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Re:Pike? by stevarooski · 2000-06-03 04:18 · Score: 1 · on Thoughts On The Pike Programming Language?

Thanks! -S

http://students.washington.edu/steve0/
steve0@u.washington.edu

Pike? by stevarooski · 2000-06-03 03:30 · Score: 1 · on Thoughts On The Pike Programming Language?

Ok, moment of honesty: I've never heard of it. Could someone please post some information? Or some urls? Any alternative to perl (which I DO use a lot and appreciate, but. . .) would be most welcome.

-S

http://students.washington.edu/steve0/
steve0@u.washington.edu

Games are great! by stevarooski · 2000-06-02 14:58 · Score: 2 · on Descent 3 for Linux Announced

Descent 3! Nice!

You know what would be REALLY cool? Port some of the oldies! The original Descent, maybe Warcraft, the old Sierra games like Quest for Glory. I don't think the companies would mind--hell, more revenue for free never hurts, huh?

If I could properly waste my time in X as well as I do in windows, then screw Billy Gates! :o)

-S

http://students.washington.edu/steve0/
steve0@u.washington.edu

NASA needs to invent a better lichen. by jamesc · 2000-06-01 02:08 · Score: 1 · on NASA Prototype: Could It Make Mars Breathable?

But it isn't like Mars is too small to retain an O2 atmosphere, in fact, mars has a fair amount of N2 and CH4 in its atomosphere, both far lighter.

No, according to The Nine Planets mirror:

Mars has a very thin atmosphere composed mostly of the tiny amount of remaining carbon dioxide (95.3%) plus nitrogen (2.7%), argon (1.6%) and traces of oxygen (0.15%) and water (0.03%). The average pressure on the surface of Mars is only about 7 millibars (less than 1% of Earth's), but it varies greatly with altitude from almost 9 millibars in the deepest basins to about 1 millibar at the top of Olympus Mons. But it is thick enough to support very strong winds and vast dust storms that on occasion engulf the entire planet for months. Mars' thin atmosphere produces a greenhouse effect but it is only enough to raise the surface temperature by 5 degrees (K); much less than what we see on Venus and Earth.

So, no significant methane, which is a pity. The proposed Mars Direct fuel factories could use an easy source of hydrogen.

Also, I don't think that most forms of algae can survive in Mars' current environment, but some strains of lichen (symbiotic fungi and algae) have been tested in "Mars jars" and lived. Maybe with some genetic engineering the lichen could thrive and spread.

But, what happens to that 5 K greenhouse if too much CO2 is turned to O2? Can some other greenhouse gas be released to make up for it? To increase it?

Side thought: If the dirt on Mars contains lots of iron oxides (and some suspected super-oxides) why not make a solar powered refinery module that would turn that into iron and oxygen gas? (Yeah, I know: cost and weight, plus modules don't reproduce. We need to hack some chemosynthetic bacteria so they don't need to live in water....)
--

VIKING RESULTS: PLEASE READ by orpheus · 2000-05-31 23:24 · Score: 2 · on NASA Prototype: Could It Make Mars Breathable?

Crashing it is not the worst they can do. They can deliberately bury and misinterpret their own data.

I've never said this before, but please consider modding this up so it make it to 'hot links'. This thread is getting 'old', and few will see this information otherwise

I wish I'd seen this article before, because it seems that *everyone has forgotten the truth about the Viking I and II findings regarding the life on Mars experiments:

In short strokes: Most of the tests were positive as NASA fully admits (but sometimes buries) several researchers associated with the experiments have reported the horror at NASA when the results came in -- "We can't publish this! We'll look like fools." Please remember this was a billion dollar mission planned at a time (70's) when a billion dollars was a lot mpore money than it is today, andthat these experiments were widely peer-reviewed around the world, and considered solid until they yielded positive results

I wish I could provide you with links to why the individual results were disqualified, but the NASA website containing most of my old links is gone or merged. (It shouldn't take more than 10-15 of poking around to find new ones, but if I don't post this comment fast, it will die unseen.) However, here's what Jame s E. Tillman , who was
on the Viking Meteorology Science Team and was Director of the Viking Computer
Facility (at the University of Washington in Seattle) said at a national Prime
Computer Users Group meeting in Orlando FL, 1984:

"As to specific results, the consensus is that no evidence for life was
found even though the biology experiments reacted in a strongly
positive way. The reason for the reaction is that the Martian soils
contain compounds that liberate oxygen in the presence of water."

"The soils will liberate oxygen"? What is the justification for this assumption. None, except for post-facto guesswork. In fact, you'll find the specific chemistry cited to 'dismiss' the experiments is inconsitent with more moderns estimates of Martian soil composition and surface dynamics. Further each of the three positive experiments (deliberately designed to complement one another and prevent error) is dismissed for a very different reason.

Finally, I think that the 'atypical' kinetics that was used to discredit one experiment (positive results as a little water was added, but later tailing off) is *exactly* what we should have expected. Water may be a limiting factor for life on mars (or it may not) but after tens of millions of years, we should expect that microscopic life in a dry part of the surface would find water toxic in excess anounts. Hence - early rapid positive results, followed by a die off.

It is also possible that there are other limiting factors to growth, so the microbes reponded positively until they hit 'the wall' on another substance... like stored short term high energy compound (e.g. ATP in earth life) or even food (quick energy foods like sugars)

I urge you to go to NASA's websites and read for yourself. This is no great 'cover-up' the info is all there for you to consider. The 'embarrassing parts' are harder to find (broken links, disappearing archives, etc,) but they are not conscientiously buried.

A Pioneer is Lost by zpengo · 2000-05-31 17:34 · Score: 3 · on Donald Davies: End Transmission

This Internet timeline mentions Davies as early as 1967. So does This one. There are few people who could have claimed to have been around the Internet scene for as long as 37 years. Most people don't even realize that it goes back that far.

Re:Interesting by stevarooski · 2000-05-31 08:26 · Score: 1 · on Apogee(r) Bans Negative Reviews?

So, does this mean--from what I'm reading in the links and here--that Apogee, and every other studio, is basically granted free marketing by controlling reviews?

Doesn't free speech come in here somewhere? What happened to the first amendment? Just because its a trademark shouldn't mean crap.

'Course, its always possible I'm reading way to much into this, but it certainly is alarming!!

-S

http://students.washington.edu/steve0/
steve0@u.washington.edu

wow. . . by stevarooski · 2000-05-30 00:53 · Score: 2 · on Tiny PC: The Matchbox Web Server's Revenge

Does anyone know where a picture might be at? I couldn't find one on the page.

Thanks!

-S

http://students.washington.edu/steve0/
steve0@u.washington.edu

Fast than Light Via Quantum Tunneling by Alien54 · 2000-05-29 21:37 · Score: 2 · on Pushing Microwaves Faster Than Light

There have been experiments in transmission of data at trans light speeds starting a couple years back. These experiments involve quantum tunnelling and some startling results. A decent page with some links is here,and a good introduction is given here. a more technical discussion is given here.

for those not "up to speed' on this issue, here is a quick summarry:

A controversy is presently raging in certain physics journals and conferences over whether Einstein's speed of light barrier has been breached by light itself. In particular, Prof. Günther Nimtz and his group at the University of Cologne, Germany have published results showing that they used microwaves to transmit what might be interpreted as a signal, Mozart's 40th Symphony, over a path length of 11.4 centimeters at 4.7 times the speed of light.
The work of the Nimtz group raises the question of whether Einsteinian causality has in fact been violated and has spawned a controversy. The players in it, as is characteristic of careful scientists, have engaged in a careful tableau of discussion of various definitions of "velocity" and "causality" that skirt any claim of the fall of Einsteinian causality. One contingent has suggested that the FTL speed in the Nimtz experiment, like that of the Chiao group, might result from time-varying transmission probability in the barrier waveguide. The other argues that the filter advance of the Chiao group is peculiar to their filter type and does not apply to the Nimtz results.
What is meant by a signal has also been a matter of debate. For example, Mozart's 40th Symphony, while it is certainly a signal in some sense, does not contain modulation envelopes or switching edges that rise in 80 picoseconds and could thus place Einsteinian causality under stress by conspicuously arriving too early. Further, since any increase in barrier thickness brings with it a corresponding and exponentially increasing attenuation of any signal, it is not feasible to increase the barrier thickness to distances large enough that the causal implications of a constant barrier transit time become more apparent.

as a final note, there were those who also argued that Mozart's 40th Symphony was not information in the first place, and so relativity was not violated.

This brings a certain smile to the face, depending on you musical tastes.

Re:why no information? by rumba · 2000-05-29 21:05 · Score: 1 · on Pushing Microwaves Faster Than Light

"As most physicists interpret the experiment, it is a low-intensity precursor (sometimes called a tail, even when it comes first) of the incoming wave that clues the cesium chamber to the imminent arrival of a pulse."

Sounds like this supports Cramer's handshake transaction theory of Quantum Mechanics. "In the absorber theory description any emission process makes advanced waves on an equal basis with ordinary "retarded" waves." Check out his short and quite readable explanation of the theory here.
The site explains a lot of this quantum hoodoo in laymen's terms. It's all in your head anyways.

Heisenberg's Knowledge Interpretation- the notion that the wave function is neither a physical wave travelling through space nor a direct description of a physical system, but rather is a mathematically encoded description of the knowledge of an observer who is making a measurement on the system.
Spooky, eh?

That tilt. . . by stevarooski · 2000-05-29 07:32 · Score: 1 · on Compaq Itsy Usability movies

The tilt-scroll ability looks VERY cool, but at the same time wouldn't it be somewhat impractical? What kind of electrical component do they use to do that, and how expensive is it??

Another thing that astounds me is the voice command ability. WOW. And the video played on the machine looked extremely good--even with a video of the video it was completely clear and easy to make out.

So, whats keeping the Itsy off the shelves? I just sold my Psion, and am looking for a new PDA. . .these look amazing. Probably VERY VERY expensive to produce, though, 'cause of the sheer number of components such functionality would require.

-S

http://students.washington.edu/steve0/
steve0@u.washington.edu

Peace Corps doing the same thing by Anonymous Coward · 2000-05-26 23:29 · Score: 1 · on The Few, The Proud, The Geeks

The Peace Corps is doing the same thing. This is great news for people like me, who were told all they were qualified to do is teach mathematics. The url to a local article follows, maybe someone can find one with a national scope? Peace Corps director launches technology program

QBASIC by stevarooski · 2000-05-26 09:35 · Score: 1 · on Best Way to Get Kids Started in Programming?

I started out long ago with the mighty Quick Basic. From there, I went to C, then C++ and Java, and here I am today becoming a CS major. Eek. ;o)

When I started to program in 6th grade, I just wanted to make games. I didn't care how, just games. It was very easy to learn (I learned from the help files and AOL articles), and kept me interested!

Though it was undeniably cool in my mind, QBASIC has gone the way of the dinosaur now. Besides, some of these other posts are right: there are other languages like Python that would start them out programming in the object-oriented sense. But for a kid in 6th grade, it was perfect--and it'd run on any old machine! The only thing that might not interest kids about it--and what made me switch to C eventually--is that its hard to make the leap to decent (for the time :o) graphics. (Screen Mode 7 or 11 is the way to go!)

Anyhow, end of reminisce. My .02. :o)

-S

http://students.washington.edu/steve0/
steve0@u.washington.edu

Hmm. . . by stevarooski · 2000-05-21 10:17 · Score: 1 · on Jor-not-a Pocket PC?

I'm not surprised. The HP doesn't compare to the Casio offering and they know it. Still, 12-bit color is better than nothing, right?

I'd like a color Rex Pro with voice input. Or, thinking near term, a Psion series 5mx in color.

-S

http://students.washington.edu/steve0/
steve0@u.washington.edu

Re:Two birds with one stone? by stevarooski · 2000-05-20 16:06 · Score: 1 · on Flywheel Energy Storage: Steel Yourself For Carbon

I agree. . .Check this out!!

http://www.survival-tech.com/litemain.htm

VERY cool.

-S

http://students.washington.edu/steve0/
steve0@u.washington.edu

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

and I'm asleep at the keyboard. Doh!

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

This announcement brought to you by the DeCSS Polar Bear.

Mac Attack! by stevarooski · 2000-05-16 09:53 · Score: 2 · on Apple Demonstrates A Dual-G4 Power Mac

Macs are great for some things. . .like running a system right out of the box, DV, and also for some kinds of developing (right, Carmack?)--gotta love/hate the closed system.

I personally use both where I work, and while I'd rather use a PC for some things, a Mac remains my choice for video editing (Final Cut Pro, iMovie, and Premiere form a competent studio), streaming (Quicktime), and graphics (Adobe).

Imagine a dual G4 for video editing and multimedia content creation! Now THAT would sell a few units--firewire built it as well.

- S

http://students.washington.edu/steve0/
steve0@u.washington.edu

AI on the web?? Great, but. . . by stevarooski · 2000-05-16 03:36 · Score: 1 · on What AI Elements Could Improve the Web?

So hey, after reading over a lot of really sharp comments, it seems to come down to this: whats the REAL role of the web once everything's settled? And how interactive/smart are we going to make multiple user server-based software, and for what reason?

I can think of excellent applications for AI in data organization, etc. . .but it all comes down to what part of your web "experience" you want controlled for you.

Were it me, better searching, more intelligent queries, yadda yadda sounds great, but until the web starts filling a greater role than it does (like perhaps when all these 'internet appliances' come out. . .or maybe the 'smart houses'), I can't really see a role for AI.

My two cents! ;o)

S

http://students.washington.edu/steve0/
steve0@u.washington.edu

M2P2 Mini-Magnetospheric Plasma Propulsion by Guppy · 2000-05-14 21:05 · Score: 2 · on NASA Proposes Launch Of Solar Sail Vehicle For 2010

Someone already brought this up earlier, but even more promising than the Magsail is the M2P2. There are are problems with the Magsail, especially with the size of the superconducting loop--the needed diameter of which has been estimated from kilometers to hundreds of kilometers.

The material requirements for the M2P2 are more modest. The M2P2 uses a magnetic field generated by a solenoid. This field is then "inflated" with plasma. According to Dr. Winglee:

"...a 200-kilogram probe could deploy a magnetic sail of perhaps 20 kilometers' breadth and attain a velocity of nearly 100 kilometers per second using 50 kilograms of gas and about 1,000 watts of power to keep the plasma envelope filled. Making way at that clip, a craft could reach from Earth to Saturn in less than six months. The Cassini probe now on route to the ringed planet, by comparison, will take seven years..."

For more information, take a look at this article from American Scientist, or try this page at the University of Washington.

You can pump magnetic fields by jeti · 2000-05-14 19:01 · Score: 1 · on NASA Proposes Launch Of Solar Sail Vehicle For 2010

AFAIK it has been proven that you can pump magnetic fields with plasma. The less the pressure there is on the field, the more it will expand. Therefore the size of the face of your sail grows linear with the energy you put into the field
Such a magnetic field even allows for lateral movements and in combination with swing-by maneuvers you can navigate the whole solar system with such a sail.
A friend studying physics has shown me a detailed article that looked serious.

However this is the best link I could find.

Experts on Yilmaz by kkumer · 2000-05-14 15:33 · Score: 2 · on Black Holes Don't Exist???

I would just like to mention that Yilmaz theory of gravity has been already discussed at length in sci.* USENET newsgroups several years ago. You can find these discussions archived here where you will find what are experts objections.

A better mirror - Google by Megaport · 2000-05-14 02:31 · Score: 1 · on Black Holes Don't Exist???

http://w ww.google.com/search?q=cache:www.npl.washington.ed u/av/altvw100.html

This is Google's cache of www.npl.washington.edu/av/altvw100.html as retrieved on Sunday, 09-Apr-00 08:37:33 GMT.

Other articles by BMIComp · 2000-05-13 21:04 · Score: 1 · on Black Holes Don't Exist???

His article...Our Millimeter-Size Universe is pretty interesting.
"Superstring theory suggests that gravity is weak because its extra-dimensional loops are a millimeter in diameter."

Streaming by stevarooski · 2000-05-13 05:44 · Score: 4 · on Cable Industry backs Mpeg-4 for Streaming Video

Heya. . .

I'm project staff at a development lab in a major University (U of Washington, Seattle). I have spent a lot of time working with different streaming formats and wanted to toss my two cents into the middle, since here at the U we're working in making streaming video a viable classroom tool for instructers.

Quicktime is an interesting streaming option simply because it can do so much. It plays extremely well with others--you can stream everything from old Autodesk Animator files to Flash with it. You can also control web pages from within quicktime streaming moviess, as well as doing internal menus and interactive movies (using something like Flash in conjuntion). The primary codec used with Quicktime is the Sorenson codec, which is great for low-motion videos but often breaks up on anything else. . .supposedly the release of Sorenson II will fix this.

Real is kinda the everyman of streaming formats. . .its quality is generally far poorer than either ASF or Quicktime, but its available on just about every OS and has a good compression ratio. Its also waaaay easier to set up than Quicktime or ASF! Working with a technologically-braindead instructor, I could set up a realplayer streaming lecture in under 20 minutes. Thats part of its alure. . .but real might be heading towards extinction if they dont improve image quality.

ASF has me impressed!! Great image quality: however, the media player for mac just plain sucks, not to mention linux. If these two aspects of the format get fixed, I could easily see Microsoft (yeah, yeah, this is Slashdot ;o) ruling supreme with this format.

So there's a bit of information and my humble opinions. . .from the streaming server setup end of things, all three are equally a pain in the ass. This article was interesting: a new player to the field, eh? We'll see how this all works out, but I think streaming content will have a big role in the direction the internet takes for the future.

Thanks

Steve Martin
CTLT
steve0@u.washington.edu

http://students.washington.edu/steve0/
steve0@u.washington.edu

Little more info on the source... by GoNINzo · 2000-05-10 02:49 · Score: 2 · on Techie Story On TCP Stacks

If any of you are interested, Stephan Savage (the guy who's work this article is based off of) has a home page located here.

He's looking for an academic job, and some of his papers (Especially the project team that created the SPIN kernel stuff) are quite impressive.

--
Gonzo Granzeau

Little more info on the source... by GoNINzo · 2000-05-10 02:49 · Score: 2 · on Techie Story On TCP Stacks

If any of you are interested, Stephan Savage (the guy who's work this article is based off of) has a home page located here.

He's looking for an academic job, and some of his papers (Especially the project team that created the SPIN kernel stuff) are quite impressive.

--
Gonzo Granzeau

Other applications? by Seth+Golub · 2000-05-07 03:30 · Score: 1 · on Effectiveness Of Online User Databases Questioned

I wonder if the real gold mine will be the competitive advantage of providing better service through personalization. Some sites actually provide a service, rather than just advertising one. Some of those sites could actually work better if they adapted to the user. To some extent, all sites provide the service of information and could be enhanced somehow. Even simple things could be useful.

Re:Mac interface woes by Foamy · 2000-04-09 22:59 · Score: 1 · on Report From The Mozilla Developer Meeting

They are building "Aquaesque" chrome. Check out this shot I found in the mozilla newsgroups.

Plus the sullivan chrome at mozillazine feels very mac-like.

Chris

Re:Finally, some sense by Mr.+Slippery · 2000-04-06 22:22 · Score: 2 · on Stephenson Gives "Heretical" Speech @ Privacy Summit

Do you really think that the NSA or whatever is actually interested in what you do? Of course not, they want to get to the people who actually do real things, not the latest kernel patch to an OS of no interest to them.

Maybe, maybe not. To produce a chilling effect on freedom, it's not necessary that Big Brother actually be watching all the time, only that citizens have the impression that he might be - its the idea behind the panopticon.

Why Big Brother might be watching me:

I've had family, friends, and co-workers apply for high-level security clearances; it's conceivable that I've been investigated as part of that process.
I've worked on ARPA and NSA funded contracts, which may have brought my name up for attention.
I know that my name is flagged for special attention in the national database used for criminal background checks of firearms owners - when I purchased a rifle last year, the check took days, instead of minutes. My paranoid side had great fun with that, while my reasonable side figures it's because my brother (who has the same last name and similar SSN) had a little trouble with the law.
I've been spouting my mouth off on the net for years, taking state-unfriendly positions (such as that police ought to be disarmed and citizens armed), spreading information about currently illegal drugs, arguing pro-animal rights and pro-environmental positions (which in some peoples' eyes makes me a terrorist sympathizer, if you can beleive it) and generally stirring up trouble; it's certainly conceivable that some domestic surveillance guy put my name on a list for "special attention" after reading a post where I said, for example, that shooting cops who break into your house executing "no-knock" search warrants might be justified.

All it really takes is the suspicion of surveillance.

(And I know "Little Brother" is watching me - my credit card purchases, my long-distance calling patterens, my web surfing habits, et cetera, are all of great interest to marketers and salesmen.)

Re:This worries me. by thrig · 2000-04-06 01:47 · Score: 1 · on Celera Completes Human Genome. Sorta.

I recently was at a presentation by a human genome project researcher (doing C14 work) given to us geek types so we would better appreciate the gigabytes of info they're accumulating on the servers at alarming rates.

Anyhow, the scientist indicated that genome variation between individuals is something like 1 pair in 1000; e.g. down at the genomic level we really aren't that different.

But what a difference that 1 in 1000 makes on the final product!

Also, at least here (where I work), the genes are donated anonymously, so there's no way (yet) to attatch a particular sample to a particular person or ethnic group.

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

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

Better living through better protocols... by Anonymous Coward · 2000-04-02 23:29 · Score: 3 · on Stopping Distributed Denial Of Service

Look at the two things DDoS attacks target: Bandwidth and the remote host(s). Network bandwidth is becoming a non-issue (in the 5-10 year range), so ignore that for now.

For the remote hosts, we need protocols that do not allocate resources unless they are absolutely necessary. Look at upcoming protocols like SCTP. The protocol mandates that the initial connection sequence be stateless on the server side. So at levels below the application, DDoS attacks become much, much harder. This is essentially the SYN cookie hack, but made official.

So what about the application level? Well, applications need written to allocate state only when absolutely necessary. This doesn't necessarily imply pushing all state to the client side, however. Mainframe folks have been doing some this for a long time. It'd be interesting to see just how much carries over to a networked system.

And NI / bus bandwidth on the receiving host? This one's a cool problem. How much processing can be done in the NI to reduce host bus traffic? And how can one reserve resources in the NI to statistically guarantee that proper sessions work during a bombardment with bogus sessions? (Extra credit: How does one move some of the app-level down to the NI to help? Or out to the routers?)

These are the interesting areas for server-side DoS defenses, not DNS and router games. Then things like CIDF and/or the idwg work for detecting and squelching DDoS attacks... Imagine if every Gnutella, SETI@home, and distributed.net client and server also helped with DDoS detection... Much more interesting and practical than DNS and router tricks.

And then there's the boost in performance SETI and distributed.net would get from the new IMPS protocol...

Re:The Question of Artificial Conciousness by SnatMandu · 2000-03-26 07:00 · Score: 2 · on Spiritual Robots Symposium

Ooops, I misspoke, not we can't always solve halting problems. I forget the trick penrose uses, but it mimic's Goedel's proof (which I've all-but-forgoteen). It's incredible how much you forget in the real world.

a good description of the halting probelm

And here's a review of SOM

Re:Bad compilers? by David+Greene · 2000-03-22 23:54 · Score: 4 · on HPs Dynamo Optimizes Code

Yes, you are. HP has some of the best compiler people around.

The thing about static compilers is that they have no idea what happens at run-time. Profiling has been used to mitigate this somewhat, but it's still a huge problem.

Accesses through memory are slow, so you want to get rid of them. One way to do this is through register allocation. Unfortunately, even if an infinite number of registers was available, you couldn't allocate everything to registers.

Why? Because we use pointers. There are multiple names for the same data running around in our little electronic brain. When you allocate something to a register, you bind it to one name. This is by definition incorrect for aliased data (data with multiple names).

Optimizations like register promotion try to get around this by allocating things in regions where the compiler can prove it only has one name. But this is exceedingly difficult when you have things like function calls which must be assumed to access and modify lots of data.

I won't even get into the problem of static instruction scheduling or other optimizations like partial redundancy elimination.

In short, aliasing through memory is nearly impossible to track accurately at static compile time. At run-time, the machine knows exactly which memory accesses reference which data, so things like run-time register allocation can do a better job. Crusoe does this to a limited extent.

Dynamo is essentially a software trace cache. Except that when forming the trace, it does transformations like Common Subexpression Elimination and other traditional compiler manipulations.

IBM has the Daisy project, which does code morphing from PPC to a VLIW ISA. I believe it also does some run-time optimizations. Projects like DyC and Tempo have been compiling at run-time for a while now.

I like to think of dynamic compilation in terms of the stock market. Which would you rather do: trade stocks with only limited information about their past behavior (and sometimes none at all), or trade stocks after having observed the absolutely most recent trends? I'll bet that if you pick the first strategy and I pick the second, I'll beat you every time.

That said, there are tricks ou can pull with static compilation. IA64 has the ALAT, which lets the machine track when store addresses match load addresses. This lets the static compiler speculatively move a load ahead of the store. If the store conflicts, the machine will execute some compiler-provided code to fix up the error. Essentially, the compiler is making an assumption that the load and store do not reference the same data and is communicating that assumption to the machine. The machine checks the assumption and invokes some fixup code if it proves to be incorrect.

--

Computational molecular biology tools by spiffy1 · 2000-03-12 07:02 · Score: 1 · on Learning About Genetic Engineering On The Net

"Computational Molecular Biology" aka "Bioinformatics" is the making of algorithms used to study genetic codes. I am currently taking a class on this subject, some of the professor's lecture notes are available online in Powerpoint format. Here are some of the resources I learned to use in this class:

Codon Usage Database
DNA is encoded as a series of nucleotides (G,A,T,C), but interpereted in groups of three, called "codons." This is a database of the frequencies of all 4^3 combinations for various species.

Info on Blast and FastA
We can also compare the genomes of various species to see how similar they are. The above link is a short description of how two of the major programs work, BLAST (Basic Local Alignment Search Tool) and FastA (not an acroynm). There's some theoretical background on genome sequence comparison on Dr. Just's page.

If you want use BLAST to search for for things with similar genomes, just grab your favorite chunk of DNA and take it on down to the BLAST homepage at the NCBI, and let it search for chunks of DNA that are similar.
Don't know any gene sequences for you favorite organism? Then head to NCBI and type its scientific name into the "Search GenBank" box at the top.

If you're tired of this computer stuff, learn how actual DNA is scanned onto microarrays for analysis. Or, better yet, learn to build your own!

(And to think I was browsing Slashdot because I wanted to take a break from studying this.)

another sun propulsion system by logophage · 2000-03-07 08:18 · Score: 1 · on JPL Accomplishes Laser Sail First

there have been a few write-ups on magnetospheric propulsion. it works similarly to a solar sail except the "sail" is a bubble of ionized plasma that interacts with the solar wind to create thrust. seems pretty cool.
Mini-Magnetospheric Plasma Propulsion

NachOS... by mitch_wagner · 2000-03-04 20:25 · Score: 3 · on Computer Science Curriculum Using Linux?

During my last term I took Intro to Operating Systems we used a set of source code from berkely and washington called nachos. It basically emulates a MIPS 2000 platform. It is set up to have around 5 or 6 projects. Multithreading, File systems, Multi-processing, Memory Management and others. There are ports of the code for BDS, Linux, Solaris etc.... I suggest you go here for ideas. http://www.cs.washington.edu/homes/t om/nachos/

RPMs by Kyobu · 2000-03-01 08:22 · Score: 1 · on Mozilla Milestone 14 Awaits

Source and i386 RPMs are at http://students.washington.edu/mpalczew/, for those of us who have been unable or too lazy to compile the tarball.

somewhat related... by G27+Radio · 2000-02-19 02:32 · Score: 3 · on 3D LCD's for Sale

The Human Interfaces Technology Lab at U Washington has some cool projects going on.

The one I thought was really neat are their Virtual Retinal Displays which can scan a 3D image directly onto your retinas using tiny lasers. That would rock for Unreal TE.

numb

somewhat related... by G27+Radio · 2000-02-19 02:32 · Score: 3 · on 3D LCD's for Sale

The Human Interfaces Technology Lab at U Washington has some cool projects going on.

The one I thought was really neat are their Virtual Retinal Displays which can scan a 3D image directly onto your retinas using tiny lasers. That would rock for Unreal TE.

numb

Re:Nethack!! by Axe · 2000-02-17 13:50 · Score: 1 · on Java 2 for Linux Released & Blackdown Gets Creds

Donna... I better double it, than track rudiculously obscure C++ "features" (And, yes I do code my stuff in C++, and love it..

Why isn't more women than men a "problem"? by tap · 2000-02-16 09:34 · Score: 2 · on Women CS Majors Declining

Go look at the student pictures for the University of Washington school of library and information science here, then take a look at the list of grad students in the computer science and engineering department. From the first 30 students listed, it looks like the ischool has 23 women and 7 men. The CSE department has 25 men and 5 women. Why is the first nothing unusual but the second a terrible problem that needs to be corrected?

I suppose the true reason there are more men and women is some fields is that the ratio of men to women in the general population is close to 50/50. Since some fields have more women than men, other fields must have more men and women for it to average out. What the center for women and technology (I hate hypocritical organizations like this who preach about equlaity but have sexist name like center for women and the implied and not men) needs to do is convince women that computer science is better than information science, or actively discourage women from entering fields like education or psychology where they are a majority. Or they could try to get more men to enter fields that have more women in them.

Why isn't more women than men a "problem"? by tap · 2000-02-16 09:34 · Score: 2 · on Women CS Majors Declining

Go look at the student pictures for the University of Washington school of library and information science here, then take a look at the list of grad students in the computer science and engineering department. From the first 30 students listed, it looks like the ischool has 23 women and 7 men. The CSE department has 25 men and 5 women. Why is the first nothing unusual but the second a terrible problem that needs to be corrected?

I suppose the true reason there are more men and women is some fields is that the ratio of men to women in the general population is close to 50/50. Since some fields have more women than men, other fields must have more men and women for it to average out. What the center for women and technology (I hate hypocritical organizations like this who preach about equlaity but have sexist name like center for women and the implied and not men) needs to do is convince women that computer science is better than information science, or actively discourage women from entering fields like education or psychology where they are a majority. Or they could try to get more men to enter fields that have more women in them.

Re:Quand meme, ce n'est meme pas une meme... by Windigo+The+Feral+(N · 2000-02-15 14:31 · Score: 3 · on Censorware and Memetic Warfare

Just Some Guy dun said:

Why, oh why, is everything ludicrous attributed to right-wingers? I am just about as far-right-wing as you can get, and I assure that my core beliefs do not condone censorship in any form. I mean, remember the PMRC (record labeling)? That was Tipper Gore, not Pat Buchanan.

Hate to have to bring some things up to dash the illusion there, but there are some things I do need to bring up in light of your venting...

1). The vast majority of groups pushing censorship, and for that matter a lot of flatly ludicrous stuff, are right-wing--specifically, members of various political groups which are basically run by fundamentalist "Christians" in the US. (For that matter, Israel sees the same thing with ultraorthodox "Jews", and darn near every country with a signifigant Islamic population deals with fundamentalist "Moslems" of the two main denominations of their religion. For THAT matter, as I understand it, India's having the same damn problem with fundamentalist "Sikhs" and fundamentalist "Hindus".)

2). For all intents and purposes, there is no functioning left-wing in the United States. The US has literally gone so far to the right (largely because of influence of fundamentalist "Christian" groups, which at one point had pretty much taken over the entire Republican Party apparatus in thirty-four states; they have apparently led to the self-destruction now of a second party [the Reform Party]. It's not all the GOP's fault, though--I'll note that in a minute) that were Richard Nixon to run today on his present political platform, he would be considered a liberal. The most "liberal" parties in the US with any large percentage of voters (the Democratic and Libertarian parties) would be considered right-moderate in most political systems in the industralised world (yes, that includes Canada, too); the largest "conservative" party (the GOP) would be hard-right in nearly any other country's political system, and the second or third-largest "conservative" political party in the US (the US Taxpayer's Party) is, for all intents and purposes, run by extreme far-righters in the US and in fact promotes theocracy as a platform. (The Reform Party, before it basically started destroying itself when Pat Buchanan got considered for nomination, probably fell in between the Republicans and Libertarians; now, for all intents and purposes, the Reform Party will probably end up as two parties, one beign slightly more left-leaning but both still firmly on the right.) One newspaper, which started in the 1800's as a "moderate conservative" paper of the times and has had pretty much the same political bent ever since it started, is now considered one of the hardest-left papers in the US. It would also probably be considered moderate or moderate-left in political spectrums in most industralised countries.

Sad to say, but the political spectrum in the US today is less like other industrialised countries and more like those in which a fair amount of corruption occurs (such as in many "third-world" nations) or which are having very serious problems with fundamentalists trying to subvert the very structure of the government itself (this is certainly true in the US, and in a lot of other places you hear about in the news--like Israel, or Pakistan and India (basically a pissing contest between Muslim fundies and Hindu fundies which could well end up in a nuclear war before it's over with) or Sudan (which is having a rather nasty civil war between Muslim fundies and Christian fundies)).

2a). On a related note, and this is very important to note with anything related to fundy movements in general--most fundy groups, especially so in the US, are basically run by power-hungry individuals. In the US at least (and probably elsewhere--there's real signs of it at least in some ultra-Orthodox communities, and among nations like Iran and Afghanistan especially), many of the people who are members of the various fundy PACs here--and especially the more decidedly active ones--are members of churches that can be described as coercive groups much as Scientology can be described as a coercive group. Many of these groups use various mind-control techniques on their members to not only have them basically allow their minister to think for them, but to specifically "block out" anything that could be averse to what the minister says (these include basically teaching that the people in the church or group are the only ones who are "saved" and that anyone who isn't "saved" is in direct league with Satan; teaching that any doubt is the result of either demonic oppression or (if someone else says it) outright possession and one needs to "pray the doubts out" or have exorcisms performed (often involuntarily); forced confession of "sins" (which have included the involuntary outing of gays in church; most Religious Right groups are homophobic at best and some (like Fred Phelps, or Donald Wildmon, or Kentucky's own Frank Simon) are downright infamous for it); telling members to only do business with "members of like faith" (including printing special directories, like the "Christian Yellow Pages") and to only watch media that is affiliated with the church because all other media sources are "worldly" at best and outright "Satanic" at worst, not to mention businesses; "shepherding" programs and "cell churches" (in most programs, the people are divided into groups of five which, in essence, play "Big Brother" on each other--if someone has doubts, the other members try to work them more into the group, in extreme cases by methods like involuntary exorcisms), and so-called "divine lies" (basically, lying about your goals or at the least being dishonest about them to lure folks in to "win more souls for Christ"--this encompasses everything from "hell house" haunted-houses which are marketed as regular haunted houses for "educational purposes" which in fact are used to make people listen to fundy preaching (and yes, sometimes the doors ARE locked and the people not allowed to leave, so yes, they are in essence forced to listen) to "pep talks" run in high schools by groups that have fundy athletes come in to prosyletise, often on the premise that these are "anti-drug" or "self-esteem" talks (most of the time, these assemblies are mandatory to attend for kids, and often the groups will take innocuous-sounding names like "Athletes Against Drugs" or suchlike to hide their fundy links) to "free pizza parties" held by fundy groups who then hold the kids for hours, not allowing them to leave (it is almost never revealed that the "pizza party" is in fact being run by a fundy group) to "stealth candidates" for political offices (which don't reveal their fundy links till elected)...). Basically, because a lot of these groups ARE essentially Bible-based cults, they can feed their members an amazing amount of horsesheisse and (because they literally have nothing else to "error-check" it with) their followers will swallow it. If anything, most folks involved are to be pitied (the only ones that really deserve hate are probably the leaders who outright manipulate their followers).

There has not been a terrible amount of info on how "Bible-based cults" do manipulate their followers until fairly recently, largely because most folks associate "cults" with "new religions" and most folk haven't wanted to believe that "Christian" groups can and sadly do turn into coercive groups preaching far more of a god of Fear, Hate and Loathing (both of self and others) than a god of love, acceptance, and respect (which is what, at least with those folks whom I've met who I sense actually "get" what Yshua was saying, feel it's supposed to be about anyways). I also expect this is a big reason why most mainstream churches in the US haven't spoken out about "Bible-based cults" except in cases where they've been really extreme (part of this, too, might be because--sadly--coercive tactics are getting into larger and larger denominations; one of the largest fundy denominations in the US, which is in essence a Bible-based cult, was the major source of TV preachers for years and has well over one million members...a recent expose of the "Brownsville Movement" (which is centered at one of the larger churches in the US for this denomination in Pensacola, Florida) using coercive tactics is one of the major exceptions; the Southern Baptists, which have had their entire church head and seminary taken over by the fundamentalist wing of the denomination, are starting to dance close to using coercive tactics though they aren't as bad as the "traditionally" fundy denominations yet); part of that, though, may be because most fundy denominations (and especially those which are basically Bible-based cults) don't have anything to do with most major ecumenical conventions, holding their own separate worldwide conferences because they feel mainstrean Christianity is "lukewarm" at best and outright perverted by Satan at worst).

I'll also note (this is a personal aside, based on my own observations of having grown up in a family of raving fundies and having seen far more than I like of the internals of the Religious Right and fundamentalist groups in the US) that--probably because many of these folks have literally been in these groups for generations (I know of three-generation households in the group I walked away from; also, many of the younger especially are literally isolated from the outside world from birth all the way through college (fundies push homeschooling in large part so that kids CAN be isolated and not see anything that could spur them to walk away; there is now even a college being set up specifically for fundy-homeschooled kids to train them to be "political leaders for Christians", homeschooled kids being perfect fodder because they have literally been raised and brainwashed in Bible-based cults from birth), partly because walkaways from groups one has been raised in are EXTREMELY rare (pretty much most kids walk away when their parents do, or if they are forced out of their homes due to "irreconcilable differences" like the kid discovering he's gay; there are literally no statistics on kids walking away on their own (with no help from parents or exit counselors) from groups they were raised in because it is so rare), and partly because this is all they know as a result...a large percentage of those involved in Bible-based cults and in groups like the FRC are, to put none too fine a term on it, control-freaks. This is probably because the only real model they have IS the preacher, who basically uses coercive tactics (and a hell of a lot of FUD) to keep his flock "in line" and not questioning the preacher--this is especially true of folks who have been raised in such groups for generations--and so they basically take the whole "coercive-tactics"/"control-freak" thing to ALL walks of life. Literally everything from politics (a big part of why fundies want a theocracy here has to do with Control and Power over others; again, this is probably an extension of how their own ministers and deacons use Power and Control to keep the flock in line, along with the major "us versus them" mindset in such groups) to parenting (a lot of fundy parents will homeschool kids specifically to keep a maximum amount of Control and Power over them--this is also why they push so much for censorship initiatives to "protect the children", and a lot of fundies won't allow their kids to attend non-Christian colleges or allow them to attend schools with coed dorms or alcohol on campus [yes, I've had experience with this; the fact Beloit College had coed dorms and alcohol on campus pretty much shot all hell out of any chance I had of going there, even without money concerns]). Basically, to put a fine point on it, many of them are control-freaks by basis of being in groups that are run by control-freaks who use coercive tactics, and they have no other model to use (either by model of literally not knowing any better, or by model of literally being so brainwashed that pretty much they have nothing else to go by).

A good starter for exploring the mindset of which I'm talking on is here. It's a page for walkaways, specifically from Bible-based cults, run by a person who was formerly involved in one (he walked away, and now actually runs a "fight-the-right" group largely because of his experiences in the coercive group); it gives you a lot of perspective on where they're coming from, if you've never been misfortunate enough to have experienced Fundie Hell for yourself. (I honestly don't recommend the latter for anyone, especially not kids and other living things. It can screw you up for life, seriously. Look at me. ;)

2b). As another aside--this is probably not widely known by folks, but there are a lot of businesses in the US--many of them Fortune 500 companies, yet--that not only are affiliated with the Right Wing in the US, but are in fact members and actually supportive of it. An enlightening--and scary page--for starters is here--this is a page featuring info on the Coalition for National Policy, which is essentially a secretive, invite-only think-tank for the Religious Right in the United States. It features a membership list that includes, among others, many members of the Coors family, a (former) Presidential candidate, and a number of representatives to US and state legislatures. There's also a good link here that talks about the CNP and a lot more of the big names in the Religious Right...

For more starters...both the Coors family (yep, as in Coors Breweries) and the Waltons (yep, as in Sam's Wholesale/Wal-Mart--as in, before Sam Walton died, one of the single richest individuals on the planet, worth more than Bill Gates, and only surpassed by the Sultan of Brunei; the Waltons collectively are still in the top 100 of the richest people on the planet) are heavily involved with the Religious Right, outright subsidizing them and being sympathetic to concerns (to give examples--the Coors family supported Amendment 2 in Colorado, which would have rescinded civil-rights laws that included sexual orientation; the Waltons have made it a policy not to carry albums with "Tipper-stickers", refused to carry heavy-metal magazines for a long time, and refuse to provide "morning-after" contraceptives even though they will provide Viagra). Needless to say, these are two of the biggest companies in the US. Another interesting one is AmWay--AmWay in and of itself has been accused of using coercive tactics with its sales representatives, but is also run by fundamentalists with links to the CNP and AmWay has been known to bankroll fundy groups in past. Not even home shopping is immune--as it turns out, the person who owns Home Shopping Club, Home Shopping Network (the off-hours version of HSC that shows up on a lot of "Christian" TV stations and also used to show up on the "Family Channel") and PAX TV is a major bankroller of the Religious Right (more on that below).

For even more shockers...a lot of times, Religious Right groups deal in a fair bit of "cloaking". The Arthur S. DeMoss foundation (a Religious Right group that pushes "Christian Reconstructionism", has actually endorsed Christian Identity groups on occasion, and pretty much is a major funding source for the Religious Right; it was founded by the widow of a Religious Right supporter who happened to be a multi-millionaire) hides most of its nastier stuff by not only doing innocuous-sounding adverts for adoption and "Power for Living" (basically a book which hawks fundamentalist Christianity), but has sympathetic multi-million-dollar stars like the woman from "Children of a Lesser God" and Jeff Gordon (great...have NASCAR drivers hawking fundamentalism to the kiddies...Jeff Gordon, probably more than anyone in NASCAR short of the Pettys, is seen as particularly "kid-friendly" and as a general, All-American "Wheaties"-box boy) and NFL stars hawking for them. (Knowing that group, I'm almost willing to bet that either a) they might not have been too forthcoming with these folks other than that they were a group promoting a book about "Christian living", or b) a hell of a lot of people in show-business need a good expose like there has been with Scientologists in Hollywood...more info on the Arthur S. Demoss Foundation here and here [thank you Google...it seems that Pathfinder is not wanting to behave well].) The Family Channel, until recently, was owned by the same folks who brought you Pat Robertson and the 700 Club--it was renamed from the "Christian Broadcasting Network" to make it sound like it offered "family-friendly" programming and to hide its links to the Religious Right (as Pat Robertson and the Christian Coalition had started to get a rather bad name). In fact, the Family Channel was sold to FOX, which does have some links to the right in the US (though not as bad as, say, Coors).

PAX TV, which is a TV network set up by a fundamentalist (again, using the exact same canard that the "Family Channel" did in its Pat Robertson days--as a purveyor of "family-friendly entertainment" which conveniently neglects to mention its links to the Religious Right) and which is largely carried on "Christian" TV stations, is heavily bankrolled by Home Shopping Club and Home Shopping Network (which--not exactly coincidentially--also showed on the Family Channel on off-hours and shows on a lot of "Christian" TV stations in off-hours) and--even worse--is also owned 20 percent by CBS and NBC was planning to buy 32 percent in PAX TV (this would be over 400 million dollars). More info here, and more info on PAX here...for that matter, the very head of Focus on the Family (which spawned off Family Research Council as a lobbying wing), James Dobson, makes a rather healthy living selling parenting books promoting "tough love" and "discipline".

Even besides all THAT, a lot of the major Religious Right groups get a lot of funding from members, and many of them can actually get it tax-free (by either setting up separate "political" wings when the heat from the IRS gets too much, or by setting it up with roughly the same tax exemptions a church would get). There are also local businesses...as one guide has advised, if you want to boycott teh Religious Right you almost have to look through one of the directories made for the Religious Right or avoid every business with an ichthus-fish on it...and besides all THAT, Religious Right groups are increasingly going stealth or relying on certain "code words" within the community like "Family", "Heritage", or names confusingly similar to existing groups (one anti-abortion "counseling center" actually named themselves "PPC, Inc." and based themselves in the same building as the local Planned Parenthood office; a legal group that bankrolls and supports lawsuits friendly to Religious Right causes is named "American Center for Law and Justice"; a really amazing number of Religious Right groups use "Family" or "Heritage" or "Christian Life Center" (in the case of churches) because these are actual code words in the fundamentalist community for fundy-friendly causes).

Needless to say, unfortunately, the Religious Right isn't exactly hurting for money and, short of ALL of their members walking away combined with a massive economic crash that disrupts nearly the entire worldwide financial system to the point that it forces us to go back to barter or most of their members walking away combined with a massive boycott of ANYTHING the Religious Right has their fingers in, they aren't going to be hurting for money anytime soon. :P

2c). Media that isn't tied with the Religious Right somehow is often basically bullied into submission. As noted above, a lot of folks in fundy groups have a very "us versus them" viewpoint to begin with--they literally believe they are fighting Satan and all of us not in a fundy group are practicing Satanists as a direct result. :P If ANYTHING is reported whatsoever that is in the LEAST critical of the Religious Right, they will protest (even if they don't read the paper or watch non-"Christian" TV because it might be "Satanically influenced") because, in essence, they will be informed about it and told to raise forty kinds of hell over it. And they will. In droves. (A Pensacola paper found this out when they basically exposed the "Brownsville Movement" as a Bible-based cult; "20/20" did an expose of the "Brownsville Movement" and likewise were damn near pilloried (of course, most fundies were already boycotting anything relating to Disney because {horror!} they dared give equal rights to gay couples for benefits and had a "gay Day" there, but that's beside the point)...my family raged for days about the expose because "Oh god, they make us all out to be cultists or something" (I hate to inform them, but, well, if the shoe fits...I'd think instead of ranting at ABC maybe you should do some serious soul-searching on whether the chuch is doing the Right Thing or not, but then again, I walked away and I dare to be sensible about the whole thing instead of getting my panties in a wad)...read your newspaper's editorials everytime someone dares suggest that the Religious Right and theocracy or even putting the Ten Commandments in schools might possibly not be the be-all, end-all to the world's problems to get an idea of just WHAT kinds of cain they do raise.) Burger King and Pepsi, among others, have literally been bullied out of running certain adverts or sponsoring programs because of letter-writing campaigns by the American Family Association (a hard-line Religious Right lobbying group which has some decidedly homophobic tendencies); many ABC affiliates were likewise bullied into not carrying "NYPD Blue" during its first two seasons for the same reason.

3). Now, to a direct point I was going to mention--hate to break it to you, but the PMRC is by no bloody means liberal. Tipper Gore (and Al Gore) are (as noted above) right-moderate AT MOST; the other co-founder, oddly enough, just happens to be Elizabeth Dole, wifey of Bob Dole and onetime candidate for the 2000 GOP nomination for President. One of the founding members was Susan Baker (wife of Former Secretary of State James A. Baker III (R)).

More to the point, though, the PMRC has many a link to Religious Right groups. First off, they have carried advertising in PMRC literature for "Back In Control Training Center" and other "training centers"; Back In Control was basically an inpatient program run by two former LAPD officers which was advertised to "de-metal" or "de-punk" kids, which was in effect a brainwashing center with links to the Religious Right and which has claimed, among other things, that Wiccans are Satanists and that the Magen David (the Jewish star) is a Satanic symbol and that if kids are wearing "gothy" or "metal" clothing this is a sure sign of Satan-worship. Back In Control has also worked with a lot of police departments and schools, and (ObSlashdot) is one of the groups that is directly responsible for kids being harassed and worse after Columbine for wearing "goth" clothing. (More info here,here (in passing, but in direct relation to how Back In Control Training Center has been heavily promoted by the PMRC), and here.)

Also, they've promoted and used material from Bob Larson Ministries; for those who aren't aware, Bob Larson is a "foamin' fundy" radio preacher who, among other things, promotes censorship and the whole Religious Right agenda. Among other things, he's called peace symbols and the Nike swoosh Satanic symbols (no, I'm not making this up) as well as the good old canard about the Magen David supposedly being a Satanic symbol. More info here (or the newer version here--the "Bob Larson Fan Site"--trust me, the kinds of horsesheisse Larson spews is the kind that must be seen for itself to be believed), and a lovely expose in a British Columbia Christian mag here. Yes, the PMRC actually promoted material from this nut :P

Incidentially, you can confirm all the info above by getting a copy of the book "50 Ways To Fight Censorship" by Dave Marsh (head of Rock and Rap Confidential, and the guy who coined the phrase "rock and roll" incidentially). It's out of print, but most better libraries do have a copy, and if you can't find it there, there are all manner of online bookstores who could probably scare up a copy for you.

Oh, and if you wondered whether the PMRC still has links to the Religious Right...the answer, darling, is an emphatic yes. The present head, one Barbara Wyatt, just happens (ironically) to also sit on the board of Focus on the Family (!)...more info here (again, thank you Google; the more recent version is here, btw), and here.

And BTW, just for the record--I don't have an agenda, other than being a walkaway from a Bible-based cult who really does not the US to descend into a theocracy (I lived under one for all intents and purposes for 25 years of my life; trust me, it sucks, and it will suck twenty times worse if they can get their theocracy nationwide) and who knows all too well both the mindset these folks operate under and the real danger (to freedom and, ultimately, to the psyches of both their memberships and those who are family to them) these groups ultimately present. In essence, I don't want the rest of y'all on Slashdot to have to put up with what I had to put up with for 25 years of my life, and an especially hellish thirteen years after I walked away and I had to live in a household of which the majority of people were raving fundies (and the rest of my family was, slowly but steadily, being assimilated by the Bible-Based Cult Of Borg). It sucks. Bigtime. :P (I note this because, when I made a little post exposing the agenda of the Family Research Council, I was accused of having an agenda. Sorry, I've got no more of an agenda than a kid who's been abused has in getting the abuse to stop. :P)

A Slight Revision to the History of Lisa by Baldrson · 2000-02-13 16:11 · Score: 2 · on The History Behind the Lisa UI

In late 1981, I was given the responsibility to develop an authoring system for the Viewtron videotex network planned for nation-wide deployment by AT&T and Knight-Ridder due to my prior work at the Plato project. At about that time, the cover story for Byte Magazine by Larry Tesler of Xerox PARC was about Smalltalk. Since I had been looking for a decent language upon which to base a network programming environment, Dennis Hall, then technical director of the Viewtron pilot, arranged a trip to Xerox PARC to see a demonstration of their system. We met with the Xerox PARC Smalltalk team in November of 1981.

We were having difficulty with the standards committee controlling the North American Presentation Level Protocol Syntax -- the graphics protocol upon which the Viewtron videotex terminals built by Western Electric were based. Specifically, there wasn't enough programmability. The Western Electric terminal was so limited in capacity that we had to fit the graphics interpreter into a very few number of bytes, and could afford only a few thousand bytes of dynamically downloadable store. I had been enamored with Forth ever since the Byte magazine article about it about a year or so earlier (my first digital purchase was an HP35 so reverse polish didn't bother me perhaps as much as it should have). Even so, I was hunting around for options. Jim Thompson, another senior staff member with the Viewtron project, was also interested in Forth -- enough so that he had subscribed to the Forth newsletter, which he shared with me. Jim was supposed to develop a menu system to run on the central system. I had specifically asked that his menu system never achieve Turing Machine equivalence, because I knew what sort of horrors lay in wait for us if it did. Nevertheless, Jim eventually implemented GOLFBAL "Game Oriented Language for Business And Leisure" -- and it was a Forth derivative. I had rejected Forth as anything but the low level protocol and engine for the telesoftware graphics system and was fairly horrified to discover what he had done. In any case, it was this immersion in Forth we brought with us to our meeting with the Xerox PARC folks.

Now, I swear on a stack of bibles that after I met with the PARC folks and discussed the problems of graphics communications, I had no idea the industry could end up being stuck with Postscript as a type-setting standard. I can say this for a certainty because:

I wanted to see a Novix-style reduction-to-hardware of the Forth virtual machine so that Forth would become the macro assembly language. Then we could use the Forth silicon machine to start running dynamically downloaded Smalltalk -- or some similar high level language -- compiled for the Forth stack machine which would provide much more powerful graphics specifications than Forth itself.

I never imagined the Smalltalk guys would actually depart from Smalltalk itself as a graphical specification language.

By the time the PARC guys spun off Adobe with Postscript and its Forth-like engine, I had become more interested in constraint/relational programming semantics than object oriented semantics because it more naturally fits graphics description, distribution, nondeterminism and parallelism not to mention databases.

It was summer of 1982 when I met with Tesler for the last time -- and he had just left PARC to go work on Lisa. We were sitting in the empty Astrodome, I think it was, next to the convention center where the Commodore 64 was being introduced to the world market as part of the precursor to Comdex. 64K of memory! At any rate, Tesler and I discussed the reason he had abandoned Smalltalk for the Lisa. I had thought that type inference coupled with artful use of assembly language libraries would be sufficient on the Motorola 68000 family, but Tesler was insistent that Object Pascal was necessary for adequate speed. Frankly, I was apalled that Tesler had so easily abandoned Smalltalk with type inference since he had made specific mention of it as an optimization technique in his Byte article. But in a recent email exchange about this history, he told me type inference was never of much interest to him -- that others at Apple were hooked on Object Pascal.

The horrifying thing about all this is that when Steve Jobs took off from Apple to found NeXT, instead of correcting the nonsense with Postscript and going straight for Smalltalk with type inference, he repeated the mistake, only this time with Objective-C. Then, as I understand it, Objective-C was the precursor to Java with its reliance on declaration rather than inference for type checking. This despite the fact that Sun already had the Self programming language in house with type inference and dynamic optimization technologies that realized the potential of Smalltalk at along last. Unfortunately the only technology to make it bigtime from Sun's Self project was the Hotspot JVM.

Although these aren't exactly the same mistakes over and over, we're still struggling to get a decent, widely-used dynamically typed language "for everyone" that includes a pure OO library for graphics. Python isn't easily deployable and although I'm a Perl bigot, even I realize we're unlikely to get Perlscript installed in every browser anytime soon. Anyway I'm partial to prototype languages like Self when it comes to Smalltalk offspring. I do have hopes for TIBET as a way of turning Javascript into a powerful programming system across many platforms -- as outrageous as that sounds. I know Bill Edney and Scott Shattuck were some of the first NeXT hackers, but we can all pray for a swift recovery. This isn't an official announcement or anything -- but Bill and Scott did do a presentation at Hackers so I figure I can mention it in the mode of a "hot rumor".

As I said, I'm more into constraint/relational stuff these days myself, but it sure would be nice if someone brought the power originally in Smalltalk the ubiquity it deserved almost 20 years ago.

Re:Another one... by ralphclark · 2000-02-13 09:53 · Score: 2 · on The Physics of Consciousness

Absolutely. William Calvin's brilliant mosaic theory explains many of the phenomenal features of consciousness, especially why thinking and experiencing feels like it does (though not, of course, why we feel it at all). *Everybody* should read about it. If anyone is curious, the full text of his books How Brains Think and The Cerebral Code are available online at his web site.

Consciousness is not what it thinks it is
Thought exists only as an abstraction

Re:Another one... by ralphclark · 2000-02-13 09:53 · Score: 2 · on The Physics of Consciousness

Absolutely. William Calvin's brilliant mosaic theory explains many of the phenomenal features of consciousness, especially why thinking and experiencing feels like it does (though not, of course, why we feel it at all). *Everybody* should read about it. If anyone is curious, the full text of his books How Brains Think and The Cerebral Code are available online at his web site.

Consciousness is not what it thinks it is
Thought exists only as an abstraction

Re:Another one... by ralphclark · 2000-02-13 09:53 · Score: 2 · on The Physics of Consciousness

Absolutely. William Calvin's brilliant mosaic theory explains many of the phenomenal features of consciousness, especially why thinking and experiencing feels like it does (though not, of course, why we feel it at all). *Everybody* should read about it. If anyone is curious, the full text of his books How Brains Think and The Cerebral Code are available online at his web site.

Consciousness is not what it thinks it is
Thought exists only as an abstraction

Here is how it was done by Ice+Tiger · 2000-02-11 00:41 · Score: 1 · on Linux Blamed for DDoS Attacks

Quoting David Dittrich from http://staff.washington.e du/dittrich/misc/trinoo.analysis

Trinoo daemons were originally found in binary form on a number of Solaris 2.x systems, which were identified as having been compromised by exploitation of buffer overrun bugs in the RPC services "statd", "cmsd" and "ttdbserverd". These attacks are described in CERT Incident Note 99-04:

http://www.cert.org/incident_notes / IN- 99-04.html

So basically this guy is making it all up as the method he is spouting was not used, it took me ten mins to find this out. Windows is vulnerable to buffer overruns as much as anything else.

Linux could indeed be the culprit by AaronW · 2000-02-10 23:46 · Score: 3 · on Linux Blamed for DDoS Attacks

There are detailed descriptions about how these attacks are being executed at Dave Dittrich's web site. It looks like there are numerous vulnerabilities in both Red Hat Linux 6.0 and in Solaris that were exploited for this bug.

Linux, Solaris, or Windows is only secure if the system administrator constantly applies the latest security patches, and how many of you actually do that? The only way to prevent this sort of attack is being vigilant about security on all machines on your network.

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