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Re:Doesn't look like an OS in a browser by chocolateboy · 2000-12-14 22:33 · Score: 2 · on Inferno Plugin for IE - An OS In Your Browser

It claims (without proof) to be a lot faster than Java: 1.5 - 3 times slower than C (according to this document, the source of much of the following information).

It's all tooled up with both the bad bways of Garbage Collection. Yes, let's hear it, folks, for Mark and Sweep and his old sparring partner Reference Counting. Still doesn't stop it churning perceptibly in the ticker applet. (They claim RT scheduling but that's no good when you're sitting inside IE with JavaScript turned on in a force 9 pr0n gale.) The polyhedra demo is fast and smoothe and reasonably svelte.

'array of array of vector of arse'. Gak! Neither I nor the compiler are amused that dcl is now compulsory.

It can run Limbo source or binaries, not just bytecode.

Dennis Ritchie encourages the development of a C compiler, and maybe the one bundled with Plan 9 has a few tricks up its sleeve. With a gcj-style Dis backend you could install signed X and Gnome/GTK/KDE/Qt (or the unbelievably cool Ion Window Manager) applets to replace the embarrassingly retro interface. How about writing DHTML in Perl or Python instead of JavaScript? Can you say .GNET?

The site's 3 years old and the guy may be talking out of his arse. I'll give him this, though: he sure knows how to diss up C++ with a zeal for hellfire and damnation truly worthy of his dear OS's name:

C++ objects and their complexities are happily left out. There is no polymorphism or tricky exception handling (the difficulty of understanding exception handling caused the explosion of the Ariane 5 rocket).

It's not every day you download and install an operating system in a couple of seconds (ADSL). Didn't even have to powercycle IE let alone reboot its other OS plugin, Windows. If they don't open the source I'm sure there's someone somewhere who's looking at his/her 1 floppy Linux distro and hatching a cunning plan. What a shame Theo de Raadt's so down on a pocket OpenBSD (reminds me of Guido's antipathy to a Python shared object, Linus's allergy to a kernel debugger). That fireproof sonofabitch would be a perfect fit for plug-in World Domination.

Good PDA keyboard by Geoff · 2000-12-07 01:49 · Score: 1 · on PDA Keyboards Compared

Well, I like the Newton keyboard that I use with my MessagePad 2100. It's nearly full-sized and quite touch-typeable.

(There's a photo if one in use on this page.)

Sigh. I'm still mad at Steve Jobs. Geoff

Re:Does Anti-aliased Text Look Better? by cradle · 2000-12-05 02:22 · Score: 1 · on Anti-Aliased Text in X11 Continued

However, when you are looking at very small letters non-anti-aliased text is illegible. ...
If you look at a Windows machine, you'll see that normal reading sized fonts are not anti-aliased. Only large and small fonts are.

I'm not sure either of these statements are correct. Take a look at this:

http://www.glue.umd.edu/~cradle/antialias.html

You'll find two images of a Word document. The text varies from 48pt down to 8pt. The left image is with the default settings for Windows (NT 4.0 at least). If you zoom in, you'll see none of the fonts use antialiasing, regardless of their size.

The image on the right is with "Smooth edges of screen fonts" set in the Plus! tab of display properties. This turns on antialiasing. However, you'll see that for the smallest fonts, MS has decided not to use antialiasing.

Now, one can argue as to whether that means small antialised fonts look bad, but your statements about Windows seem to be incorrect.

Univ of MD still clean by strredwolf · 2000-11-28 09:58 · Score: 2 · on Slashback: Bricks, Consoles, Projects

I'm taking/repeating a Data Structures in C++ class here at The University of Maryland, College Park. Last year the professor (who is teaching this year, too) told us that they were moving away from the OSF/1 platform (the "Detective" cluster) and to a Solaris cluster (which is shared with every student). At this time, that cluster (wam.umd.edu) was also accessible by the NT platform over AFS, and on it was... wait for it...

Microsoft Visual Studio 6.

BUT there's a good side. The project we had to do had to compile with ol' faithful, gcc 2.95.1.

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WolfSkunks for a better Linux Kernel
$Stalag99{"URL"}="http://stalag99.keenspace.com";

Re:Backup programs ? by larien · 2000-11-26 21:04 · Score: 3 · on Searching For A Reliable Backup System?

Try Amanda. It's free, runs under most versions of *nix and will even back up SMB shares (if you have samba installed). It is also fairly intelligent and will run different levels of backup depending on how much has changed on disk (eg, if not a lot has changed, it'll do an incremental; if a lot has changed, it might as well just do a full dump etc).

We use it here to backup our Unix stuff and it rarely needs poking; it just chugs away in the background and the only intervention we have to do is change tapes every day (which you'll get on any backup system without a tape array).
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Asteroid Name List Link! *Fun* *Cool* *Foo* by ackthpt · 2000-10-24 00:51 · Score: 2 · on New 'Planet' Discovered in Solar System

Follow this link and be the life of the next party!

Unless the next party includes any of the following: Actors, actresses, models, recording artists, professional athletes, amature athletes, sports agents, literary agents, lawyers, lawyers with doberman pinschers clamped onto one or both ankles, used car salesman, RIAA scum, MPAA filth, pencil pushers, paper shufflers or accountants.

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Re:Windows 98 security by nchip · 2000-10-23 12:54 · Score: 2 · on Excite@Home Claims Broadband 'Safe'

This is a nice example of window security is the following worm. Or how about password passing? The only reason windows machines aren't cracked so often is that are not so easy to use remotly as Unixen. Windows 2000 is about to change this....

Re:Liver not designed to handle alcohol? Hogwash. by Dr.+Sp0ng · 2000-10-18 03:14 · Score: 2 · on A Minor Political Screed

Very good, we're getting somewhere. Now are you ready to generalize this flash of insight to cannabinoids? ;)

Heh, of course. Pot isn't something I use to get fucked up, it's something I use for the positive benefits it gives me - relaxation, creativity, headache relief (NOTHING is better than pot for getting rid of a headache), and a general sense of well-being. And so I don't smoke an obscene amount of it. If I did, I'd be stoned right now. But I've been at work all day.
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Re:Non-sequitur warning by Dr.+Sp0ng · 2000-10-18 02:33 · Score: 2 · on A Minor Political Screed

The human brain has receptors for opiates (endorphins), amphetamines, cocaine and a lot of other things. So what's your point?

If these substances were inert they wouldn't have any psychoactive properties, would they?

No, most other drugs bind to receptors which are meant for other substances, usually neurotransmitters such as seratonin. Cannabinoids binds to receptors which don't accept anything else (they also bind to other receptors as well, though). I wish I still had the URL to this study, I'll go look for it in a minute (as soon as Perl stops being a bitch. Heh, if anybody has experience using fork() in Perl, please email me, this is getting ridiculous).
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More comprehsive URL by SWroclawski · 2000-10-17 22:13 · Score: 2 · on Wireless LANs and Linux

That story URL was good, here's another (and I think more comprehensive), from a DC LUG meeting more than a year ago.

Thanks to Peter Teuben for doing this:

http://www.astro.umd.edu/~teu ben /linux/wireless.html

- Serge Wroclawski

Re:For underwater robots... by cybercuzco · 2000-10-07 23:08 · Score: 2 · on Mini-Robot Available For Wreaking Havoc At Home

I work at the university of maryland Space systems lab. At the SSL we have a gian neutral bouancy tank where we can simulate on orbit testing. The SSL has been working on a robot called ranger since 1990. It has been modified slightly to work in an underwater environment. If you have $20 Million you can get your own

Re:*sigh* package only for x86? by Dahan · 2000-10-06 08:20 · Score: 1 · on X86-64 Simulator - now available (Linux only)

*ahem*...I suppose the reason that this is only for x86 is because it is a X86-64 emulator. It emulates a 64-bit platform on x86 machines. Therefore, solaris, PPC, et. al., can reasonably be left out on this round.

No, it doesn't emulate a 64-bit platform on x86 machines. It emulates an X86-64, a 64-bit x86 platform. There's no reason it couldn't run on some other machine. Nintendo/SNES/Gameboy emulators work just fine on x86 PCs, despite the lack of 6502/65816/Z80s in 'em.

And FYI, here is an public domain IA64 simulator, which you could compile on a SPARC, Alpha, PPC, whatever... it only simulates the CPU though, not a full machine.

Global Impact Calculator by Alien54 · 2000-09-18 04:41 · Score: 4 · on UK Publishes Asteroid Armageddon Report

As always, when this sort of news comes out, this Sky and Telescope Magazine webpage comes in handy. It has plenty of links.

Especially useful and entertaining is this Solar System Impact Calculator, where you if you are lucky, you can help Marvin the Martian get rid of the pesky planet blocking his view of Venus. :) You can check out effects of impacts on other planets as well. Just don't make Marvin mad ...

:)

- - - - - - - -
"Never apply a Star Trek solution to a Babylon 5 problem."

Global Impact Calculator by Alien54 · 2000-09-18 04:41 · Score: 4 · on UK Publishes Asteroid Armageddon Report

As always, when this sort of news comes out, this Sky and Telescope Magazine webpage comes in handy. It has plenty of links.

Especially useful and entertaining is this Solar System Impact Calculator, where you if you are lucky, you can help Marvin the Martian get rid of the pesky planet blocking his view of Venus. :) You can check out effects of impacts on other planets as well. Just don't make Marvin mad ...

:)

- - - - - - - -
"Never apply a Star Trek solution to a Babylon 5 problem."

Global Impact Calculator by Alien54 · 2000-09-18 04:41 · Score: 4 · on UK Publishes Asteroid Armageddon Report

As always, when this sort of news comes out, this Sky and Telescope Magazine webpage comes in handy. It has plenty of links.

Especially useful and entertaining is this Solar System Impact Calculator, where you if you are lucky, you can help Marvin the Martian get rid of the pesky planet blocking his view of Venus. :) You can check out effects of impacts on other planets as well. Just don't make Marvin mad ...

:)

- - - - - - - -
"Never apply a Star Trek solution to a Babylon 5 problem."

Asteroid finding project? by jesser · 2000-09-01 14:27 · Score: 2 · on Apocalypse Missed: Asteroid Near Miss

Crazy idea for a business: collect $1000 from people in return for a place in a queue [?] for getting asteroid names. Use the money to pay for the operation of an observatory. Send asteroid data to the Minor Planet Center. If the observatory is the first to spot an asteroid whose orbit is later determined, we choose a name for the asteroid based on the name of one the contributors in our queue.

Of course, this only works if you can find lots of people crazy enough to pay $1000 to get an asteroid named after them. But just think: you could get your name on the doomsday asteroid!

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Re:Not yet... by Anonymous Coward · 2000-08-30 00:26 · Score: 3 · on More Threats From The MPAA

Securing Linux by Kiro · 2000-08-14 07:07 · Score: 4 · on GNOME, Security, Linux, and Cable Modems?

Information sites on keeping your Linux box secured:

http://www.linuxgazette.com/issue34/v ertes.html
http://www.linu xworld.com/linuxworld/lw-1999-05/lw-05-ramparts_p. html
http://www.secu rityfocus.com/focus/linux/articles/linux-securing. html
http://www.isr.umd.edu/~dani elf/Linux/securinglinux.html
http://www.gl.umbc.edu/~jjasen1/unix/ linux.html

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Kiro

Nautilus: A pad++ rip-off? by cjsnell · 2000-08-05 05:20 · Score: 1 · on New Nautilus Screenshots

I noticed that Nautilus' zooming interface sure sounds a lot like a now-extinct zooming interface project called pad++ that was originally developed at the University of New Mexico. I'm wondering if some of the old pad++ developers are working on Nautilus or if they licensed this technology or did they just rip it off?

Read more about pad++ here.

Internet coverage on this story by Fraser+Cain · 2000-08-01 03:09 · Score: 1 · on Microbes Survive Space Trip

Now I think this story is really interesting. Here's a list of Internet coverage about the story:

The research is being done by the University of Maryland Biotechnology Institute. Here's their press release on the subject.

To shoot the bugs into space, they used a NASA sounding rocket. Information on the rocket launch facility is located here.

Here are some links to the Discovery.com article, as well as a few others:

And, of course, my own coverage on Universe Today:

Tough Bugs Ready for Spaceflight - July 26th

Fraser Cain

Re:Programming for distributed systems. by jmaessen · 2000-07-31 20:38 · Score: 1 · on Distributed Operating Systems?

Actually, very few programmers actually understand how to write correct multithreaded code, and many published guides give advice for multithreaded programming that is explicitly wrong! For an example of this, see The "Double-checked Locking is Broken Declaration"---which gives a long list of citations at the end, all of which advocate using a programming idiom in Java which simply doesn't work.

Unfortunately, these problems become more severe when your multithreaded programs are running on more than one machine. This is because memory ordering is the hardest part of multithreaded coding to understand---and distributed shared memory uses far more complex protocols with far more aggressive reordering properties. Programs which may have happened to work on one or even two processors are very likely to break under distributed shared memory.

Re:Earthlink by gilroy · 2000-07-14 01:12 · Score: 2 · on Earthlink Refuses To Install Carnivore

Blockquoth the poster:

The Chinese empire lasted for three thousand years ....

Fair enough. On the other hand, from my admittedly spotty understanding of Chinese history, it's not really fair to say the empire was continuous throughout that time. I believe (but am willing to be corrected) that long periods of stability were punctuated by sharp bursts of chaos wherein much of the structure retreated if not collapsed.

As an aside, according to http://www-chaos.umd.edu/history/imp erial.html, the unification of China into the currently-recognizable entity occured around 221 BC, so that empire lasted for "only" 2100 years. :)

The same source goes on to say "The collapse of the Han dynasty was followed by nearly four centuries of rule by warlords." The Han collapsed around 200 AD, so this dark period runs until around 600 AD. The Chinese Empire is down to, at best, 1300 years of continuous rule. But lo, "Misrule, court intrigues, economic exploitation, and popular rebellions weakened the empire, making it possible for northern invaders to terminate the dynasty in 907. The next half-century saw the fragmentation of China into five northern dynasties and ten southern kingdoms... But in 960 a new power, Song (960-1279), reunified most of China Proper." So the Chinese Empire has only about 1000 years.

In fact, if you look into the history of the Chinese Empire, you find many turnovers and wholesale replacements of the ruling peoples and structures, including foreign dominantion at least twice. I believe the myth of a super-stable Chinese Empire placidly ruling for thousands of years is just that --- a myth.

Re:The FBI is just looking out for us by Stephen+Samuel · 2000-07-06 13:52 · Score: 3 · on FBI's Wiretapping Demands May Nix Verio Deal

Well, excuse me for pointing this out, but Timothy what's his name who blew up the federal building in Oklahoma wasn't a Muslim, wasn't a foreigner, wasn't a homosexual and wasn't an "enviro-nazi".

He was a blond-haired (blue-eyed?) conservative who "served his country" in the military and probably voted Republican before he was arrested for the deadliest terrorist attack on US soil in recent history. I know of no evidence that he announced his plans to blow up Oklahoma over any phone line that the FBI bothered to tap.

I could further point out that, although Martin Luther King is now considered a Civil Rights hero, the FBI didn't just wire tap him, they tried to discredit him with their wiretap info. As for the people who shot MLK, the FBI probably considered them good, upstanding members of the KKK.

NOW you can try and justify violations of, and limits on, our civil rights "so the government can protect us".
`ø,,ø`ø,,ø

Re:George Washington vs. FBI ding ding ding by Stephen+Samuel · 2000-07-06 12:48 · Score: 2 · on FBI's Wiretapping Demands May Nix Verio Deal

Yeah, but still: If the FBI doesn't have the right to tap the phones of people like Martin Luther King and Judi Bari, no right-minded government would be able to sleep soundly.

BTW: The intelligent terrorists will make misleading comments in their phone calls (Think Spock in Wrath of Kahn).

There's a second (less obvious?)issue in this purchase: Industrial espionage. I don't think that it's a big shock that the company they're worried about is serving "more than 20 percent of the companies on Standard & Poor's 500". I would guess that the FBI figures that it's easier to prosecute people for supporting industrial espionage if they're US nationals.

Yes, I did it! I stole Colonel Sanders' secret recipe for Hiroshima chicken. But you just try and prosecute me in Tokoyo ... Pig-san!

Of course if the converse happens, the last thing you'd want is to have to send the poor bugger who programmed the router back to Tokoyo.
`ø,,ø`ø,,ø

Re:Plenty of good research... by petebu · 2000-07-05 06:31 · Score: 1 · on GUI Research - Is it Still Being Done?

I had a look at the Pad++ just now. It looks promising, some real innovation at last. It also incorporates the idea of magic lenses. Unfortunately the implemenation is only available for non-commercial use.

However, the good news is that Jazz (a Java implementation of the zoomable UI) has just been made available under the Mozilla Public License. This is something worthy of more people's attention, IMHO.

Plenty of good research... by rcm · 2000-07-05 02:59 · Score: 5 · on GUI Research - Is it Still Being Done?

There's tons of good GUI research being done:

zoomable UIs (Pad++)
two-handed user interfaces (e.g. toolglasses and magic lenses)
smarter desktops(e.g. Apple Data Detectors, LiveDoc, CyberDesk)

The ACM CHI and UIST conferences over the past 10 years are full of good stuff that hasn't made it to production yet. It'd be great to see some of these ideas incorporated into open source projects.

Re:CMU's Human Computer Interaction Institute by namesAsh · 2000-07-05 02:43 · Score: 3 · on GUI Research - Is it Still Being Done?

cool stuff. Here's a link for the UMD HCIL:

Re:Chaos theory by dubl-u · 2000-06-23 03:00 · Score: 1 · on Electronic Circuit Mimics Brain Activity

Heisenberg's work isn't part of chaos theory, bucko. Check out the excellent Chaos Page at the University of Maryland.

Chaos theory deals with "simple nonlinear deterministic systems" that "behave in an apparently unpredictable and chaotic manner".

Sorry, but quantum mechanics doesn't count.

Although now that I think about it, many Anonymous Cowards are simple detministic systems that behave in a chaotic manner. Maybe you should go in as a lab animal. :-)

Online Impact Calculator by Alien54 · 2000-06-22 20:29 · Score: 1 · on Nine Hundred Asteroids in Near-Earth Orbits

Sky and Telecope Magazine has a neat asteroid and comet information page here. And to make things more interesting, there is an excellent online impact calulator here, complete with comments by "Marvin the Martian" if the interplanetary object you dial in is sufficiently large.

Missing a step? by sugarman · 2000-06-16 01:05 · Score: 4 · on From Paper To PDF?

You mentioned OCR software, but didn't go much further with it. Wouldn't this be the solution you need?

Scan to OCR to PS to PDF

there are apprarently a couple tools to do this for you. check out a brief list here

Seeing as you've looked into Adobe Capture, windows may be an option. If so, then the other question would be whether you've looked into Textbridge? This looks like it would do exactly what you're asking. No muss, little fuss.

Re:Coincidence by Dr.+Sp0ng · 2000-06-15 22:52 · Score: 2 · on Is The x86 Obsolete?

Heh, what up spiralx? Go post something on Smokedot instead of reading this crap :-)

Anyway, I smoke weed like a fiend - every day, if I can help it. And I get tons of stuff done. I work full time, write open source software, do CGI art, and other stuff. I can't usually get anything done if I'm not stoned though :-)

Alright, this is drifting way off topic.
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Re:Why?? by Dr.+Sp0ng · 2000-05-28 10:44 · Score: 2 · on RAM Prices Expected To Skyrocket This Week

Raytracing isn't the big RAM eater - the modelling is. I have 320MB in my P2 (and 512 in my Alpha, but that's purely "because I can", I never use anywhere near all of it :-) Anyway, the 320MB in my P2 gets used up routinely when I'm doing 3D work (take a look at this picture for an example of one that used the full 320 and then some virtual memory as well.) This is using 3D Studio and Bryce 4, not Povray, which needs far less RAM.

On a related note, whose fucking bright idea was it to put only 3 RAM slots in my damn motherboard instead of 4 like it should? I would *love* to put some of the RAM from my ALpha into my P2 and actually put it to use.
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Rational Programming is Not an Oxymoron by Baldrson · 2000-05-27 21:57 · Score: 2 · on What Will The Internet Of The Future Be Like?

The future of the Internet is in what I call "rational programming" derived from a revival of Bertrand Russell's Relation Arithmetic. Rational programming is a classically applicable branch of relation arithmetic's sub theory of quantum software (as opposed to the hardware-oriented technology of quantum computing). By classically applicable I mean it is applies to conventional computing systems -- not just quantum information systems. Rational programming will subsume what Tim Berners Lee calls the semantic web. The basic problem Tim (and just about everyone back through Bertrand Russell) fails to perceive is that logic is irrational. John McCarthy's signature line says it all about this kind of approach: "He who refuses to do arithmetic is doomed to talk nonsense." More on this a bit later, but first some history, because he who fails to learn from history is doomed to repeat its nonsense:

When I invented the precursor to Postscript (an audacious claim that I can back up -- it started as a replacement for NAPLPS which I proposed while Manager of Interactive Architectures for Viewdata Corp of America back in November of 1981 -- the Xerox PARC guys found my approach of what they called a "tokenized Forth" communication protocol to be an intriguing way to encode text and graphics), I was interested in having a Forth virtual machine migrate into silicon (ala Novix) so it could evolve from mere graphics rendering into a distributed Smalltalk VM environment (ala Squeak) as videotex terminal/personal computer capacities increased. But I was _not_ interested in object-oriented programming as the long-term semantics of distributed programming environments. (I still have some of the hardcopy of the communiques with Xerox PARC and others from this period.)

Rather, relational semantics were what I saw as the ultimate direction for distributed programming. I had a bit of a go at Tony Hoare's "communicating sequential processes" paradigm and its Transputer realization because he was, at least, starting with the hard problem of parallelism rather than making like the drunk looking for his keys under the light post the way everyone else seemed to be doing (and still are, save for Mozart, since threads, etc. are always an afterthought). But, because there were other hard problems like abstraction, transactions and persistence that he ignored, I christened his approach "Occam's Chainsaw Massacre" in my communiques (in honor of his distributed programming language "Occam") and dropped it in favor of relational programming, which has inherent parallelism resulting from both dependency and indeterminacy. (BTW: Dr. Hoare seems to have finally come to his senses about this issue.)

Unfortunately, the only researcher doing hardcore work on relational programming (meaning, getting to the root of relational semantics in a way that Codd had failed to do) at the time was Bruce MacLennan, then, of The Naval Postgraduate School, and he just didn't have the glamour of Alan Kay at places like Xerox PARC to attract the attention of guys like Steve Jobs. Bruce had a bit of a blind-spot, too, when it came to transactions and persistence, which I attempted to remedy by bringing David P. Reed's work on distributed transactions for the ARPAnet to him, but although he wrote a white paper on a predicate calculus (close to a relational) implementation of Reed's thesis (MIT/LCS/TR-205), he didn't really "get it", IMHO. Reed and MacLennan abandoned their work for other pursuits (ironically, Reed was chief scientist at Lotus while Notes was being developed but did not contribute his ideas on distributed synchronization to that development despite the fact that we had a mutual acquaintance from my Plato days by the name of Ray Ozzie -- so, I share some of the blame for this failure) even as Steve Jobs botched the embryonic object oriented world by abandoning Smalltalk and giving us, instead, a lineage consisting of Object Pascal on the Lisa/Mac which begat Objective C on Jobs's NeXT which begat Java at Sun via Naughton and Gosling's experience with NeXT.

This brings us to the present -- a world in which Javascript-based technologies like Tibet promise to not only salvage the object oriented aspect of the Internet from the birth defects of Jobs's spawn, but actually provide an advance over Smalltalk in the same lineage as CLOS and Self. But it is also a world in which there is growing confusion over the proper role of "metadata" in the form of XML -- particularly when it comes to speech acts and distributed inference. I would call Tibet "the next major Internet advance" except for the fact that the basic idea for a Tibet-like system has been around and well understood since the early 1980's. When it is finally released, Tibet (or a system like it) will put the Internet back on track. I call that a "recovery", not an "advance".

We are now poised to move forward with type inference based on full blown inference engines, thereby dispensing with the nonterminating arguments over statically vs dynamically typed languages that allowed Steve Jobs's spawn to get its nose in the tent. If you want to declare a "type" in a declarative language, just make another declaration and let the inference engine figure out what it can do with that information prior to run time. See how easy that was? Well, there is more to it than that, but not that much: Assertions have implications and assertions made prior to run time have implications prior to run time. Live with it and don't repeat the mistakes of the past.

The confusion over semantic webs, and the reason Berners Lee et al will fail, is essentially the same as the confusion that has beleaguered all inferential systems such as logic programming and "artificial intelligence" over the years: logic is irrational and the real world demands rationality -- otherwise nothing makes sense. By "rationality" I mean that reasoning must literally incorporate "ratios" -- or, as John McCarthy would put it, doing arithmetic so things make sense. By making sense, I mean there is a sense in which one interprets the sea of assertions that clearly dominates for a particular purpose. With logic not only are you limited to 0 and 1 as effective quantities; you have no adequate theoretic basis from which to derive more accurate quantities with which to make sense by taking ratios and determining which inferences are dominant.

Fuzzy logic and expert systems incorporating probabilities have typically failed because they are not based in the first principles of probability and statistics. As Gauss, the premiere probability theorist put it, "Mathematics is the study of relations." He didn't say, "Mathematics is the study of multisets." There are good reasons that relational databases, and not set manipulation languages, have come to dominate business applications -- and Gauss was aware of these differences when he began to derive his laws of probability. Subsequent axiomatizations of mathematics based on set theory were similarly misguided and have led to the idea that "fuzzy sets" are the way to introduce rationality into programming. Rather than sets, relations are the foundation, not just of mathematics but of rationality in the same sense that Gauss realized when he derived his theory of probability from the study of relations.

Rationality allows for judgment which is recognized as inherently fallible -- but which allows one to procede without exponentiating all possible paths of inference. Judgment also allows various identities to limit sharing of information to that needed -- thereby creating speech acts and a basis for rational measures of credibility associated with those identities. Since credit-rating is a degeneration of credibility, it should come as no shock that the invention of negative numbers, originating as they did with the Arabic invention of double entry account keeping, has its analog in something that might be called "logical debt" with which negative probabilities are associated.

And now we have come to the "quantum" aspect of rational programming. It is precisely the "credibility debt" aspect of rational programming that corresponds, in mathematical detail, to the various equations of quantum mechanics and their negative probability amplitudes. (Von Neumann's quantum logic failed to properly incorporate logical debt which has led to much confusion.) Logical debt is important to distributed programming for the same reason debt is important to financial networks. Logical debt is a way of handling poor synchronization of information flow in the same way that financial debt is a way of handling poor synchronization of cash flow. As in any rational system, there are both limits to credit and limits to credibilty that influence one's judgments and actions, including speech acts.

The object oriented folks may, in a sense, have the last laugh here because when we divide up inference into identities that engage in speech acts, we are reintroducing the notion of objects that hide information via exchange of speech act messages that can be thought of as "setters" (assertions) and "getters" (queries). However, I believe it is only fair to recognize that the excellent intuitions of Johan Dahl and Kristen Nygaard did need the added insights and rigor of philosophers like J. L. Austin and T. Etter.

Finally... a story where this is *not* offtopic... by Anonymous Coward · 2000-05-19 20:38 · Score: 5 · on Oxford Yanks Student Page Over Spoof DeCSS

and I'm asleep at the keyboard. Doh!

Oh well... here it is.
Add your own, and spread this far and wide:

This announcement brought to you by the DeCSS Polar Bear.

Re:Interface Testing by jacoplane · 2000-05-15 06:30 · Score: 5 · on Making Linux Easy With Eazel's Andy Hertzfeld

I agree.

If anyone's interested in the theory behind usability, I recommend this book on Human Computer Interaction as an introduction.

Also, here are some web-sites I found useful:

- Cooper design
Excellent collection of articles, case studies and, for students who want bullet-point summaries for ease of recall, a nice list of HCI design axioms. See in particular http://www.cooper.com/design/ where there is a series of articles, including one entitled "The myth of metaphor". Cooper is also the author of two excellent books on interface design.

- Ask Tog Design
Bruce "Tog" Tognazzini developed the first version of the Apple Human Interface Guidelines in 1978, moved to Sun, and is currently lead designer at Healtheon. He has published two excellent books on interface and software design and at this web site, he answers questions and discusses interface issues with wit and insight.

- Jacob Nielsen's website
Nielsen produces a bi-weekly column on web usability and has also just published a book called Designing Web Usability: The Practice of Simplicity which is getting rave reviews. He is widely regarded as a leader in the field of web site design and usability testing.

- Interface Hall of Shame
An excellent collection of scathing but accurate reviews of user interface disasters of one sort or another. The ultimate depressing experience for any interface designer must be to end up here.

- HCI Reading List
If you want an exhaustive list of HCI reading materials, this is a good place to look. It is reasonably up-to-date (Feb 98) and has useful comments on the majority of textbooks in this area.

- University of Maryland Human-Computer Interaction Lab
The Human-Computer Interaction Lab (HCIL) at the University of Maryland conducts research on advanced user interfaces and their development processes. They study areas such as new approaches to information visualization, interfaces for digital libraries, multimedia resources for learning communities, zooming user interfaces (ZUIs), technology design methods with and for children, and instruments for evaluating user interface technologies. The director is Ben Schneiderman, author of the book "Designing the user interface".

Computer Vision - the real problem. by fundflow · 2000-04-29 20:53 · Score: 1 · on Solving Chess?

For many years chess was thought of as the ultimate problem to check for artificial intelegence. Recent events (such as Kasparov's loss to a machine) showed that this problem is doable.

The biggest problem now lies in the field of computer vision.

Consider this example: Even a dumb dog can know the difference between a leg and a tree. How many people can write a computer program that can distinguish between the two?

It might surprise you, if you are a programmer, but try to do it. Grab few pictures from the internet (or from you webcam) and think how would you solve this. No computer-science major/geek/whatever knows how to solve this in a reasonable way.

While chess has defined rules and possibilities, a picture can have any value - and it's not clear how we humans interpret this information.

Another example is optical character recognition (OCR). In order to understand hand-written script what did people do? Here is a hint: think palm-pilot. Yes... since it's too hard, the solution was to "train the monkey". That is, you, the user have to type one character at a time, and not regular characters but special characters.

Most of these problems have no known solution yet. It is not a problem that can be solved with huge computers.

Did you wonder why we don't have fully automated appliances like in Futurama?

For examples of some neat things that can be done, check this page.

College/Military/Government surplus store by Cy+Guy · 2000-04-25 23:57 · Score: 2 · on Online Sources For Older Hardware?

Call the large public institutions in your area. Some of them require that they sell (or at least offer to sell) anything with potential value before it can be just thrown in the trash.

I know that the University of MD does this and even has a website, and I know an Army base that had them, plus I have heard some cities do it as well.

Time for Slashdot to take a stand... by Anonymous Coward · 2000-04-05 03:12 · Score: 4 · on MPAA Files Another Injunction Against 2600

The following is a list of all the mirrors from the 2600 site.

Re:Poor site anyway by tklancer · 2000-03-26 23:30 · Score: 1 · on Professor Sues teacherreview.com Site Operator

How accurate (considering accuracy is pretty subjective here) are sites like this? I can't imagine going to one of these sites and giving it much weight at all

Disclaimer : My opinion may be a bit biased, because several of my friends operate teacherreviews.com along with the defendant in this case. I'm also marginally involved with the site. (ObPushyComment - it's not affiliated with any school, and it's got reviews for schools all over the world -- see if your school is there and see how your profs rate)

That being said, I give sites like this quite a lot of weight. I avoided the worst profs at UMD whenever possible thanks to a good site (now defunct). I also wasn't able to avoid some of the bad professors (scheduling) -- and believe me, the reviews tend to be accurate. Yes, some people have a chip on their shoulders -- but once you have 3 or 4 independent reviews, you generally have a decent base to form an opinion on. And the best professors, while sometimes controversial, get some extremely positive reviews.

I personally feel that the aforementioned site helped me get a better college experience -- I was able to focus in on the best teachers and get the most for my (parents) money.

Recipe for pi by Klaruz · 2000-03-13 21:40 · Score: 1 · on Happy Pi Day!

Check out This page if you'd like to make pi yourself on your home machine. The longest string the person writing the page knows of for a home computer is 256 million digits with a 400mhz pII. That took 3 days using version 2.2 of Carey Bloodworth's program.

How far can you get?

Recipe for pi by Klaruz · 2000-03-13 21:40 · Score: 1 · on Happy Pi Day!

Check out This page if you'd like to make pi yourself on your home machine. The longest string the person writing the page knows of for a home computer is 256 million digits with a 400mhz pII. That took 3 days using version 2.2 of Carey Bloodworth's program.

How far can you get?

Re:Sounds dodgy to me... by James+Lanfear · 2000-03-10 03:11 · Score: 1 · on $6 System-On-A-Chip Mimics Human Vision

Am I the only one who thinks that this sounds somewhat fishy?

Absolutely. There are several projects underway (and completed) to do this, and all of them are well into the multi-thousand dollar range, AFAIK. The silicon visual system constructed at, IIRC, Georgia Tech, is supposed to be most complex VLSI device ever created (or was when their page was last updated ;-). I suspect that you won't be buying one for for $50.

(Incidentally, my favorite hardware vision project is here. This guy building most of a primate visual system (retina to cortex) to model attention and tracking. Who needs a silicon retina when you can get a silicon cortex ;-)

Wierdness by howardjp · 2000-03-01 01:47 · Score: 1 · on Open Source Symbolic Math Program?

I was sitting in my scientific computing class at Maryland learning obscure MATLAB commands. Before long I got to thinking about starting an open source clone of MATLAB. Let me know if you are interested here.

Best Space Weather Link by kabloie · 2000-02-19 11:41 · Score: 2 · on Massive Sun Flare This Weekend

I see some of the space weather sites going down hard tonight. The biggest effect of this storm will be that a LOT of university sites will have to upgrade their systems.

Click here for the Space Environment Center's daily forecast and current conditions. Nice plots, basically of the Sun and Earth conditions. No solar wind, though.

Also the SOHO spacecraft has a really awesome monitor, results from which are shown at this page .
Be the first on your block to detect the CME shock front! :)

kabloie

Re:Solar Flare season by kabloie · 2000-02-19 11:08 · Score: 1 · on Massive Sun Flare This Weekend

If only moderators knew what they were doing:

Expect this to get worse. We're not even at the peak of the solar flare season yet, if I've understood things correctly. This one could easily send the control systems on satellites haywire, resulting in some interesting
(and expensive!) atmospheric special effects.

Geosync. satellites aren't going zooming anywhere.
And the faster Iridium comes down the better.

As we get further into the year, things could easily get a lot worse.

Worse than worse? Worser? Worstest.

Now is NOT a good time to buy shares in telecom satellite companies. Also, expect trans-continental Internet service to stagger.

That's total BS. You are just making this up now!

Yes, there -are- undersea cables, but much of the NSF equiptment used satellite feeds. If those are interfered with (likely) or destroyed (entirely possible), the Internet is likely to suffer severe lag, or even fragment until alternative links can be brought in.

If WHAT is interfered with? The fiber optics under a mile of conducting salt water? At 40 degrees latitude? Safest place to be in a magnetic storm.

The only things that is manmade and conducts electricity are pipelines and powerlines. And you can bet the utility companies are watching this one carefully.

Just keep your eyes out for another Anik, but your packets are in no danger. Just the Spice Channel.

kabloie

P.S. Just keep your beady eyes on this plot. If the density hits 50/cc, look up!

Mirror by cybercuzco · 2000-02-13 04:34 · Score: 2 · on The History Behind the Lisa UI

Ive mirrored the original site here

Re:Mining the sky by Paul+Fernhout · 2000-02-09 21:50 · Score: 1 · on Exploring the Asteroids

Excellent book!

John Lewis (the author) is one of the heros of the space settlement revolution. A more technical book by him is "Physics and Chemistry of the Solar System": http://www.astro.umd.edu/ ~mcfadden/books/Lewisreview.html

He is involved somehow with Spacewatch (a program at the University of Arizona, led by Dr. Tom Gehrels) which has done much of the pioneering work in the field of NEO detection. http://www.xs4all.nl/~carlkop/asterimp.h tml

Another good site is: http://www.permanent.com/ where Mark Prado also has a book on this topic.

Been there, done that by Anonymous Coward · 2000-01-31 14:13 · Score: 0 · on Inflatable Toys in Space

This is hardly new technology. Several years back, U Maryland's famed Space Systems Laboratory developed a ceramic-fiber fabric heat-shield which opened like an umbrella. The opening mechanism is immaterial- the critical issue is developing material which is thin, light, collapsable, and able to withstand extreme temperatures. See The Space System Laboratory's web page, and be jealous of the undergraduates who work there. :-)

He's Stuart Smalley, and dog gonit people like him by Anonymous Coward · 2000-01-29 13:28 · Score: 0 · on E-Mails from (Over?) The Edge

The guy is a fairy. He makes Alan Alda look like Mike Tyson.

The fag needs to be put in the Marine Corps boot camp at Parris Island. Somewhere along the way the queer boy lost his manhood. Maybe the USMC can find it for him. If he survives the ordeal, that is. That would really give him something to write about.

Mirror from 2600 - probably will be gone soon by Anonymous Coward · 2000-01-20 09:36 · Score: 0 · on MPAA Sending Out DMCA Demand Letters

Mirrors

http://www.multimania.com/sxpert/decss/

http://www.posexperts.com.pl/peopl e/wrobell/css/

http://www.koek.net/dvd

http://logical-solutions.com.au/DeCSS.zip

http://www.sarahandcasey.com/decss/

http://www.fsp.com

http://www.warren-wilson.edu/~echerry/dvd

http://people.mn.mediaone.net/bojay/s lashdot/

http://www.mafkees.com/dvd

http://members.tripod.com/donotsueme/