:
1) Spend some time training end users how to use basic tasks such as GUI stuff (copying files, moving windows) then try office apps (word processors, spreadsheets) and you will be amazed. Alternatively, take a good course on user interface design, or Medical Informatics. The average user cannot recognize something as a check box, unless it the same as the ones they know. Even bits of shading and color can make them unable to recognize the screen as anything other than colors. It just "looks to complicated" and they turn off their brains.

Apple realized this long ago. MS hasn't (hence, Windows XP was born). There are a great many articles available at the ACM Digital Library regarding user interface design and experiments. There are certain user interface rules are that pretty much accepted as fact, since they have so much research behind them. Apple is very consistent at following them, which is why people think Apples aer easy to use, even though most techies look at them as really being the same. It's the subtleties that we don't see. A quick list from my memory:

- Dynamic menus are always slower than static menus
(You know the rearranging menus in Office 2000/Windows 2000?)
- Vertical scrolling is easier than horizontal scrolling
- Multimodal interfaces are faster if they are properly paired
(Ex: Keyboard=okay, Mouse+Keyboard = excellent, Joystick+Keyboard=bad)
- Consistency is more important than feature set

I highly recommend that you:
1) Spend some time training end users how to use basic tasks such as GUI stuff (copying files, moving windows) then try office apps (word processors, spreadsheets) and you will be amazed. Alternatively, take a good course on user interface design, or Medical Informatics. The average user cannot recognize something as a check box, unless it the same as the ones they know. Even bits of shading and color can make them unable to recognize the screen as anything other than colors. It just "looks to complicated" and they turn off their brains.

Apple realized this long ago. MS hasn't (hence, Windows XP was born). There are a great many articles available at the ACM Digital Library regarding user interface design and experiments. There are certain user interface rules are that pretty much accepted as fact, since they have so much research behind them. Apple is very consistent at following them, which is why people think Apples aer easy to use, even though most techies look at them as really being the same. It's the subtleties that we don't see. A quick list from my memory:

- Dynamic menus are always slower than static menus
(You know the rearranging menus in Office 2000/Windows 2000?)
- Vertical scrolling is easier than horizontal scrolling
- Multimodal interfaces are faster if they are properly paired
(Ex: Keyboard=okay, Mouse+Keyboard = excellent, Joystick+Keyboard=bad)
- Consistency is more important than feature set

Some years ago when I was in high school, I suffered a complete meltdown with my wrists. Since then, I have learned about the Dvorak layout and the Kinesis Contoured keyboard. Both have made a tremendous difference for me.

Quite simply, flat keyboards and the qwerty layout suck. Posture is not going to make much difference when the hands are doing so much extra work on keyboards which are not designed for the human hand and with an inefficient key layout.

The Kinesis Contoured keyboard is designed for the proportions of human fingers, and also takes advantage of the thumbs.

Naturally, if someone is in serious pain from typing, then he should stop everything immediately. After recovery is the time to think about switching to a better keyboard and better layout.

My ergonomic typing story is detailed on my Explorations in Ergonomic Typing page.

SHN FAQ has some info and links regarding what shn is.

Bah, PHP? Try awk, Bash or Postscript for a thrill!

• Microsoft buys Colusa Software (March 12, 1996)
• White paper on Colusa Omniware (PostScript format)

As long as people are randomly promoting other webcomics (shamelessly, I might add) in this thread, I thought I'd toss in my two cents:

Achewood
My New Fighting Technique is Unstoppable

Also, if anyone knows what happened to the author of the Larry the Cow comics (the guy that supposedly hassled the Gentoo mailing list for 'stealing' his poorly drawn cow face to use as their logo), reply. Those comics were damned funny. They used to be located here.

in '80s it was anthony michael hall in sixteen candles. social outcast. young. obsessive behavior. not getting anything in the bedroom.

in the '90s geek became bill gates (yeah, i know it's ironic anthony michael hall played bill gates in that tv docupic opposite noah wiley's steve jobs). rich. older. strictly technology-associated and more specifically computer-associated. probably getting something in the bedroom now. ;-P

i wonder what the meaning of geek will be in the '00s? either way, it drifts further away from what i think it should be.

i like the japanese word "otaku".

otaku carries all the obsessive weight of the american geek, but overemphasizes the social outcast part, and certainly none of the technophillic rich part. maybe we should disregard the waterdowned term geek in a world where business school dot com scammers could don the adjective in the late '90s to give them some sort of retrohip social cachet.

face it folks. the word "geek" is dead. real geeks should abandon the term.

from now on, refer to me as otaku.

please note, the word otaku must loose an association with a scary underside first though.

here are some sites which i guess could define obessive "otaku" best ;-P

car otaku

anime otaku

fish otaku!?

etc...

The otaku, the passionate obsessive, the information age's embodiment of the connoisseur, more concerned with the accumulation of data than of objects, seems a natural crossover figure in today's interface of British and Japanese cultures. I see it in the eyes of the Portobello dealers, and in the eyes of the Japanese collectors: a perfectly calm train-spotter frenzy, murderous and sublime. Understanding otaku-hood, I think, is one of the keys to understanding the culture of the web. There is something profoundly post-national about it, extra-geographic. We are all curators, in the post-modern world, whether we want to be or not.

-William Gibson

A problem here is that you're mixing patent issues with copyright issues. This is also drafting a bit far afield from the basic problem that government works are automatically placed into the public domain. They are also not patented either. At least from what I can tell this excludes government modification of GPL licensed software because not only does the GPL prevent placing more restrictions on software, it also prevents removing restrictions.

But if the IP is covered by patent, then it really cannot be considered public domain. Furthermore, md5 does not appear to be in the public domain to begin with. It is copyright 1991 RSA data security and released under a liberal license. (Which raises some interesting questions about the patent case. Since RSA owns the code, and Pumatech claims a patent on the use of the code, does the patent interfere with a copyright holder's rights?) You seem to be suffering from the confusion that public domain equals widely published.

In fact there is a serious problem with redefining copyright to permit the government to apply the GPL to their works. The GPL depends on the creator of the software holding the copyright to the software. I suspect that the GPL also depends on the continued goodwill that the programmer will not decide at some point in the future to pack of all the marbles, go home, and stop publishing a given software package under the GPL in order to collect royalties. This is one advantage that public domain has over copyleft and even liberal licenses. Once something is in the public domain it can never be withdrawn from the public domain. There is minimal risk that the terms under which the work is distributed will change in the future.

I'm not comfortable with the idea of granting the government the ability to "own" critical information such as census data, geographic maps, and the congressional record. The arbitrary nature of national security restrictions on governmental data is tricky enough. I personally don't want to live in a nation in which newspapers could be forced to pay a royalty on court records if Congress felt that it was a good way to raise revenue. Granted the public domain nature of this data means that the local newspaper can charge fifty cents plus exposure to advertising for printing the court record. On the other hand, it also gives me the right to choose one to the courthouse and demand it for myself.

Certainly the GPL is a good tool for individuals and projects. However it depends on individual property rights that were granted to citizens and denied to the government for some pretty strong reasons.

The computer engineering program at my school, UMBC, is exactly the same as the computer science program except you are required to take additional courses which would otherwise count as elective credit if you took CS (stuff like more physics and an electrical engineering course).

How would real-time animation be different than puppetry? Modern puppets often have more than one person controlling them, and the controls are arcane to say the least (each finger might control a different part of a face, say.) In my experience with puppeteers and animators, I have found that you can teach any competent visual artist animation -- some will be better than others, no doubt -- but puppetry is a much more rare talent.

Real-time rendering of CG puppets has been done by Brad de Graf, now at Dotcomix and several other people over the years; but it's never been easy or particularly successful.

Real-time capture of data for later non-real-time rendering is much more common. Graham Walters and I did the Waldo puppet for The Jim Henson Hour back in 1988. One might also consider the motion-capture technology now widely used in visual effects production as a type of whole-body puppetry -- the robots in the latest Star Wars movies are animated by having people perform the parts, and then capturing that motion.

There may be a future in multi-track puppetry; where you can lay down a track at a time, each pass recording a few more paramters until you get the whole sequence done. This would be of course analogous to multi-track audio recording. But recording a whole complex character in real time would mimic puppetry with all of its limitations and flaws, but more expensively.

thad

• Modern Information Retrieval [Baeza-Yates, Ribeiro-Neto]
• Understanding Search Engines, Berry & Browne
• myth of paperless office, Sellen and Harper
• a mathematical theory of communication, C.E. Shannon
• elementary statistics, some dude

• Instant Messaging in Java, Shigeoka
• thinking in C#, Eckels

CISC vs. RISC is a red herring. Today's RISC machines are as complex as today's CISC machines under the hood. The real difference between VLIW machines and current ones is that the VLIWs are statically scheduled whereas other current desktop and workstation CPUs are dynamically scheduled.

Statically scheduled machines rely on compiler software (in the case of Crusoe, the code morphing software) to take a sequence of instructions and determine what order they'll be issued in and what instruction-level parallelism is available.

Dynamically scheduled machines take a serial sequence of instructions, and use large amounts of complex hardware to detect dependences between the instructions. From this, it determines the instruction schedule on the fly.

Statically scheduled processors benefit from greatly simplified instruction decode and dispatch (since no dependence tracking and no real decision making is required aside from conditional branches). Dynamically scheduled processors have some performance benefits insofar as they can make opportunistic scheduling decisions with the additional information that's available at run-time, and not available to the compiler.

On traditional VLIWs, the compiler is usually only able to statically analyse a program and so it may have to schedule conservatively. A typical example is that the compiler may not be able to tell when two different pointers point to the same thing, so it must serialize accesses via the two separate pointers. Crusoe is able to do a couple things better: First off, the instruction set and hardware provide some mechanisms that allow the machine to speculate sequence of instructions (that is, essentially, make a programmatic guess that a given optimization is OK and check it afterwards, discarding the result on the off-chance it's wrong). Second, it can instrument the code and get on-the-fly branch and function profile data so that it can re-optimize the hot spots more aggressively. Both of these can allow the statically scheduled Crusoe to approach the performance of dynamically scheduled CPUs in the cases where it would've fallen behind. In a sense, embedding the code-morphing software on an otherwise statically-scheduled device makes it a "blockwise dynamically scheduled" device.

Spelling aside on dependences vs. dependencies . The correct term is dependences when talking about how one instruction depends on another's result. This link gives a primer on the types of dependences that can exist between instructions.

As for energy efficiency: If you're able to get your work done in fewer cycles, you can power the clock off sooner or run it at a much slower rate. Power consumption is linear with respect to clock over lower clock speeds, but as you get to higher speeds, various effects cause non-linear increases in power consumption.

Also, keep in mind that energy efficiency is computational work per Joule. The absolute power consumption may are may not be lower with a more energy efficient part. In this case, they're saying 3x faster and 47% more energy efficient. I read that as meaning approximately, if you compare TM5800 to TM8000 at full-tilt-boogie on a given task, TM8000 will probably dissipate 2x as much power (Watts vs. Watts), but do so for 1/3rd as long.

Another thing to keep in mind is that TM8000 will probably be on a newer semiconductor process node than TM5800.

If you're totally ignorant of basic computer science.

This seems like a great technology for an enterprise to take advantage of older hardware. Upgrading your company's desktop PCs? Take the older ones and plug them into your openMosix cluster. If I recall correctly, processes can automatically migrate from node to node based on system load. I know my old had a Unix cluster for all of the CS students to use. It would get seriously bogged down at times, especially around finals. It'd be nice to have something like this which is able to take advantage of older hardware. There were times when a simple 'ls' would take 30 seconds to complete. Certainly this is something that an old 486 node could take care of.

I have a Tachometer mounted in my PC.

Here is a Picture.