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(Or try the Perry-Casteneda Library at the really big U)

I guess that's the PCL at the University of Texas at Austin.

I spent way too much time there, though I seem to have spent most of my time in the UGL or in the Physics-Math Library rather than the PCL.

(Or try the Perry-Casteneda Library at the really big U)

I guess that's the PCL at the University of Texas at Austin.

I spent way too much time there, though I seem to have spent most of my time in the UGL or in the Physics-Math Library rather than the PCL.

(Or try the Perry-Casteneda Library at the really big U)

I guess that's the PCL at the University of Texas at Austin.

I spent way too much time there, though I seem to have spent most of my time in the UGL or in the Physics-Math Library rather than the PCL.

There has been a plethora of research into massive black holes and their relationships to their respective galaxies. Of course most of the work is theoretical, but it is incredibly interesting!

The work is lead by a group of physicists who call themselves "nukers", and a lot of information can be found here.

The main questions that they have been struggling to answer are:
1) What factors about a galaxy do the size and mass of the blackhole at its center dictate?
and 2) Is it neccessary for a galaxy to have a blackhole at its center?

It is this first question which ties directly in with the rate of star formation and such material. If you're interested at all in the subject, I highly suggest checking out the links I provided above. (Yes, I'm too lazy to cut and paste the links again...)

--- I've been up for way too long, so I apologize if at times I made no sense. Just follow the links.

A group of higher education associations are recommending that government officials, college administrators and researchers abstain from using the term "binge drinking" to describe student alcohol consumption. Members of the Inter-Association Task Force on Alcohol and Other Substance Abuse Issues, an umbrella organization of 21 higher education associations, claim that the term may actually encourage alcohol consumption by leading students to believe that heavy drinking is a campus norm. "The use of the term 'binge drinking' has hurt our effort in controlling alcohol abuse on campus," said Edward Hammond, chairman of the National Collegiate Alcohol Awareness Week.

In order to read the whole atricle search for Binge drinking here

To be reliable on mobile devices, IP6 would need built in support for informing the other side of each connection when your location changes. This is in an RFC which I dug up here, but does anyone know whether that is commonly implemented in IP6 stacks? Or how usable the tunnelling thing would (or wouldn't) be once everyone and his dog has an internet enabled mobile phone?

Sure, here you go...
http://ccwf.cc.utexas.edu/~eangst/tackstaples_q150 x150.gif.
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SNAP 19 type. Hurray for SNAP. specs

Bluefin Robotics makes underwater autonomous robots. You may not like the pricing or availability, though. UT Applied Research Labs makes a version that lives on the surface of the ocean and listens for missle impacts in ICBM tests.

Just about any robot you want is out there if you look hard enough.

I got " No employee record was found for the name that you entered"

Too bad, I wanted to thank the guy for producing an entertaining story.

As for a $1000 Windoze, suits me fine. It would give the entire PC manufacturing community lots of reasons to support Linux and to put money into the kind of development that is yet to be done in order to make Linux and its applications usable for one's computer illiterate grandparents.

I really want to see that. Wouldn't it be nice to be able to advise somebody who's new to computers to buy a computer, spend a day showing them the ropes, and NOT have to provide unpaid customer support afterwards?

However, I really don't think anybody at M$hit is really stupid enough to commit to the course of suicidal stupidity described in the PDF.

In a post-breakup environment, they would have to compete for real with stable operating systems under circumstances where the developer community momemtum would be out the door from their viewpoint. Their options will be to cut prices and improve product quality in order to stay in business.

Risto Miikkulainen has done some notable work in this area too.

The hacked open source software is now being called "Qcat" someone posted it to freenet, I just found it. If it's not there, get a copy and post it to freenet again. Files there stay alive as long as people access them. The more versions the better.
That's the way to tell these guys to shut up!
The name "Qcat" is now public domain by nature, no one can claim trademark to it because it's in public use now. Freenet clients are available at

http://freenet.sourceforge.net/
want keys? ...
http://uts.cc.utexas.edu/~blanu/keyin dex.html

For those who are interested, it appears that the :Cat uses a modified base-64 encoding (not the MIME one!) and a little bit of XOR too. Check the decode() routine for details.

Special interest groups get what they want out of the system because they take the time to vote. It's quite simple really.

They will give up their scruffy clothes, and their organized acts of violence in the name of "protest" and they will instead simply walk down tho the local elementary school and cast their vote.

What was it Bill Hicks said about Americian politics? "I think the puppet on the left represents my views. No, I think the puppet on the right it more to my liking." Meanwhile it's the same guy with his hand up both puppet's asses.

(See also Bill's version of the new president's first day in office, as rendered by Garth Ennis.)

Well, I dare say we've got a cool Java app, at least if you have a large, heterogeneous network.. we manage our lab on Ganymede, which is about 200 thousand lines of Java, GPL'ed.

Ganymede features a centralized database server written entirely in Java which contains object data for Users, Groups, Email, Netgroups/NFS, Automounter configuration, IP Networks, Systems/DNS, and more. Administrators in our lab can use the Ganymede GUI client in their web browser (on Windows, Macintosh, OS/2, Solaris, HP-UX, Linux..) to login to the server. The Ganymede server only lets them edit things that belong to them, and many different administrators can be logged into Ganymede simultaneously, each browsing the database and committing changes at the same time. A back end Makefile and Perl code takes the text data files written out by custom plug-in Java code on the server and does an NIS build, a DNS rebuild, an RSH over to our NT PDC to update users and groups on our NT server, a rebuild of the lab's Sendmail aliases, an update of our VPN and Dialup router authentication files, and more.

All Java, distributed, and multi-threaded as heck, with a client that worked the first time we tried it on both Macintosh and OS/2.

I don't know about y'all, but I'm impressed and pleased with Java quite well. If Sun didn't have such tight control over the specification, I'm sure more Java technology would be supported by Microsoft, at least, but I am also sure that you would get less reliability and consistency in running a given piece of code, as everyone would package the class libraries that they like or that is strategic to them, or would provide extensions/distortions to the VM so that floating point math would be done more quickly on their particular processor, or the like. None of which would be helpful for code portability, which is essential for Java to be a credible platform in the first place.

Have a look at Linux on Laptops. They link to Linux reports on just about every notebook model you'll find.

The "look and feel" lawsuit, which is the one we're discussing, was ended by an adverse decision in court in June of 1993, (had to look it up) see this page. Apple also lost their appeal to the Ninth Circuit in 1994 or 1995, so this case can hardly be said to have been "going well"...

By the time of the $150 million investment in Apple by Microsoft, 1997, Apple had some other patent suits going againsr MS, the Quicktime one was definitely going well for them if memory serves, but the "look and feel" suit was essentially dead and buried.

The biggest source of flexibility in UNIX is that everything can be manipulated with linguistic tools. If Microsoft ever ships a truly easy to use from-the-command-line scripting system that can easily interact with and manipulate COM objects, they'll have achieved much of the flexibility of UNIX. If they ship Perl/Python, then they'll have a language rich enough to generate its own hashtables and lists of data that can then be analyzed/treated as if it were a text file, and regexp's and the like will be available to work with their full COM suite.

I've spent almost five years now developing a GUI, object-based sysadmin project for UNIX, and it has taken almost that much time to convince some die-hard UNIX traditionalists here that the very poweful consistency safeguards, error checking, privilege delegation and support for n-user simultaneous editing that it provides was worth giving up the ability to do grep on the passwd file.

I'm with Miguel all the way on this.. something like COM can mean *more* flexibility, as long as we have good scripting tools that make working at the higher level easy, and as long as the COM-style interfaces are designed with a *lot* of thought towards flexibility and security.

If we get COM-style interfaces that prevent us from doing things that the designer thinks we shouldn't do (such as setting a pre-hashed password for a user account, which NT doesn't provide an API for), then a COM would become a barrier. If the interfaces are designed to be as open as possible while still hiding implementation -specific details and providing safety and error checking, then a COM becomes a tremedous strength.

I sure wish Miguel would have talked some about security, though.

As to employees not being responsible for the actions of their companies? Well, I believe the excuse "I was only following orders" went out of fashion in 1945. Also, there is a quote which goes something like "For evil to succeed, all that is required is for no good man to stand against it". I think that applies.

How 'bout a response to this from the inside?

On Evilness: I've been working here for about 2 years, and I don't seem to be carrying out any 'evil' orders. But, I can understand how certain events (especially the way they're taken out of context by the media) combined with agressive business tactics have turned people against MS. I sincerely hope that MS softens up a bit.

It's interesting, though, is how pure accidents (a perfect example is filtering cards from that one company into the Junk folder in OE) that could have never been predicted during development are misconstrued as malicious intent. If there is a conspiracy it's one that causes anti-MS people act like MS is omniscient and attach malicious intent to everything they do or don't do.

On Product Quality: People need to understand that MS is a business and the overriding goal is to make money. Most (~3/4) developers here are scarily good and want to develop excellent products. However, the other necessary goal is to ship within a small amount of time.

I think this famous ad perfectly fits: The Penalty of Leadership

Functional languages seem to lend themselves to formal correctness proofs. I don't mean to imply that it is not possible with other languages, only that it is (IMO) somewhat "natural" for functional languages.

For instance, check out ACL2. This is a LISP-derived system that can both execute code and do semi-automated correctness proofs of same. It works by having you propose correctness theorems about the code, and (cool part!) expressing those theorems in the same language as the code itself.

<trivia>ACL2 was used to validate parts of AMD's K5 and K6 FP operations after Intel's embarassing faux pas with the Pentium FP unit. I've heard that it was used even more extensively on the Athlon. (Strictly speaking, what ACL2 validated was a model of these processors, since the processors themselves are not actually written in ACL2's input languages.)</trivia>

--

Sir, I couldn't help but notice your sig. I apologize for any mix-up, but it seems to me that you are claiming to be:

* Lord of Everything
* Master of All

As you can see, I am Lord and Emperor Phedrick Dobbs, the proper owner of the aforementioned titles. They were transfered to me at my creation. The proof of the matter can be found here.

I apologize in advance for any errors on my part in interpreting your role. However, in order to make sure that the U.S. Government continues to recognize the title of Emperor of the Universe, I must unfortunately defend my rights rather more aggressively than I would have liked.

-Phredrick Dobbs
Emperor of the Universe
Grand and High Protector of Everything

I maintain a comprehensive list of related projects here.

Don't know if the projects are related, but there's been a language called C-- at least since 1995. It's basically just x86 assembler with a C-like syntactic sugar. It was used to create the security software I use in my lab.

The original page seems to be long gone, but you can download the language and docs here.

Now the question is since it was just described and not built does it count as prior art?

When has not having a working prototype ever stopped a patent filer?

Ah... but even if not, then we only need to look to the Stanford Research Institute from the 60's when Englebart et al. showed off their system that included the mouse, and the "gui" with features that were very hypertext like. Now if I could only find the damn link to a description of it. Anyone?

Searching google, I came up with this...
Your Working Boy,

And for those looking to install Linux on just about any laptop under the sun, the Linux on Laptops homepage is the place to look.

LL

I've been running Linux {RH 5.2, then 6.0, and now SuSE 6.4} on my Thinkpad 600E for 18 months. The Linux Laptop Page gives details of everything you need to know to get the Thinkpad working with Linux - with the exception of the dastardly inbuilt modem. I think the latest kernel's/installs actually make even that work - but it doesn't affect me because I've got a modem/LAN card in the PCMCIA slot. It's great to see IBM finally supporting Linux officially, but this isn't exactly late breaking news - it's been done.

The only problem is that the script would have to sit as an idle background process (no cron on a mac)...

Actually, iDo Script Scheduler is included with
OS 8.1 and above.

There's a MacOS version of cron available here, too.

Now that Sun is making their Java plug-in available, the problems with varying Java support in browsers is going away. For Ganymede, we use a hybrid Java applet/application for the client, and it works great on UNIX, Win32 (under Netscape or IE), MacOS, and OS/2.

Applets work just fine as long as you don't get overly ambitious about it, and as long as you keep in mind what an applet is for, and what the constraints of the Java security model are.

Here is the link that gives the intro to the basic wacko theorywith links, etc.

Next we have links to the Expanding Earth theory (with another one here, with some nice graphics, but which is again wacko. It holds that the reason for the shifting of the continents is based on the earth expanding like a balloon, with the crust spreading in sections. The pretty graphics explain the idea nicely. It is tied into the interesting explanation of how dinosaurs could be so big.

Next we have a collection of somewhat related FAQs about science vs areas of psuedo science here, followed by a nice basic intro to plate techtonics here and here.

Some nice graphics related to plate techtonics can be found here and here as well.

the main point being that the continents have been separated and combined into a large single land mass many times through the history of the planet.

so the idea of shifting gravity and an expanding earth is probably a little silly.

Dulce et decorum est, pro patria mori (as the romans put it: it is right and proper to die for one's country)

Very romantic, but somewhat counterproductive if taken to the extreme of dying like lemmings, not in pursuit of a goal but to give the enemy a 50:50 chance...

if a general orders an air attack on a hill, rather than guaranteeing more fatalities in a troop assault, is he a coward?

if the division commander does, is he a wuss?

the NCO's of sections at the foot of the hill: if they have a way of achieving objectives while minimising their own casualties, what should they do?

If you're trying to find honour and cowardice in war, honour is in saving lives through one's actions. Cowardice is in the opposite.

Were we to concentrate on the Kosova, I would say that if there was cowardice, it was political. There was a quite understnadable reluctance for NATO to become involved in a costly ground war. And a nice technical one makes good TV.

How effective it actually was is best summarised in this editorial.

Armed forces are there to achieve the goals set by the political branch of a society. Sometimes how these goals are achieved can be legislated by the political branch, for example through UN mandates and so on, but Sinjun our original poster should understand that where it can be avoided, not getting oneself killed in the process is a service one owes to one's family, one's colleagues, and one's society.

Perhaps he/she should also be aware that there are no swelling orchestras on a battlefield to accompany death-or-glory attacks upon the enemy...

BTW, you might also be interested in this artefact from WW1.

chiral compound
Definition:
A molecule that has an asymmetric center and can
be found in two non-superimposable mirror-image
forms (enantiomers).

Science and Biotechnology Dictionary

Charles Spurgeon's Ethernet Web Site

Jason Schwarz Ethernet Tutorial

Lantronix Networking Tutorials

You might also try typing "ethernet tutorial" or somesuch in your favorite web search engine. Hope this helps!

--

If you're going to have such a program for people to chat with, that is called a Cha tterbot. It's been done.

There are an assortment of Vi rtual Robots for different web tasks. Personally, I think the searching/indexing problem is still lacking a solution -- although librarians have been working on it for decades.

Citizen do not have to accept bad laws as being binding. The concept of jury nullification goes back over eight hundred years in English common law which is what U.S. law is based on. Where I first heard of this concept was on Jerry Pournelle's Chaos Manor Musings. I did a quick search of his site and come up with the following quote:

The jury system was a compromise developed in England after the Norman Conquest to curb the power of the government and particularly the Norman barons while maintaining something like law and order. Under the original jury system jurors were not selected for their lack of knowledge, but the opposite. In the US apparently to be a juror on a major case like the Simpson trial, you must either lie, or be so stupid as never to have heard about something that has occupied the media for weeks to the exclusion of anything people might want to hear. I suppose you could have recently returned from Patagonia or something.

Jurors in the Napoleonic system render verdicts on specific matters of fact; jurors in the English system, which was adopted wholesale in the US and was part of what is meant by trial by jury, render a "General Verdict": one is either guilty or not guilty, and if the jury finds "not guilty" it is inappropriate to make official inquiry into their reasoning.

From this comes "jury nullification", and it was pretty common at one time: if the jury didn't think that whatever the defendant did was a crime at all, they would find him not guilty even if they were certain he had done it. The "unwritten law" under which it was no murder to kill the man who had deflowered your daughter with no intent of marriage was one common reason for not guilty verdicts in the US. In England there were acquittals of Irish by Irish juries in treason and murder trials. One of Jesse James's gang was acquitted of train robbery, probably on the grounds that the railroad had illegally (at least in the eyes of local jurors) seized the family farm for right of way. Utah juries regularly acquitted men of bigamy, and may still do so for all I know.

During the Depression, juries regularly acquitted farmers of crimes associated with defying court orders of eviction. Iowa made it illegal (inciting to riot) to lead a parade carrying a red flag, and although at least four people were tried for this crime, none were ever convicted; I don't know the details, but it's pretty clear what was going on. (Those were the days when if the sheriff held an auction on farm land for back taxes, the only bidder would be the owner; anyone else trying to bid was given to understand that he would not survive the trip home.)

Jury nullification may be abused, but it was certainly accepted by the Framers of the Constitution. But then the Second Amendment had nothing whatever to do with hunting and sporting: it was intended to insure that the populace would be as well armed as the government, and specifically applied to muskets and bayonets (useless for hunting) and even cannon: many of the cannon that now stand on courthouse lawns were owned by local private citizens and served by local militia. When the wording of the Amendment was debated it was made clear that "the great thing is that every man be armed", and there wasn't any question about what armed meant: it meant being able to turn out at a minute's notice. As the British found out at Concord, Lexington, and more significantly, Bunker Hill. (As an aside, Bunker Hill may have been the decisive battle of the Revolution: Howe "won" but he lost so many men and particularly officers in taking that position that he never again dared close; which is why Washington escaped from Harlem to cross the Delaware and win his Christmas Surprise. Howe never dared pursue closely.)

Anyway, long enough: it was always considered the right of free Englishmen (which is what the Continental Congress was fighting for in the Revolution) to have a trial by a jury of one's peers, and that jury was entitled to render a general verdict.

We seem to be losing that, along with private ownership of military weapons. Perhaps it is as well: I am not at all sure I want the people down the street, the ones with the rowdy teenagers, to have a closet full of cluster bombs and Stinger missiles. But I do think the way to amend the Constitution is spelled out in the document, and allowing the courts to do it is a transfer of power I am not prepared to approve.

"Nullification" was never an announced doctrine, and "unwritten law" comes closer to defining the practice.

This blockquote is from one item on Jerry Pournelle's website regarding Jury Nullificaiton".

The DMCA is a law passed by Norman barons.

For a more cogent history of jury nullification see here. Or simply enter "jury nullificaiton" into your favorite search engine.

I think, therefore, ken_i_m

I've been working on a directory services management system for over four years now. It works on Linux, BSD, Solaris, AIX, HP/UX.. a fellow here has even got the server running on OS/2. The system's GUI client works on all of the above plus Macintosh and all flavors of Win32.

It's called Ganymede, and it is a metadirectory system, which is to say that it is an object database with a sophisticated permissions system that accepts changes and turns around and updates NIS, DNS, Samba, our NT PDC, our routers, Sendmail, etc.

Ganymede is designed to be a smart server, where the adopter can define their own network schema and write plug-ins that customize how various kinds of objects in the server behave and how they connect to each other. It's all written in Java, so it is quite robust and portable.

It's not designed to replace something like OpenLDAP or DNS or NIS, it's designed to provide sophisticated management for all of the above. At our lab, we have a dozen technical groups that have their own resources, but we share directory services, and Ganymede is what manages the whole show.

It has been a few months since I've made a release of Ganymede, but development hasn't stopped, by any means. Lots of performance and stability improvements on the server have been achieved, and this week I'm writing a Ganymede client that can take XML from external sources (Perl generated, etc.) and load that data into Ganymede. I expect a 1.0pre1 release will come out by the end of the month.

While this notion of 'real software' strikes me as flamebait, I'll go ahead and bite.

I recently came accross JEdit. Its a pretty cool Java text editor.

You might want to try Ganymede, which is an extensible directory management system written in Java. Oh, and it's a database too.

You can also look at java.sun.com for a bunch of stories about web sites that use Java on the back end.

The java compiler is written in java.

Mike

Certainly sounds reasonable. I've found Omnipoint to be good when you are in coverage range. I'm near the Philadelphia, PA area in the US, and get good coverage out to the suburbs. I've was in Singapore once since joining Omnipoint, and rented an international capable handset directly from them for the trip. Very reasonable for 30 days or less, ~$40+insurance if you want it. You want to get them to set up the international roaming option about a month before you leave to avoid trouble, 'cuz I called them every couple days for two weeks prior to my trip trying to guarantee it would work when I got out of the country. And it still wasn't enabled until my second day there. But after that it was fine.

Rates are reasonable (personal opinion), but you'll pay less than $1.00 minute if you give them the $2-3/month international fee for picking a country to roam in. You could end up paying more than that from some hotel land lines, so I consider their rates reasonable. My voicemail notification worked also. And you can cancel the $2-3/month after you travel if you are an infrequent traveller.

I carried the Ericson i888, and it worked just like my normal Ericson, only it could roam on GSM 900. I flew through SFO, Tokyo/Narita (no coverage, no GSM) to Singapore and had coverage everywhere but Japan.

I'm purchasing a Motorola L7089 (L2000 Asian) because it does tri-band, whereas the Ericson is only dual band. Both phones have infrared data capability, which I plan on trying out once I get the Motorola.

And the Sony Viao looks like a good choice. I just picked one up, and a SuSE Linux install went fairly well, although the Viao's (Z505RX) floppy/cdrom standard equipment make it a little tough to install on. Check out Linux Laptops for great help on setup and which laptops have been tested.

I also found good deals on the Viao's at Ubid and Ebay.

Also, I have a solid knowledge of HTML and UNIX, and through a part-time job at the University, I am quickly learning (some) Perl, PHP, and SQL (check my first example Here. It's still a work in progress obviously...). I am not a trained programmer, although programming in some form is becoming more and more intriguing now that I have figured out the basic concepts (I need to mind all my ";" and "\n" and "{}", etc.)...

The small question is this: would I make an acceptable candidate? Would completing this program create a significant enough benefit for me vis-a-vis the very monastic time investment it requires?

Also, you give example URLs for useful websites built by students and colleages (ArfDigita.org, etc.) who have been trained similarly as the ArsDigita program... The majority of these sites are database-driven... Are there other examples? Are PHP/SQL websites the only useful result of a CS education? Do I really need a CS education to make database websites?

Better yet, here's a picture of the ground track:

http://www.utexas.ed u/depts/grg/gcraft/notes/gps/gif/svs27.gif

Biological computing has the potential to revolutionize the way we do things. Using DNA, computers can be *grown* rather than manufactured. They would no longer require power, but rather nutrients. They could accomplish computations in a one-step process that takes billions of CPU cycles. I think its certainly an interesting field to watch. However, DNA is not just being used at the hardware level. There is a growing field of artificial intelligence research concentrating on neuro-evolution, using DNA to encode neurons of a neural network, selecting the best-performing set of neurons, and recombining the DNA in a form of 'breeding' to hopefully get better neurons. Check http://www.cs. utexas.edu/users/nn/pages/research/neuroevolution. html for some interesting links. Look for the section on Eugenic Evolution.

The Computer Museum's Computer History Timeline has a lot more detail.

Of course, for Internet history, there's Hobbes' Internet Timeline, and of course Charles Spurgeon's Ethernet Web Site (not focused on the Internet, but a major bit of networking history).

I have a list of links to projects related to distributed networks. I will be adding links to distributed network hardware, but right now it's mostly just software projects. As one of the Freenet developers, I've heard about just about project out there.

What's a gopher site?

An indication, how old this joke really is. It looks like The Original Gopher Server is dead, but it's still in use in some places -- like here.

Lego My Eggo!
----
Don't underestimate the power of peanut brittle

In response to the question to Jeremy about work on making Samba authenticate against a network database, I'd like to put in a plug for Ganymede, the GPL'ed metadirectory we've been working on for the last four years.

With Ganymede, all network directory information is held in the Ganymede server's object database. When anyone creates a new user account or changes a password, or whatever, Ganymede writes out the appropriate data into the appropriate network directory services.

Here at ARL, when an admin creates a new user, that user's vital information gets set up in NIS, tacacs, Samba, and on a real live NT PDC via rsh and a Win32 Perl script.

Ganymede is extremely customizable and expandable, and includes password logic designed explicitly to support an NT PDC and Samba server as best as can be done, given the difference in password formats, and the difficulty in keeping things synced without keeping plaintext passwords around on disk.

We're working on preparing a 1.0pre1 release which will change a lot of things in the Ganymede system, including support for XML data import/export, but people interested can take a look right now at http://www.arlut.utexas.edu/gash2.

When Stephenson began working on Snow Crash, he intended it to be a video game (super-interactive novel). Unfortunately, we're only getting to the point where that would be a plausibility. Or is that fortunately? If Ion Storm can succeed at Deus Ex, someone can succeed at Snow Crash...though Juanita's avatar tech is still a ways away (see Pixar's advances in this realm!)

Speaking of Pixar, it's always easier to fake tech in a movie; you get to pre-render everything. Snow Crash would make a great movie without too much trouble, because of its many high-octane visual elements. Also: the political/social satire that runs rampant is surprisingly easy to do visually: just show the Uncle Nunzio Pizza billboard and you're done.

Of course the movie would be radically different from the book, but it wouldn't be an insane adaptation like LotR--you just cut out the boring stuff, and you've got a whole bunch of cool action sequences. Stephenson's namshub mumbo-jumbo barely makes sense anyway (though it _nearly_ fits together quite neatly); the book could do with the bit of narrative tightening a movie would provide.

Snow Crash is hobbled by the importance of Juanita to the outcome of the book, and her near-complete absence from the book. A rewrite that dealt with the narrative problems caused by her would be welcome. My suspicion is the whole rewrite issue is what's killing this project: the book, while amazingly cool and smart and readable and one of my all-time favorite books, is seriously flawed by its tenuously connected plot threads.

Visually, the movie would be great in so many ways: the avatar world could be done anime-style, the Sumerian backstory (if it even entered) could be covered in a killer animation sequence like that from Todd McFarlane's Do the Evolution video, etc.

Stephenson deliberately drew on pop-culture ideas and imagery for the book, and took a lot from movies. Snow Crash could make a very good movie.

It probably would make a better computer game, but I'm not convinced we really have the tech for it.

Here's my mirror.
And another.

really? i find your professor's statement hard to believe. my understanding of the way that people teach computer science at major universities (i attend one of the 5 largest universities in the US, and am enrolled in their top-10 CS program) and certainly my direct experience is that you are taught theory: how to program, how to reason, and how to problem solve in different domains. certainly, there are the low-credit "c++" or "lisp" classes where all you are learning is a language, and the professor can (but hasn't, in my direct experience) specify a compiler/IDE for you to use---but mostly one is asked to submit code that complies to the relevant standards so that any compiler can compile them, and that has certainly always included unix compilers. in fact, the only class in which i was required to stray from unix compilers (from "pc" to "gcc/g++" to "clisp") was the assembly languange & computer architecture class, in which we were forced to use an assembler that only barely ran under the Mac emulator executor and forced me to hit the lab to use an actual Mac.

i hate to call your professor wrong without meeting the guy, but CS is more about how to think than how to implement a solution, and there is no good reason to be platform-specific during the learning process. (there are several bad reasons: TA/professor laziness, microsoft has subsidized all of your labs on campus and there are only windows machines available for development, etc)

of course, i could be misreading your post, and you could mean "Windows type development models" to be something completely different than "development required to be under a Windows OS"...if so i hope you'll correct me =)

really? i find your professor's statement hard to believe. my understanding of the way that people teach computer science at major universities (i attend one of the 5 largest universities in the US, and am enrolled in their top-10 CS program) and certainly my direct experience is that you are taught theory: how to program, how to reason, and how to problem solve in different domains. certainly, there are the low-credit "c++" or "lisp" classes where all you are learning is a language, and the professor can (but hasn't, in my direct experience) specify a compiler/IDE for you to use---but mostly one is asked to submit code that complies to the relevant standards so that any compiler can compile them, and that has certainly always included unix compilers. in fact, the only class in which i was required to stray from unix compilers (from "pc" to "gcc/g++" to "clisp") was the assembly languange & computer architecture class, in which we were forced to use an assembler that only barely ran under the Mac emulator executor and forced me to hit the lab to use an actual Mac.

i hate to call your professor wrong without meeting the guy, but CS is more about how to think than how to implement a solution, and there is no good reason to be platform-specific during the learning process. (there are several bad reasons: TA/professor laziness, microsoft has subsidized all of your labs on campus and there are only windows machines available for development, etc)

of course, i could be misreading your post, and you could mean "Windows type development models" to be something completely different than "development required to be under a Windows OS"...if so i hope you'll correct me =)

and of course, there are all these helpful /. people around... everyone I emailed about my thinkpad was very helpful (thank you, if you're reading this). nice thing about the Linux community -- there is a Linux community, and people are really nice about helping.

Lea