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I'm on the University of Virginia team, and we're one of two teams to qualify representing the US for the simulation league (which doesn't use real robots, and is thus a lot more fast paced). The other team being AT&T Research Labs.

We're actually in the process of looking for sponsors so that we can get to go to Japan for the competition.....

Maybe we can get a six degrees of [RIAA|MPAA|CBDTPA|DMCA] game going ala the oracle of bacon so we all know who exactly stands for what and where.

Yes, I would have taken him more seriously.

If you can't get your English right, what else are you too careless to get right? Edsger Dijkstra said, among other things: ``Besides a mathematical inclination, an exceptionally good mastery of one's native tongue is the most vital asset of a competent programmer.'' I think that this includes the habit of using it correctly.

What language was it? If it were some simple instruction set, i.e. RISC or something simpler, it would not be surprising if half the class came up with the same code

Then again, with x86 generations, you have to wonder, although the incident still seems absurd

if it's lewdly pornographic it should be banned.

From the song Smut , by Tom Lehrer

When correctly viewed, everything is lewd;
I could tell you things about Peter Pan, or the Wizard of Oz,
there's a dirty old man!

Sig: What Happened To The Censorware Project (censorware.org)

Plenty of Newtons but no Kepler.
Perhaps you meant to say; plenty of Keplers, but no Tycho Brahe.
You can find many sources for this info, I just did a quick google search to find this:
Brahe compiled extensive data on the planet Mars, which would later prove crucial to Kepler in his formulation of the laws of planetary motion because it would be sufficiently precise to demonstrate that the orbit of Mars was not a circle but an ellipse.
Brahe and Kepler Observations of Tycho Brahe

So, is the 80GB/s aggregate access for the (n) processors in the box? It's a Solid State Disk -- In other words, it's memory. And, it's not _that_ fast for a shared memory architecture system. see: STREAM Memory benchmarks

In late 1994 I wrote a prophecy about Canter and Siegel as pioneers, and everything Canter said in that interview confirms its accuracy.

This is a little surprising that it got posted and all because it's not all that earth shatterning news, but I'll provides some additional information about grids in General.

There are a wide variety of systems like this that are either currently available or are being developed. Among them are Particle Physics Data Grid, NEESGrid and various European and Asian counterparts.

The basic premise is to allow access to various resources you don't have at your desktop. This is not to be confused to with putting all these computers together an forking a process a billion times and having it run it run all over the globe. It's more like saying I have a process that requires 128 processors and 4GB of ram, go find it an run it for me.

Most of the systems use Globus which is pretty much the defacto standard. There are other systems out there such as Legion and Condor which serve slightly different purposes.

I've also seen some issues about security raised, so I'll mention them quickly. Globus is built upon an API called GSS (Generic Security System), I believe it will soon (if not already) have an RFC published. This is a layer on top of various other security systems that may be local to the server running it. It can use Kerberos or PKI to do encryption across the network (don't flame me if it's wrong, I'm not security expert).

When I wish to start using the grid, I start up my proxy that takes care of all authentication for me. Then my proxy connects to the gatekeeper on the remote machine which authenticates me based on my private key and then authorizes me via a mapping (usually just a text file). The task is then executed by the gatekeeper via the mapping on the remote machine. Input and output can be redirected over a secure layer if you so desire.

My certificate is issued by an authority. In this case the Globus CA. The nice thing if that if you want to set up a grid of your own computers, you can get a cert from them too. Install Globus and it will tell you how.

Certificates also allow you to get access to data. This allows me as a user A to run program B at site C providing results to user D at site E for a period of time F.

It's all terribly neat and remarkably easy to install on your favorite Linux or Solaris box. It's also fairly easy to write programs to utilize the Grid thanks to the various CogKits for Python, Java and Perl.

Qt's non commercial edition works on Windows.

Qt's non commercial edition does not work on Mac OS X.

Besides, QT 2.3 non-commercial for Windows works only with Microsoft Visual C++ 6.0, whose MSRP is $550. That's six months' wages for some people I know. It does not work with popular Win32 compilers MinGW (free software based on GCC) or LCC (free as in beer).

I have addressed only the limitations of the current Qt distributions. To answer trolls who may try to poke holes in my argument as it applies to OpenOffice.org: Yes, I already know that the current build processes for OpenOffice.org and Mozilla also require MSVC. Yes, I already know that cheaper versions of MSVC exist, but MSVC Professional is the cheapest available version that performs even minimal optimization. The cheaper versions of MSVC don't optimize the code at all; some don't even permit redistribution of binaries compiled with the software.

Lcc32 - a free win32 Compiler and IDE. The source for lcc (which lcc32 is based on) is also available, and it's a neat little cross-compiler (even if the authors are now MS employees)

I think the movie succeeded in doing what the book was meant to do - it sparks the imagination! What IS the world going to be like in 800,000 years? I can't even imagine the changes that will come in the next 50! ... Let's put aside our petty concerns for a minute and remember what an important time this is to the evolution of technology.

As regards technological evolution, I note that in Wells' original, it was the Morlock's love of machines and enslavement to the idea of "mechanical progress" that led them at last to cannibalism and moral degeneracy.

The film fails, as the Pal version did in the 1960s, by dropping the key theme of Well's book: the time traveller discovers the end result of class warfare. The proles won by letting the rich think they'd won because they enjoy a life of luxury, but instead they are just cattle being fattened.

Wells was a Fabian Socialist with a huge sense of irony and these influences informed all his work. But socialism and irony is apparently too dangerous for Hollywood. Instead, Pal's film changed it into a metaphor about nuclear warfare and survivalism, and Wells Jr changes it into a metaphor about the perils of leisure development. What a crock.

The Time Machine is here. The end-of-the-earth chapter, which seems to give Katz the willies, is a perfect little End-Of-Colonialism piece, very typical of the time. Hodgson's House on the Borderland , Night Land , and Stapledon's Last and First Men are more of the same, but with their own charms.

`I grieved to think how brief the dream of the human intellect had been. It had committed suicide. It had set itself steadfastly towards comfort and ease, a balanced society with security and permanency as its watchword, it had attained its hopes -- to come to this at last. Once, life and property must have reached almost absolute safety. The rich had been assured of his wealth and comfort, the toiler assured of his life and work. No doubt in that perfect world there had been no unemployed problem, no social question left unsolved. And a great quiet had followed.

`It is a law of nature we overlook, that intellectual versatility is the compensation for change, danger, and trouble. An animal perfectly in harmony with its environment is a perfect mechanism. Nature never appeals to intelligence until habit and instinct are useless. There is no intelligence where there is no change and no need of change. Only those animals partake of intelligence that have to meet a huge variety of needs and dangers.

`So, as I see it, the Upper-world man had drifted towards his feeble prettiness, and the Under-world to mere mechanical industry. But that perfect state had lacked one thing even for mechanical perfection -- absolute permanency. Apparently as time went on, the feeding of the Under-world, however it was effected, had become disjointed. Mother Necessity, who had been staved off for a few thousand years, came back again, and she began below. The Under-world being in contact with machinery, which, however perfect, still needs some little thought outside habit, had probably retained perforce rather more initiative, if less of every other human character, than the Upper. And when other meat failed them, they turned to what old habit had hitherto forbidden.

I think the movie succeeded in doing what the book was meant to do - it sparks the imagination! What IS the world going to be like in 800,000 years? I can't even imagine the changes that will come in the next 50! ... Let's put aside our petty concerns for a minute and remember what an important time this is to the evolution of technology.

As regards technological evolution, I note that in Wells' original, it was the Morlock's love of machines and enslavement to the idea of "mechanical progress" that led them at last to cannibalism and moral degeneracy.

The film fails, as the Pal version did in the 1960s, by dropping the key theme of Well's book: the time traveller discovers the end result of class warfare. The proles won by letting the rich think they'd won because they enjoy a life of luxury, but instead they are just cattle being fattened.

Wells was a Fabian Socialist with a huge sense of irony and these influences informed all his work. But socialism and irony is apparently too dangerous for Hollywood. Instead, Pal's film changed it into a metaphor about nuclear warfare and survivalism, and Wells Jr changes it into a metaphor about the perils of leisure development. What a crock.

The Time Machine is here. The end-of-the-earth chapter, which seems to give Katz the willies, is a perfect little End-Of-Colonialism piece, very typical of the time. Hodgson's House on the Borderland , Night Land , and Stapledon's Last and First Men are more of the same, but with their own charms.

`I grieved to think how brief the dream of the human intellect had been. It had committed suicide. It had set itself steadfastly towards comfort and ease, a balanced society with security and permanency as its watchword, it had attained its hopes -- to come to this at last. Once, life and property must have reached almost absolute safety. The rich had been assured of his wealth and comfort, the toiler assured of his life and work. No doubt in that perfect world there had been no unemployed problem, no social question left unsolved. And a great quiet had followed.

`It is a law of nature we overlook, that intellectual versatility is the compensation for change, danger, and trouble. An animal perfectly in harmony with its environment is a perfect mechanism. Nature never appeals to intelligence until habit and instinct are useless. There is no intelligence where there is no change and no need of change. Only those animals partake of intelligence that have to meet a huge variety of needs and dangers.

`So, as I see it, the Upper-world man had drifted towards his feeble prettiness, and the Under-world to mere mechanical industry. But that perfect state had lacked one thing even for mechanical perfection -- absolute permanency. Apparently as time went on, the feeding of the Under-world, however it was effected, had become disjointed. Mother Necessity, who had been staved off for a few thousand years, came back again, and she began below. The Under-world being in contact with machinery, which, however perfect, still needs some little thought outside habit, had probably retained perforce rather more initiative, if less of every other human character, than the Upper. And when other meat failed them, they turned to what old habit had hitherto forbidden.

Here are the top 1000. Number 1 is Christopher Lee (Saruman in FotR), probably largely because he's been in 228 films.

In addition to the other replies, here's the link to the Oracle of Bacon that lets you find out the degree of separation between Kevin and any other person who is featured at IMDB.

There is also a generic search that lets you combine any actor with any other actor. Unfortunately I have forgotten who the best-connected actor was (average to all other actors is smallest). Anyone?

In addition to the other replies, here's the link to the Oracle of Bacon that lets you find out the degree of separation between Kevin and any other person who is featured at IMDB.

There is also a generic search that lets you combine any actor with any other actor. Unfortunately I have forgotten who the best-connected actor was (average to all other actors is smallest). Anyone?

I think you mean the Oracle of Bacon.

Interestingly, however, much of this stuff can be achieved with LCLint, which if I recall correctly has a mechanism which can be used to extend it to statically check almost anything. Now that sounds like a good idea (tip: if running lclint for the first time on a program, use the -weak command-line option!)

The Oracle of Bacon - Find any given actor's degree of seperation from Kevin Bacon. Ties in to the imdb database.

The Center of the Hollywood Universe - Lists the 1000 best connected in hollywood.

Now, it turns out, Christopher Lee (average number 2.599102) has passed Rod Steiger (average number 2.603871).

The Oracle of Bacon - Find any given actor's degree of seperation from Kevin Bacon. Ties in to the imdb database.

The Center of the Hollywood Universe - Lists the 1000 best connected in hollywood.

Now, it turns out, Christopher Lee (average number 2.599102) has passed Rod Steiger (average number 2.603871).

Not to nitpick, but the "Center of the Hollywood Univerise" is actually Christopher Lee. Rod Steiger is second. Kevin Bacon rates #913.

The Oracle of Bacon at Virgina is a great resource for this stuff.

Here's a translation:
Marvel Comic book characters are modelled after real world social interactions. Such as Person A has Friend B who has a Friend C, at a 3rd degree of seperation. Person A is more likely to know Friend C, because of social clustering.

All it is doing is showing a web of each characters connections and affiliations, similar to a six-degrees setup. Like Kevin Bacon.

This is nothing new.
Check out Legion:

http://www.cs.virginia.edu/~legion/

The Travelers and the Plane-Tree

TWO TRAVELERS, worn out by the heat of the summer's sun, laid themselves down at noon under the widespreading branches of a Plane-Tree. As they rested under its shade, one of the Travelers said to the other, "What a singularly useless tree is the Plane! It bears no fruit, and is not of the least service to man." The Plane-Tree, interrupting him, said, "You ungrateful fellows! Do you, while receiving benefits from me and resting under my shade, dare to describe me as useless, and unprofitable?'

Moral: Some men underrate their best blessings.

Or alternatively in other Aesop's texts, the moral is: Ingratitude is often blind.

Thanks to

I am so sick and tired of seeing a thought-provoking (yes i said thought-provoking, that doesn't mean "I love everything Katz says" it means "He makes me think about something") Katz post and then reading some of the moronic Katz bashing that goes on under the post. Do you understand the fable? Katz is creating a forum for comments on concepts we are all interested in. Be grateful for the forum, don't attack the forum! Whodathunkit!

If you don't like Katz's idea be intellectually honest and attack the idea not Katz. Get it? What, do you think you sound clever? You sound like a f***ing insecure moron.

And if you are excessively negative in your comments irregardless of your foil, maybe that says something more about you than the post. Or better yet, if you have nothing positive to say, go away... don't post comments... don't visit Slashdot. I fear for your friends and lovers, because you're such a negative creep.

It is, btw, possible to disagree entirely with a Katz post and respond positively to it by stating what you think instead on the subject without being a totally negative crank. What a concept! Can you imagine such an idea! Apparently... some of you can't! ;-P

I am so sick of the Katz bashing! Grow the f*** up!

This is two days in a row now that Slashdot has posted articles on the great new idea of distributed operating systems that CS theorists solved and have largely ignored for the last ten years. Besides Amoeba, there was the Connection Machine, VMS clusters, and others.

...none of which were designed to tolerate the high latencies and frequent failures that a truly Internet-scale OS would face. Legion and similar projects are much nearer the mark, but this is still nowhere near being the sort of "solved problem" you claim it is.

I thought everybody knew Vannevar Bush invented the concept of hypertext & hyperlinks with the introduction of Memex in 1945. Read the full article here. Maybe someone should mention this to BT before they waste a lot of time with this nonsense?

The Oracle of Bacon uses the IMDb data to link any two stars that show up in the IMDb database. However, the freely available ImDb databases that it uses are only ~150 Mb, so this concept may not scale very well.

The Oracle of Bacon uses the IMDb data to link any two stars that show up in the IMDb database. However, the freely available ImDb databases that it uses are only ~150 Mb, so this concept may not scale very well.

Well, we actually have a pretty good idea which are the closest ones within a few hundred light years (barring the really dim red dwarfs and whatnot, of which there are probably plenty). The Hipparcos mission, flown by the European Space Agency did an all-sky survey of the distances to over 100000 stars by measuring the "wobble" of these stars relative to the backround as the Earth moves around the sun (called parallax).

An even more exciting mission is coming up in the next decade or so called the GAIA mission which will get accurate measurements for the distances of over one billion stars (about 1% of the entire galaxy!)

I dunno about GDB, but you can do this on command with the "abort" call and the "undump" command. While in your program, call abort(). Run undump on the core file to get an executable. When you run the executable it starts exactly where it left off at the abort().

details here

Woops, after reading that it sounds like it starts off at the top of main() again. But, if you had a flag to indicate where you'd aborted from, you could jump to that immediately and resume operations.

It's a cool little trick; unfortunately I've not yet gotten to use it for anything :)

Without extraordinary good proof, the three laws of
thermodynamics are accepted as the truth in the science community.

See how some graduate students extend its possible use
to the heaven and hell. ;-)

I'm not surprised, since systems such as this are already widely used for detecting plagiarized essays.

I was personally thinking a cyclotron would be better. They don't have to be 1 mile in diameter, they just use that for really energetic stuff. To produce antimatter AFIAK you only need a cyclotron around 50 metres in diameter.

The thing about a cyclotron is that it's a solid device (magnets, vacuum chamber, etc) so one that's "only" 50 metres in diameter would still be a helluva lot of material to haul around. TRIUMF's magnet is 18m in diameter, and it's the world's largest.

You also have to specify what type of antimatter you want to create. TRIUMF has a beam energy of about 500 MeV, so it cannot create antiprotons (which have a mass of 938 MeV, but which according to this page need 6 times that much energy to satisfy the necessary conservation laws when creating them). However TRIUMF has no problem creating positive muons or positrons (which still qualify as "antimatter").

A local company, Ebco Technologies, sells small cyclotrons for the production of medical PET radioisotopes. These aren't quite backpack sized, but they would easily fit into an apartment (provided the floor was strong enough and you had 80kW of electrical power available).

Yeah, Techno fetishists everywhere are already creaming their pants over the demonstration of the new "doctrine" of remote warfare displayed by the US in the Afghan War.

It's certainly good for initial deployment and aerial interdiction and control, but remains untested for endgame positional tactics using soft assets.

But this development is nothing that Our Prophet Philip Dick did not foresee in such stories as Second Variety .

It reminds me of how Twain saw the devastating and immobilizing affect on warfare of machine guns and trench technology in the closing chapters of his 1889 A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court .

Or HG Wells foreseeing aerial warfare and the bombardment of cities and civilian populations in The War in the Air .

But because war is politics by any means necessary, when one approach is blocked the street will find a way to express itself through another. If politicized groups and countries cannot hope to use conventional warfare, then they will move on to more promising avenues and asymmetrical opportunities. Things more horribly inventive than destroying buildings with sharp knives and opportunity.

And as so many here have pointed out, most of this is self-serving propgaanda. 30% of munitions dropped still fail to explode. And this article points out, the Rout of the Taliban was largely a social victory. Factions on the ground saw which way the wind was blowing, shaved their beards, and changed sides.

But most of the same local bosses are still running things... why else do you think so many high-profile "Taliban" are being let go. Why is it proving so difficult to arrest Omar, a practically dead, half-blind guy doing a Steve McQueen on a motorbike?



Meanwhile, Blair ran a victory lap in Kabul. Right.

Remember, the Russians also "took" Afghanistan with virtually no resistance within a few months. But their mistake was to stay longer, and eventually the factions started uniting against them. That KC-130 that crashed, they are flying bricks. One hasn't crashed in error since the start of the 1970s. Odds are it was brought down by a shoulder-launched SAM at extremely close range.

And now the Marines are exiting and being replaced by the 101st, who'll be digging fortifying those bases that annoy the Russians so much. They are there for the long haul? I hope they have better luck than Reagan's Marines in Lebanon.

And why are Katz's articles so goddamn difficult to read? Does he go through a rewrite phase where he trys to find longer latinate words whenever possible, replacing anything short and punchy with polysyllabic monstrosities? A dose of Strunk and Whyte would go a long way there.

I find that sleeping for 10 hours and then staying awake for 20 hours works best for me. The problem is trying to get everyone else to work around my schedule! I've read that without light cues, people's circadian rhythms change by varying degrees. From the link above:

Experimenters have found that subjects under isolated conditions slept sometimes for 19 hours at a time, seemingly unaware of the time that had elapsed. Similarly, subjects sometimes stayed awake for as long as 30 hours, underestimating the length of their days. These outwardly bizarre sleep-wake cycles went unnoticed by subjects and had no adverse effects.

Kind of makes you wonder if our planet has always been spinning this fast, doesn't it?

Coleridge or Maiden?

Up the irons!

Well, I wouldn't go with a USB solution, since the bus can't handle the bandwidth needed for 24 bit/96 khz recording. I would definitely recommend the MOTU 896 (markoftheunicorn.com) which has a firewire interface and works great with both PC and Mac desktops/laptops. We use it in the VCCM as well as our Portable Audio Workstation (PAWN) (click on the research link) which is a lunchbox-type solution running Linux.

Secondarily, if Christ wanted us to celebrate his birthday, *why* isn't it mentioned at ALL in the New Testament?

The well-known words from Luke, chapter 2 seem to indicate some celebration was called for:

And there were in the same country shepherds abiding in the field, keeping watch over their flock by night.

And, lo, the angel of the Lord came upon them, and the glory of the Lord shone round about them: and they were sore afraid.

And the angel said unto them, Fear not: for, behold, I bring you good tidings of great joy, which shall be to all people.

For unto you is born this day in the city of David a Saviour, which is Christ the Lord.

And this shall be a sign unto you; Ye shall find the babe wrapped in swaddling clothes, lying in a manger.

And suddenly there was with the angel a multitude of the heavenly host praising God, and saying,

Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace, good will toward men.

Not to toot my own horn, but here's a nice(in my opinion) extragalactic picture. I'm an undergrad and my lab group and I took these this past semester. The two images are of the same galaxy, just different contrast settings to hilight different features. If it weren't for the odd shape, they'd be good desktop pics. NGC 660

As others have already pointed out, Itanium does fairly badly on SpecINT and moderatly well (though not spectacularly) on SpecFP, but there are other benchmarks to consider: Stream and TPC are the two that leap to mind, but I am sure that there are some others that measure more than just raw CPU performance. (you won't be running any of your code on a bare CPU anyway, so you should consider some measures of full system performance) I don't see any numbers for Itanium on the Stream or TPC web sites, but maybe I missed something.

OK, so I go to UIUC and haven't heard of this. I'm only a freshman and not even in CS, so that seems probable. But get this - a road right next to my grandmother's house in good old, technologically backwards Inverness, Florida carries the exact same amazingly-lacking-in-common-vowels name on one of its roads. This is not even a normal road either. It's a road that goes for about five feet and then vanishes into a banal brown path. Now, I've got a fairly extensive vocabulary, but this word is utterly foreign to me. How could it possibly link the meager stretch of road in Inverness to an immersive virtual reality visualization system? Clearly a Google search was the first step in my investigation. I found that these are not the only products to carry this eclectic word as their name. We've got Syzygy.net, a european firm specializing in the creation of e-businesses, a page documenting religious cults, a hardcore eclectic videogame magazine, and, my first solid lead, a company selling astronomical simulators. The last seemed to be the only lead worth following, and a dictionary.com search ended my confusion. Apparently, Syzygy is the key point in an ecclipse when the sun, moon, and earth lie in a straight line. For what it's worth, you can also have multiple Syzygies, but that word is not nearly as fun what with its normal vowels. My quest is now complete. Alas, now I'm at a loss as to what I can do to forstall finding employ over winter break. Ideas are welcome.

According to Dr. Jeff Bradstreet a little-mentioned fact is that Over 90% of autistics are blood type A. If true, that would be better than twice the expected frequency for American "whites" and so close to 100% that the probability of it being due to chance is disappearingly small.

Also, the processor time and memory is roughly proportional to key length

In other words, the time to decrypt a message with an n-bit key is O(n). The time to bruteforce a message (decrypt a message with all n-bit keys) is thus O(n*2^n) which is still O(2^n) at high values of n. So you still lose a bit of key length to Moore's law of transistor density every 18 months.

So if you double the capabilities of your computer then you can double the key length without taking a performance hit.

But then you and everybody you communicate with would have to make new keys. And even then, you often can't use more than 128-bit keys across national borders.

Well computers probably got fast enough in the last 80s, but encryption-for-everybody still hasn't really taken off. I guess social factors are harder to model than CPU speeds!

Another problem is that PGP/GnuPG "web of trust" model requires you to know somebody face-to-face who is already part of the web of trust so that you can validate her key and gain access to the rest of the keys. In fact, there must be a path in the graph of PGP users that leads to Phil Zimmermann or to Richard M. Stallman (see also Oracle of Bacon).

The Silicon Valley article is a bit misleading, and doesn't accurately reflect the range of distribution alternatives being used for Bioinformatics software. It is certainly true that many Universities claim ownership of computer software copyrights, but it is important to appreciate that there many levels at which the implementation of these policies is decided. For example, both the WU-BLAST and the HMMer packages were developed by researchers at Washington U. in St. Louis. WU-BLASTbinaries are available to academics after an appropriate license is signed, and licensed commercially. HMMer i is available under the GPL but a commercial license is also available.

Likewise, the FASTA package, can be freely downloaded by both academic and commerical users, but must be licensed from the U. of Virginia to be redistributed. This has allowed the software to be widely used by researchers and also incorporated into commerical packages.

As a Bioinformatics researcher and software author, my goal is to have my research and software be used as widely as possible. This improves my ability to obtain future external funding, to get my papers cited, etc. etc. Even at universities like Wisconsin and Stanford, which derive enormous sums from IP licensing, these funds are less than 10% the value of NIH and other external funding. Thus, it is not hard to argue that software licensing policies should maximize the likelihood of external funding, and the widest possible distribution (though not necessarily GPL) is likely to have the greatest impact and long term benefit. (Moreover, once software becomes widely used, it is much more valuable commercially.)

Thus, while a university's Vice-President for Research may be interest in IP licensing, a Dept. Chairman may be more interested in faculty success in obtaining external funding, and a broader software distribution.

The patent was granted in 1989 but applied for over 10 years earlier. The patent application seems to have been amended after initial filing so I'm not sure which of the dates listed really counts, but if you're looking for prior art then you need something further back (unless Xanadu was mostly formed by 1974).

Of course, filing a patent and then amending it to death is the great Lemelson patent-process-exploitation trick. There was an article in Fortune magazine about it.

The book "Dream Machines" is a little fuzzy about what-was-written-when... The style of the book is a little disjointed (and it has been heavily revised) but that's not surprising, considering the author (Ted Nelson) coined the word "hypertext" in 1965.

This link: Ted Nelson and Xanadu seems to imply that Ted had fleshed out most of the Xanadu system by 1974. The page talks about "xanalogical storage" (basically hyperlinking), unique-IDs for pages, and the "docuverse," a cool word we don't use often enough.

For all the anal-retentive geek international standards enforcers out there, a link to something I wrote way back when complaining that "MST3K" is not a legal SI abbreviation.

A lot of the static checking made possible by Cyclone can be done for ordinary C with lclint, which lets you add annotations to C source code to express things like 'this pointer may not be null', 'this is the only pointer to the object' and so on. You write these assertions as special comments, for example /*@notnull@*/. These are checked by lclint but (of course) ignored by a C compiler so you compile as normal. (If you weaken the checking done, lclint can also act as a traditional 'lint' program.)

Also C++ provides a lot of the Cyclone features, not all of them, but it certainly has a stronger type system than C. I'd like to see something which combines all three: an lclint-type program that lets you annotate C++ code to provide the extra checks that Cyclone (and lclint) have over C++.

For a course at my college a few years ago, a group of us decided to build a digital picture frame. We wanted to build something similar to what you are describing. I hope my experience can help.

We built it from scratch -- no PC or handheld -- since we wanted it to be cheap, small, and portable. As the processor, we used a BasicX microcontroller. You program it in a language similar to BASIC -- very easy to pick up -- and it stores the code in EEPROM so that you can make changes at will. It also has a serial port (use a null-modem cable -- this is how you put the code on it) so you can use that for input/output when it is running independently to add/remove pictures, etc. The BasicX controller isn't the most stable thing in the world (nor the fastest) -- but it's great for quick + dirty development.

We used a cheap, nondescript, color 6" LCD, but had major problems trying to get it to sync correctly. The documentation was too scarce -- make sure you get lots of current docs on your LCD of choice. Perhaps the speed limitations of the BasicX controller had something to do with it (I think the minimum instruction execution time is around 1 us -- more for serial port accessing).

For storage, we tried to get a flash memory reader/writer, since the BasicX EEPROM was not sufficient. We wanted it to have lots of static memory that was also portable. (Perhaps not the greatest idea.) We couldn't find anything that was good for development purposes -- just end-user PC-compatible reader/writers. I recommend trying to find cheap, slow computer memory. This is possibly the most difficult part of the supplies -- finding static memory at a decent price.

Pricing was as follows:
BasicX Development Station: $140
Used, generic, unknown color LCD: $300
Flash memory reader/writer: $80
32MB Flash card: $50 (it was a few years ago)
Total: around $400

We also wanted to use a USB controller for reading/writing to memory -- bad idea. It cost us a lot of time and money.

Hope this helps,
Josh

"What's this?! It's a little boy's face! Oh, don't worry, little boy, I'll free you from this block of wood!"

"You know, Little Wooden Boy, the worst sin in the world is disloyalty. You wouldn't lie to me, would you, Little Wooden Boy?"

This guy likes him even more than me! *shudder*

Your theory does not explain how that many species can die that quickly. It was some event or events and then poof, no more dinosaurs and a number of other species (how many trilobites do you see today?) This isn't over the period of millenia, but on the order of 50 years. Being in "decline" doesn't really prove anything since they had been in decline twice before (and came back) and the evidence we have is based on what dinosaurs happened to keel overn a riverbed. Making the kind of assumptions you seem to be making defies he evidence as has been collected.

Added to the fact that nature is all about being lucky and being at the right time at the right place. Mutations occur at random and whether these mutations are passed down has everything to do with what the current conditions are and whether or not those mutations are helpful. Humans (especially humans of European desent) have cystic fibrosis because it was helpful for the conditions it first developed in, it doesn't make us more "fit" but it did help out under certian critera. Have you not studied random number theory. If there isn't random variation then the data that has been collected isn't correct. Nothing occurs right on the nose or exactly every time. There is always a probablity of an event occuring and a probablity of an event not occuring. Randomness and probablity implies luck. Any you're alive today based on a huge number of probablities playing out in your favor. So am I and so is everything else on the planet. Mammals did get lucky compared to the dinosaurs.