Slashdot Mirror

Here are the mirror links for the program and the data update in case telestra.org goes down again. There is nothing posted there besides this list anyway.

Maestro for Windows XP/2000/Me/98

Download from NASA Download from Freecache Download from USF FTP (Florida) (Internet II - university students start here) Download from LibertyOutreach Download from KNCL FTP (Texas) Download from Lakewebs (Oklahoma) Download from NJIT (New Jersey) Download from UALR (Arkansas) (Internet II - university students start here) Download from Emporia State Univ. (Kansas) (Internet II - university students start here) Download from TU-Budapest (Hungary) Download from TU-Berlin (Germany) Download via BitTorrent (what's this?) Download via ed2k (what's this?)

Maestro for Mac (requires Java3D)

Download from NASA Download from FreeCache Download from USF FTP (Florida) (Internet II - university students start here) Download from KNCL FTP (Texas) Download from Lakewebs (Oklahoma) Download from NJIT (New Jersey) Download from UALR (Arkansas) (Internet II - university students start here) Download from Emporia State Univ. (Kansas) (Internet II - university students start here) Download from TU-Budapest (Hungary) Download from TU-Berlin (Germany) Download via ed2k (what's this?)

Maestro for Linux

Download from NASA Download from Freecache Download from USF FTP (Florida) (Internet II - university students start here) Download from KNCL FTP (Texas) Download from Lakewebs (Oklahoma) Download from NJIT (New Jersey)

Here are the mirror links for the program and the data update in case telestra.org goes down again. There is nothing posted there besides this list anyway.

Maestro for Windows XP/2000/Me/98

Download from NASA Download from Freecache Download from USF FTP (Florida) (Internet II - university students start here) Download from LibertyOutreach Download from KNCL FTP (Texas) Download from Lakewebs (Oklahoma) Download from NJIT (New Jersey) Download from UALR (Arkansas) (Internet II - university students start here) Download from Emporia State Univ. (Kansas) (Internet II - university students start here) Download from TU-Budapest (Hungary) Download from TU-Berlin (Germany) Download via BitTorrent (what's this?) Download via ed2k (what's this?)

Maestro for Mac (requires Java3D)

Download from NASA Download from FreeCache Download from USF FTP (Florida) (Internet II - university students start here) Download from KNCL FTP (Texas) Download from Lakewebs (Oklahoma) Download from NJIT (New Jersey) Download from UALR (Arkansas) (Internet II - university students start here) Download from Emporia State Univ. (Kansas) (Internet II - university students start here) Download from TU-Budapest (Hungary) Download from TU-Berlin (Germany) Download via ed2k (what's this?)

Maestro for Linux

Download from NASA Download from Freecache Download from USF FTP (Florida) (Internet II - university students start here) Download from KNCL FTP (Texas) Download from Lakewebs (Oklahoma) Download from NJIT (New Jersey)

As for the maintenence of the iPod costing 33% of the unit's replacement value every 1.5 to two years, an automobile is slightly higher than that. At an average cost of $24,000, and an average driving distance of 15,000 miles per year at an average cost of about 50 cents per mile, automobile upkeep/operation costs about 50% of replacement costs in 1.5 to 2 years of operation.
http://www.ftc.gov/bcp/conline/pubs/autos/newcar.h tm
http://www.nctr.usf.edu/clearinghouse/costtodrive. htm

Compared to a car, the upkeep costs of an iPod are low.

Iraq has suffered mightily from ecological disaster during the regime of Saddam Hussein and in the wake of the Iran-Iraq War, Gulf War I, and Gulf War II. However, it was once the garden spot of the Middle East, and there is work already underway in restoring ecosystems in the Tigris/Euphrates River Basin.

Yes, there are a lot more pressing needs for the Iraqi people as a whole. But F/OSS is certainly better for them, as a developing nation, than bondage to Microsoft which is no doubt in Bill Gates' plans.

There's an old Union organizing song which has a line that says "we need bread and roses too." Iraq needs all the things people are saying they need in this thread. But they also need access to technology, both for practical and not-so-practical reasons. A developing nation needs bread, but that doesn't mean roses are out of the question until the bread situation is dealt with. We could do worse than to encourage F/OSS in Iraq. Certainly the Bush Administration, Halliburton and their buddies at Microsoft are hard at work encouraging other things to base Iraq's computer infrastructure on.

If you want, here is an RPM that contains updated modutils. The package is called modutils so that it cooperates with the pre-defined dependencies. It also allows you to boot 2.6 and 2.4 kernels. It works well for me on redhat 9

modutils-2.4.21-22.i386.rpm

REAL Ultimate Power!

Wizards are sooooooooooo sweet that I want to crap my pants.

Facts:

1. Wizards are mammals.
2. Wizards fight ALL the time.
3.The purpose of the wizard is to flip out and kill people.

aargh. Now why didn't I think of that?

(see functional fixity )

Gastrobotics

There was a previous Slashdot article on it:

A Robot That Runs On A Sugar High

The link in there no longer works, but this one does:

Meat-eating robot has (g)astronomic potential

Basically, the robot has a "belly" full of the E-coli virus which is used to generate electricity (ala The Matrix). Now we only need to figure out how to create an "ant-Matrix" to power our PCs...

Well, yes

I know I am going to be flamed for this, but this very topic is discussed at extreme length in Stephen Wolfram's book, "A New Kind of Science". He specifically goes on end about a particular one-dimensional cellular automata, "rule 110" (IIRC), which seems to produce randomness, but which is based off of a small handful of simple rules, and a base starting condition of a single black pixel. He demonstrates in excruciating detail how, no matter how complicated you make a system, that all such systems can be brought back to the set of simple one-dimensional CAs. He demostrates how Turing machines can be set up (via initial starting conditions - not just a single pixel) which use these same CA to perform Turing machine calculations - thus these same CA can, in theory, execute (albeit very slowly) and emulate any current computer or program in existance today. He names this "the principle of computational equivalence".

He explores at great length how systems that are seemingly random can actually be simulated by these self-same CAs, which are based on simple sets of rules - blowing away the time-held notion that complexity arises from an underlying complex ruleset. It stands to reason that given the ruleset, and a result output from the CA, one can work back to the initial starting conditions - the problem arises in that we may only have the initial conditions, figuring out that ruleset is (probably) impossible.

He explores our current methods of perception and analysis, and shows how while our current methods of analysis show that something is random, as humans using our senses we have an affinity for picking out what look to be like patterns - he seems to make the point (unless I have misinterpreted him - which is very likely) that it isn't our senses decieving us, it is our methods of analysis that are incomplete. He also presents ideas and thoughts on how we can overcome these limitations.

The book is much more than that, however - I have read articles dismissing the work as everything from a form of plagerism (at worse) to restating others thoughts (at best). I do not believe this is the case. While it is true many others in the past have played with CAs, what Wolfram has done is go that extra step, building on these ideas and bringing them all together under one umbrella of thought. He acknowledges this throughout the book.

Anyone interested in these topics and others tangent to them owes it to themselves to read Wolfram's book and come to their own conclusions. I honestly believe he is on to something, which could have profound effects in the future (perhaps far in the future, but much sooner if we read it and understand it now).

Other related links:

Collection of Reviews on ANKOS
Stephen Wolfram's Web Site
ANKOS Web Site

The placement of an apostrophe has been a pet peeve of mine for quite a while with the most egregious offense lately being the title of the movie "Bridget Jones's Diary". Or maybe that just the british way of doing things...

Don't assume that something that counters your experience or learning is automatically incorrect. That just might be a sign of elitism and intellectual laziness. The title of the movie refers to a diary that belongs to the character "Bridget Jones". Whether the possessive form of her name should be written Jones' or Jones's seems to be a matter open to debate. I am not an English major, so I don't pretend to have a definitive answer; it seems to depend on whom you ask....

Give these links a try.

I didn't get a close look at the article, so I can't say if it's a CRC16 or CRC32. Assuming a CRC32, the probability of a one-bit error making it through undetected is 1/2 ^ 32, or highly likely to be caught. However, multi-bit errors (from what I recall reading on CRC's recently) are _more_ likely to be caught. I can't locate a souce on that at the moment, but there are some interesting sources here that might prove fruitful.

Due to the nature of CRC, each successive bit radically changes the sum, so that single bit errors are easy to detect, and multi-bit errors are even easier, IIRC.

Just as soon as you show me proof that either Bill Gates or Microsoft is responsible for the gruesome deaths of millions of people and other atrocities, I'll concede you have a point. Until then you just sound like every other insensitive idiot who compares their pet peeve to Hitler.

Next time you get the urge to compare Bill Gates to Hitler, why don't you visit the web site below. Perhaps it'll help you put things in perspective.

Photos: Germans Confront Nazi Atrocities

The Nazi's killed 6 million Jews, but if you look here article, they killed 5 million others. To many think that just the Jews were persecuted by the Nazi's, but there were just the easiest to target.

I am in high school and very interested in physics and it would be an awsome project to work on something like this.

Where have I heard this type of thing before?

You may think this is the ultimate chick "magnet," but personally, I think that even if fusion reactors only get a second place in the science fair these days, you should try to build a Tokomak. There's just something sexy about how they look.

After the fair, no matter how you do, you can take a promising date to see it, dim the lights and crank it up and see if sub-nuclear particles are all that get excited. Who knows, maybe you'll finally discover the joys of practical applications for combinatorial physics, where books have only given you theories to feed your fantasies...

(moderators: please don't "nuke" me too badly on this one)

The pay is about 20% lower than the corporate world, but the benifits made up for half of that. Job security was great....there is no chance for layoffs. :)

Job security IS great. I've worked at a university for a number of years and the fact is, if someone should be fired, they won't be. I have never seen it happen.

The worst that can happen to you for anything is that you'll be suspended with pay.

You don't even have to do your work. It is so difficult to fire anyone that they'll just hire someone else to do the work you were supposed to do.
The hours are great too: its strictly 9:30 am to 3:30 pm. You also get plenty of time-off. Where I'm at its 8 hours leave every two weeks = over 5 weeks off per year. You might have to tell them you have a tummy ache to get 2.5 of those weeks off.

You can even say things like: "Jihad is our path! Victory to Islam! Death to Israel! Revolution! Revolution until victory! Rolling to Jerusalem!"
without much consequence. Or maybe you'll
help found the governing council of the Palestinian Islamic Jihad and then served on it.

Ooops, until you end up on O'Reilly factor shortly after the slaughter of 3000 people. Thats when the suspended-with-pay thing kicks in.

http://www.washtimes.com/op-ed/20020701-7405733.ht m

You'll also get plenty of support from the faculty.

http://w3.usf.edu/~uff/AlArian/

Of course, this is only if you share your co-workers' political views. If you don't -- well, you wouldn't have been hired in the first place so it doesn't matter.

I was at Acroname's Robo02 robotics expo in Boulder, Colorado, earlier this year.

Lt. Colonel John Blitch (US Army, Ret.), of the Center for Robotic Assisted Search and Rescue, brought one of the Packbots that had been used in Afghanistan to the expo for his presentation on robotic search and rescue. (The robot still had Afghan dirt all over it).

A similar model was used, and lost, during the search at the World Trade Center site. Pictures of it at the WTC can be seen at http://www.csee.usf.edu/robotics/crasar/photoGalle ry.html.

I was at Acroname's Robo02 robotics expo in Boulder, Colorado, earlier this year.

Lt. Colonel John Blitch (US Army, Ret.), of the Center for Robotic Assisted Search and Rescue, brought one of the Packbots that had been used in Afghanistan to the expo for his presentation on robotic search and rescue. (The robot still had Afghan dirt all over it).

A similar model was used, and lost, during the search at the World Trade Center site. Pictures of it at the WTC can be seen at http://www.csee.usf.edu/robotics/crasar/photoGalle ry.html.

I just read that page, and I'm pretty sure that's a picture of Betty Crocker. Maybe she invented A/C!

Long Live Betty Crocker!

I remember from visiting Apalachicola, Florida, that they have a sign proclaiming to be the birthplace of air conditioning. Google it and see. Here's a decent page: http://fcit.coedu.usf.edu/florida/lessons/gorrie/g orrie.htm .

He had rooms cooled by mechanical refrigeration 50 years before the usurpers in Buffalo! Let the revisionist history be cast down!

Yep, apparently he's proposing Dynamical systems theory ('Chaos theory') and CA as his own ideas which is obviously not true. E.g. Poincare discovered 'complexity' in similar simple dynamical systems some 100 years ago. Somebody collected a set of ANKOS reviews here. Incidentally the idea that world would consist also out of CA's is actually also not originally Wolfram's (I think I have even read a scifi story based on this idea).

Perhaps the most interesting is Scot Aaranson's, submitted to Quantum Information and Computing, where some of Wolfram's claims are actually unearthed and analysed by someone who knows their stuff.

Here's a quote from the conclusion of that review:

In computational complexity, we argued that Wolfram often recapitulates existing ideas (such as pseudorandomness and the intractability of simple instances of NP-complete problems), albeit without precise definitions or proofs, and with greater claims of significance. On the other hand, some of the book's contents, such as the explicit constructions of Turing machines, may be of interest to theoretical computer scientists.

In physics, the book proposes that spacetime be viewed in terms of causal networks arising from graph rewriting systems. The causal network models are intriguing, and in our opinion merit further mathematical study. However, their relevance to physics is difficult to evaluate without the details that Wolfram declines to supply.

As for the proposal that a deterministic, relativistically invariant, causal invariant model underlies quantum mechanics, we argued that it fails - even if quantum mechanics breaks down for more than two particles, and even if, as Wolfram suggests, one allows long-range threads to connect entangled particles. Exactly what kinds of classical models could underlie quantum mechanics is a question of great importance, but Wolfram makes no serious effort to address the question.

In general, Aaronson finds that Wolfram's decision to go it alone works to the detriment of the book, but still credits it with being an excellent popularisation of many scientific fields, once you subtract the posturing and grandiose claims about CA. A common thread in some of the more literate reviews is that Wolfram ignores and downplays the work of many people in fields where he's claiming to have made big advances.

See here for a page that links to about 15 reviews of ANKOS. My favorite is this review for the Mathematical Association of America.

Well, this Eden project looks really cool, but there are definitely other candidates for the 8th wonder of the (modern) world: The Baha'i Gardens:
http://www.tour-haifa.co.il/BahaiShrine/indexEng.h tml
http://www.bahaiworldnews.org/terraces/ And as for the ancient world here is a candidate eighth wonder: Banaue Rice Terraces:
http://ce.eng.usf.edu/pharos/wonders/forgotten/ban aue.html
http://www.twnside.org.sg/title/mm-cn.htm

Maybe you mean the Egyptian port of Alexandria? With the big lighthouse and library?

Most of the evidence as I understand it comes from the ability of the Phoenicians and Egyptians to cross the Atlantic (based on ship construction). Maybe there is more evidence I am not aware of, buy Hyerdahl just proved it could be done, not that it was done.

From www.m-w.com

Main Entry: capitalism
Date: 1877
: an economic system characterized by private or corporate ownership of capital goods, by investments that are determined by private decision, and by prices, production, and the distribution of goods that are determined mainly by competition in a free market

There is nothing in that definition that says only one individual may benefit. Indeed, it's already been pointed out that private individuals in a capitalist system already voluntarily cooperate for their mutual benefit. Capitalism just means that individual decide rather than the state.

A better political comparison would be between a robot team where each robot has control over its own robot body, and a robot team with a central master control, telling each robot what to do. Indeed, its interesting that his robots evolve individually where there is a sort of distributed intelligence, rather than under some central authority as in socialism or communism.

Just for comparison,

Main Entry: socialism
Date: 1837
1 : any of various economic and political theories advocating collective or governmental ownership and administration of the means of production and distribution of goods
2 a : a system of society or group living in which there is no private property b : a system or condition of society in which the means of production are owned and controlled by the state
3 : a stage of society in Marxest theory transitional between capitalism and communism and distinguished by unequal distribution of goods and pay according to work done

I think its interesting that the third definition allows for unequal distribution of goods and pay.

Also look at http://fcit.coedu.usf.edu/holocaust/resource/docum ent/PROGRAM.htm for one historically influencial socialist group and their platform.

Anyway, the field of robotic USR at this point is so new that a lot of interesting and very different technologies are being developed. A lot of groups use platforms that wouldn't be of great use in a real rescue situation, such as the iRobot Magellan Pros we used, simply because they're research robots designed to roll around on flat surfaces. These in particular lack sensors specifically designed for rescue use - they have a ring of sonar and infrared range sensors around them and a video camera. Others, like the Urbans used at USF, are very rugged (they are tracked and can climb things) and have very sensitive FLIR sensors for detecting people.

Autonomy versus teleoperation was the subject of some debate at the competition last summer. The scoring for the contest was done according to an equation that rewarded for the number of people found, penalized for the number of people it took to operate the robots, and so on. The formula gave a very clear advantage to teleoperated robots: even though teleoperating is very difficult (it's not like RC cars!), it's a lot easier for a human to look at a screen and navigate/find people than it is for a robot to derive this information from the same image. In a way, this is a very pragmatic approach: we need to develop useful technologies soon. On the other hand, this contest took place at an AI conference, where naturally advancing the state of the art of machine intelligence is viewed as a pretty important goal.

Because of the robots' differing abilities, the contest featured three seperate NIST-developed standard courses; one with flat floors, one with more challenging debris, and one with what essentially was a big pile of rubble. Our Magellans could only handle the first room; the Urbans and a huge homebrew tracked robot from the Sharif University of Technology in Tehran took the more challenging rooms.

In any case, here (at last) is a summary of some of the technologies used in the competition:

• Swarthmore College (us): Standard Magellan Pro wheeled research bot with a Canon pan-tilt-zoom camera on top. Final version used "semi-autonomous" guidance, where an operator would tell the robot to go to a point not too far away and the robot would go there. Big lead-acid gel batteries; PC on board did lots of processing. <gimmick>Robot could also generate red-blue stereogram images of site on operator command by rotating slowly and compiling distance data.</gimmick>
• University of South Florida: Teleoperated Urban tracked robots with FLIR sensors. Some info. Probably lead-acid batteries, don't know about onboard processing (suspect no much).
• Sharif University of Technology: Medium dog-sized tracked robot with binocular vision. Teleoperated by laptop or Palm. I wouldn't want to get in the way of this thing. Few or no sonars IIRC, giant lead-acid gel batteries, probably very little onboard processing.
• University of Minnesota: Cute tube-shaped robots designed (no joke) on a DARPA grant to be shot out of a grenade launcher. Completely radio controlled; AFAIK no smarts on board. Sent wireless video feed to monitors. A spring mechanism allowed them to jump out of tight spots. DARPA doesn't let them talk about power supply, other info.
• ?University of Utah?: A commodity approach: robots were Radio Shack RC cars with Basic STAMPs on board. While not completed at the contest, eventually they will swarm with complete autonomy around the disaster site, detect people (or other hot things) with IR sensors, and relay their position to a central controller. Power is a simple 9V battery.
• University of Edinbugh: don't recall exactly; despite all their valiant efforts, they couldn't get anything working in time. I think they were also working on an autonomous system of two or three bots.

Enough rambling for now. In any case, it was a really cool experience to go out to Seattle and see all the stuff the teams were trying. For me, robotics is a great, growing field that is a whole lot of fun, and the conference was one unforgettable week.

--Tom

Regarding tethered/wireless: the Inuktuns are tethered. This limits their range, but makes it possible to use them continuously, and there is really no risk of losing communications (unless the tether is physically broken). Further, if needed, the robot can be retrieved by following the tether.

The iRobot/RWI robots are wireless, and would normally be capable of running with full autonomy (i.e. they have onboard processing and a sensor suite). They are limited by their battery life, and if the wireless communications are lost (due to interference or otherwise), they may be difficult to recover. For this reason, the Inuktuns were used primarily.

Check out

the USF USAR page (not yet updated with WTC
information) for more.

I believe that in comparison to other educational institutions, MIT is quite a bit more enlightened, giving inventors 1/3 of any licensing revenues (at least in some departments). Universities like USF (hint: a place probably best avoided by smart students) have their student inventors thrown in jail if they want the exclusive rights to a promising invention.

As for these specific patents, it would be interesting to know what they are for: do they really represent interesting inventions, or is it the kind of patent that claims "any television that uses a framebuffer and a CPU".

I knew that description sounded familiar. The door sound from Star Trek. And it must work, I just watched an episode, and sure enough, people were facing the door when the sound occurred.
They might have problems patenting a sound from a 60's TV show.
Here's a WAV file. For best results, repeat 3 times.

If it weren't for the regulation of society through the mechanism of slavery, and hence the suppression of the free market, we could have had the industrial revolution 2000 years ago.

200 BC: Alexandria, Egypt: A cultured city with a population of 500,000, the world's first lighthouse, university, library with 500,000 manuscripts/books, multi-decked shipping, theatres, temples with automatic sliding doors, and engineers working with a simple steam engine. From: Peter James and Nick Thorpe, Ancient Inventions.

In which case we would be about where we are now in high-tech back in AD 200. By AD

230 Billus Gaticus and Laurence of Ellisonius would be multi-trillionaires, clone many offspring, build a sanctuary in space, and then des troy the planet, so they can make version 3.1 the way it was supposed to be, and then encode their plan in DNA, enslave their new creations, and create a secret society so the information isn't lost.

Who needs money when you can have a planet of slaves?

I tried. I really did. But I couldn't help myself. I just *had* to tweak these people. I can't wait to see what kind of response shows up in my fake e-mail address. Maybe I can forward the best ones to bonsaikitten.com for them to post...

Are these people kidding? If they want the web sanitized, prehaps they should remember how effective book burning has been. They might change their minds...

If there ever was an easily-renewable thing, it's microbes. It seems to me there was a mention relatively recently on Slashdot about "Gastrobots", as a small-scale example.

The idea of turning septic tanks into generators appeals to me. This sort of thing might also someday make an adjunct to methane-burning power plants in landfills.

Personally, I'd love to find a way to make the medium that the microbes grow in safe to drink - imagine, brew your own beer AND generate your own power at the same time! (This fuel cell runs on yeast...)

Publications

A warning, however: reading these in the wrong frame of mind becomes extremely creepy:

"...A machine or vehicle deriving its power from natural renewable sources can theoretically remain in operation indefinitely, or until some vital part comes to the end of its service life."

And if you're really clever, the darn things'll learn to fix each other, thus extending their useful period, and to cultivate their own 'renewable sources of power'...

-Cyclopatra

"We can't all, and some of us don't." -- Eeyore

We use discreet edit 5 here at my work . You're supposed to buy some bespoke Coompaq or IBM solution but we use a frankenstein monster and it works great. We used to use Avid MCXpress but edit came over better. discreet say they won't support you unless you have this hardware but so far they've been great.
We're running it on NT workstation 4 (sorry) OS and the HWare spec is dual P400's with 256 RAM and 60 gig of scsi disk space. Overall including the edit sware I guess it cost approx $20k. We use after effects too - but edit also expands into paint and effect. Effect is a DV compositing tool that rocks.
There are issues with the M$oft ODBC and running anything other than just edit. In short once you got edit installed and running you gotta use it standalone cos most apps (especially Outlook) will blow it to hell. Which kinda sux if you want a hybrid editing/everything else PC. Edit has lotsa functionality and is IMHO a top notch solution. But it's not a cheap one.

I think that the very first thing that a Linux desktop needs to be able to do and able to do absolutely flawlessly is, download a RPM or similar package, install it with a few simple clicks, create a "shortcut" to run it on the desktop or in some program menu somewhere, and then run the program. ... right now the graphical shells just plain SUCK at this.

Regarding easily installing packages... there is a Netscape plugin that will download and install an RPM (you need the root password) - it's called "Autoinst" and it's here. Then, if it's a Gnome app with a .desktop entry, it automatically gets entered into your application menu. (I'm sure there's something similar for KDE).

I think that's a long way from "just sucks!"

---

People mislocate USF all the time. The `south' in the name makes them think it's in Miami, not Tampa. And no, I don't know why they call it U South Florida. Tampa is west central FL.

A real news story would list the name of the course is, which Microsoft programs, and probably who the teacher was.

This is more like one of those newsbites that runs down the left or right side of the page. Not necessarily thorough, but provocative. Ratings, you know.

Since when do universities offer courses based on a specific corporation's software?

My micro apps for business class is specifically targeted at Office.

(If it were a continuing education course, it would have said that.)

Not necessarily. See the bit about the newsbite.

Mike
--