Slashdot Mirror

Because THEY will be the ones, the corporations, the government and the DOD, who control our indentities. Any digital identity should exist to empower the individual to become a better, more informed customer, not a manipulated consumer.

I highly recommend you read Doc Searles and David Wienbergers views on this to see why any implementation of DigID that is corporate centered rather than individual centered is PURE EVIL, and will be used for all sorts of nefarois things, from total erasure of shopping anonymonity, total profiling, and even BLACKLISTING. This is bad stuff, pure and simple.

Planet P Blog

Besides previous Slashdot stories about NASA's space elevator project, I also wrote several columns about this concept in the last months. If you're interested, take a look at "NASA Plans Elevators to Space," "Pushing the space elevator closer to reality" or "Space tourism 'viable at $15,000 a seat'?."

Besides previous Slashdot stories about NASA's space elevator project, I also wrote several columns about this concept in the last months. If you're interested, take a look at "NASA Plans Elevators to Space," "Pushing the space elevator closer to reality" or "Space tourism 'viable at $15,000 a seat'?."

Besides previous Slashdot stories about NASA's space elevator project, I also wrote several columns about this concept in the last months. If you're interested, take a look at "NASA Plans Elevators to Space," "Pushing the space elevator closer to reality" or "Space tourism 'viable at $15,000 a seat'?."

The work of Achim Hartschuh, Erik J. Sánchez, X. Sunney Xie, and Lukas Novotny has been published by Physical Review Letters, Volume 90, Number 9, March 7, 2003. Here is a link to the abstract of their paper, "High-Resolution Near-Field Raman Microscopy of Single-Walled Carbon Nanotubes." You also can read the summary I wrote on this subject, "The Smallest Sight: Researchers Zoom In on the Nanoscale."

A good, recent comparison of EJB containers and Java 2 servers is here--

http://www.onjava.com/pub/a/onjava/2003/02/26/ejbi nherit5.html

A comparison of Tomcat, Orion, Resin and Weblogic is here:

http://radio.weblogs.com/0107789/stories/2002/05/2 8/isTomcatCrap.html

Note that while the Paul Graham rating of 0.999999999999999 is high, in practice I use Gary Robinson's calculations (more refined and use even infrequently occurring tokens - I get better, less extreme results). Gary Robinson's spam rating on this is: 0.61705129961986 That may seem relatively low, but is on a different scale and is firmly indicative of spam.

Unlike Paul Graham, I don't parse out (and ignore) HTML comments. I find all information is useful, and I find it just as effective (and simple) to treat the text as a straight byte stream.

If you go to the Red Herringwebsite, please notice the prominent "SUBSCRIBE NOW" button on the left navigation bar.
So if you want to spend $34.95 for a dead magazine, you still can.
But hurry up, the website is supposed to close within two weeks.
Too bad!
Roland Piquepaille (Technology Trends)

slashdot.org
newsforge.com
theregister.co.uk
my university's daily newspaper (no link!)
fark.com
the smirking chimp
dr. fun
the daily vault (although i review there once in a while)
google news
daily rotten
lwn.net
crackmonkey archives
the dot
kde-look.org
corona's coming attractions
snopes' update page
doc's weblog

And I think that's about it for a daily basis.

In this column, you'll find my comments on both the "Computer Made from DNA and Enzymes" article, published by National Geographic News and "New DNA Computer Functions sans Fuel" story provided by Scientific American. But more importantly, you'll find the real *meat*, the abstract of the research conducted by the scientists of the Weitzmann Institute of Science. It is published in today's online edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

I think this article gives a better description of what the data retention policy is. It's more concise anyhow.

You should check these two columns, DNA supercomputers in our future? and DNA Computing to learn more about the limitations of DNA computing. For example, Len Adleman, a professor at the University of Southern California, says "that DNA computers will never be able to rival their electronic counterparts for speed without an unforeseen scientific breakthrough, he does think that they have a future niche. One day, a DNA computer programmed to react to the presence of a toxin, such as cancer, could be embedded into a cell. When it detects the toxin, the computer would respond by directing the cell to replicate and chemoluminesce or "glow." The glow could be seen with the naked eye allowing for early disease detection and saving lives."

You should check these two columns, DNA supercomputers in our future? and DNA Computing to learn more about the limitations of DNA computing. For example, Len Adleman, a professor at the University of Southern California, says "that DNA computers will never be able to rival their electronic counterparts for speed without an unforeseen scientific breakthrough, he does think that they have a future niche. One day, a DNA computer programmed to react to the presence of a toxin, such as cancer, could be embedded into a cell. When it detects the toxin, the computer would respond by directing the cell to replicate and chemoluminesce or "glow." The glow could be seen with the naked eye allowing for early disease detection and saving lives."

I'd love to hear from anyone who can show that they posted from their phone using email before then so we can set history straight.

On February 5th I added to graphic to help me remember that these were posted from the phone.

I don't really know what is the future for CDs, but I know it has already a long past. Here is what I wrote on this subject about six weeks ago. After the Internet, the compact disc also will celebrate its 20th birthday this spring. But the CDs you buy today are essentially the same that you purchased 20 years ago. Paul Boutin explains. "This spring, the compact disc celebrates the 20th anniversary of its arrival in stores, which puts the once-revolutionary music format two decades behind Moore's Law. The IBM PC, introduced about a year and a half earlier, has been revved up a thousandfold in performance since 1983. But the CD has whiled away the time, coasting on its Reagan-era breakthroughs in digital recording and storage. The two technologies, the PC and the CD, merged not long after their debuts -- try to buy a computer without a disc player. But the relationship has become a dysfunctional one. The computer long ago outgrew its stagnant partner." He aso reviews the recent offerings from record companies, the DVD-Audio (DVD-A) and the Super Audio CD (SACD). But many people prefer to use MP3 players and CD burners "because they can archive hundreds of albums on a laptop and download them to portable players smaller than a single CD jewel box." Check this column for a summary or read the original article for more details.

That Crazypatents site is a gold mine of hilarity.

http://www.crazypatents.com/images/Large/4044405-1 .gif

Here is something just like that idea actually, but it's implemented in a truly ingenious way. They have an image of a fly in the urinal which looks real and so people will automatically aim for it.

Oh, and I actually came across GameTab the other day. Great site, I've found it very useful. I'm looking forward to Freelancer right now, but think I'm going to wait until the reviews start coming in.

Wow Getting modded flamebait for quoting Pulp Fiction. Some people need to get a clue when moderating. Full Context of the quote

In this column, you'll find interesting facts about Gollum. It was based on a Los Angeles Times article, Putting a Human Face on 'It' (please note that you need to register -- it's free -- for accessing it.) Here are short quotes. Technically, Gollum is not a "he," but an "it" -- an agglomeration of 1s and 0s that required six years of research, scores of computer programmers and countless cycles of processing power to make the animated amphibious creature as believable as human actors. The key, though, was a human actor -- a classically trained Shakespearean stage player named Andy Serkis whose face never appears on-screen, but nonetheless infuses Gollum with enough sadness and pain to make him perhaps the most believable computer-generated character in a movie.

As I wrote in this column, extreme programming is not really new. "Extreme Programming (XP)" is just another way of saying "Team -- or pair --programming". Programming in pairs is the most difficult aspect for many to accept (believe me). Even for XP die-hards like Edward Hiett, who works for San Francisco-based Evant, programming with someone looking over your shoulder remains disconcerting. ``Programming is a very creative process and requires a lot of concentration. It's natural to want to go away and do it by yourself,'' says Hiett, , where all programmers work in pairs. ``With pairing, you have to give up control.''

As noted by Bill Bumgartner, file size of the package has gone from 7.2MB to 6.9MB.

I haven't seen file size increase with upgrades. The Safari developers should be proud.

Check out the recent discussions on lambda the ultimate (a programming languages weblog).

Check out the recent discussions on lambda the ultimate (a programming languages weblog).

In this column, you can read what I thought about this. "About a week ago, my bank asked me if I wanted a new plastic card, named Moneo. This card would be dedicated to small purchases, like newspapers or a french baguette. My bank also asked for 10 euros per year for the card..." Personally, I don't think Moneo will be successful except if it's free. For more details, check this BusinessWeek article or the official Moneo website (in french). Roland Piquepaille.(http://radio.weblogs.com/0105910/)

On the risc of being a lil offtopic, I would like to share the following observations.
Interesting how our brain works. Powerpoint Syndrom is a very fine observation. English is not my first language( and that explains all the gramatical and spelling mistakes :-) ). However, it has been the language of my education. One of the tips'n'tricks that my english teacher from school told me was that in order to imporve my english, I should start thinking in it. The idea was that we our brain uses the first language (urdu in my case), and so our thoughts are limited by the expressions we can come up with using the language. Whatever language we learn afterwards is a process of run-time translations. But then with the passage of time we master other languages and we can train our brain to think in all these languages.

So whats the point in pointing out the obvious. We are taught the basics, like the alpabets, and then we build upon these basics. However our knoweldge, our way of thinking will always be limited by basics. Its just like the decimal system. There are only 10 digits. You ll only be re-using them again and again. Consider how difficult it would have been if we were all to use the binary system for our daily mathematics. Same goes for the possiblity of using hexa or maybe centa number systems.

Edward D. Bono pointed out in his book on lateral thinking the very same things. We are taught a basic way of thinking, of reasoning. Thats limits us in looking at things from a different prospective.

An interesting paper, Beyond Language: Cultural Predispositions in Business Correspondence disucsses this issue.

Look at IKVM.NET for an example:
http://radio.weblogs.com/0109845/
GNU Classpath meets Mono!

Our Boston Public Library, the so called Massachusetts Library
of Last Recourse, deflects people interested in our Sound Archives collections.
Of interest are the recordings of now defunct local broadcasters.
Shelf lists are public record, but BPL has
violated state freedom of information principles!

See also
Weblog. Guide to Problematical Library Use. Boston Public Library.

Stories
http://GuideToProblematicalLibraryUse.WebLogs.com/ stories

Updates
http://GuideToProblematicalLibraryUse.WebLogs.com
http://zork.net/~dsaklad

Our Boston Public Library, the so called Massachusetts Library
of Last Recourse, deflects people interested in our Sound Archives collections.
Of interest are the recordings of now defunct local broadcasters.
Shelf lists are public record, but BPL has
violated state freedom of information principles!

See also
Weblog. Guide to Problematical Library Use. Boston Public Library.

Stories
http://GuideToProblematicalLibraryUse.WebLogs.com/ stories

Updates
http://GuideToProblematicalLibraryUse.WebLogs.com
http://zork.net/~dsaklad

Baysian filtering IS word-counting with (not very sophisticated) statistical heuristics applied to the results

This may be the case, but most of the newer filters available now are not really Bayesian filtering by this definition. I use spambayes, and it has some very sophisticated algorithms to determine the statistical probability of the "spamminess" of a ham/spam.

Some of these fancier algorithms were developed by Gary Robinson and are discussed in some detail here. You can see the results of these different classification techniques (gary combining, chi-squared) in some nice graphs here.

On a related note, spambayes is VERY accurate in catching spam for me. Amazingly so in fact. It does a far better job than SpamAssassin or the Bayesian filter in Mail.app in my personal experience.

I wrote the following on Dec. 20, 2002 about phenotropics. Jaron Lanier is mostly known for being the guy behind the expression "virtual reality." For its special issue "Big [and Not So Big] Ideas For 2003," CIO Magazine talked with him about a new concept -- at least for me -- phenotropics. "The thing I'm interested in now is a high-risk, speculative, fundamental new approach to computer science. I call it phenotropics," says the 42-year-old Lanier. By pheno, he means the physical appearance of something, and by tropics, he means interaction. Lanier's idea is to create a new way to tie two pieces of software together. He theorizes that two software objects should contact each other "like two objects in nature," instead of through specific modules or predetermined points of contact. Jason Lanier also talks about software diversity to enhance security. Check this column for a summary or the original article for more details."

AFAIK, QUEL was originally developed specifically for Ingres, and was considered a better implementation of a relational query language than SQL, by such people as Codd, Date, et al.

(Short discussion on the history of Ingres here, here, and here)

AFAIK, QUEL was originally developed specifically for Ingres, and was considered a better implementation of a relational query language than SQL, by such people as Codd, Date, et al.

(Short discussion on the history of Ingres here, here, and here)

However Microsoft have got pretty much every other language - Basic, Python, Eifel, Cobol, Perl, Scheme etc. to run.

I don't know why no one has called Miguel on his claim that you have to translate everything to Java, but .NET provides a happy shiny world where all of the languages are well-supported. Clearly that's untrue.

Personally, I liked Good Omens, but then again, I also like British comedy in general. If you aren't a fan of that genre, I can see how some people might not have cared for it. [personally, I think it still ranks as my favorite book to date, but then again, I also love MPFC, Red Dwarf and the like].
[not directly a reply to you, but to some of the others in this thread]

As for Neverwhere, the problem is that you read the book. This is one of those cases where the book didn't come first. [ie, it's like reading the book adaptation of a movie... it's going to suck, so don't bother]. It was decent, but it wasn't nearly as good as the BBC mini series, that Neil Gaimen did with Lenny Henry [whom most Americans would only recognize from Chef! if their PBS station carried it]. The current anticipated release date for it in the US is June 2003. [See the Jan 17th entry]

It was shown in the US, however, as a promotion through the release of the book in the US by Borders, which is when I saw it. [Personally, I know it's sick, but I liked the frog scene]. Oh...and although it was done 6 years ago, and US standards were low, it had that gritty 'Dr. Who' production budget feel to it, but it was still good TV.

While they started out with the bayesian algorithm described by Paul Graham they quickly discovered that the effectiveness of his algorithm tends to depend on the values of some quite sensitive tuning parameters and that diffrent people can get wildly differing degrees of success depending on their configuration and the types of spam/ham that they receive. Gary Robinson wrote an interesting critique of Paul's algorithm and helped the spambayes team incorporate his so-called chi-squared combining scheme (which apparently isn't bayesian at all) which doesn't seem to depend so much on 'magic' numbers and their testing framework showed that it works surprisingly well for both small and large sets of messages.

It's still under active development although most of the ongoing work is centered around the user interface components (POP proxies, Outlook plugins, etc...) whereas the actual spam classifier hasn't changed much in a while.

Well worth looking into if you're getting too much spam. Who isn't?

Karlin Lillington, respected technology hack with the Irish Times, had a "researcher" in MIT medialab Europe check out the browser ... and it gets glowing reports. Details in her blog.

Karlin Lillington, a respected journalist for the Irish Times newspaper, maintains a weblog and has posted a more technical analysis here after talking to some people from MIT's media lab in Dublin, Ireland.
Some snippets:
"He says that what Adnan has done is re-engineer the efficiency of how a browser operates, which allows it to run up to six times faster (but usually not that much faster -- two to four times faster is more common). So it's not managing bandwidth but managing the way the browser itself handles and presents information. The researcher (whom I know and will vouch for) says that instead of simply tinkering with existing code he went down to the socket layer and reworked it at the protocol level (now, many of you guys will know the significance of this better than me, I'm just reporting the conversation). He added that it is incredibly clever work and stunning that a 16 year old has done this (I am not scrimping on the superlatives because that is what was said)."
So perhaps there is some truth in this after all.
newsQuakes

Karlin Lillington has more on the browser today and this seems informed!!

The Irish browser story: Ok folks, here's the scoop. I am just back from talking to one of MIT Media Lab Europe's researchers, who both checked out the browser and talked to Adnan. He says the browser is 'absolutely extraordinary'. He says that what Adnan has done is re-engineer the efficiency of how a browser operates, which allows it to run up to six times faster (but usually not that much faster -- two to four times faster is more common). So it's not managing bandwidth but managing the way the browser itself handles and presents information. The researcher (whom I know and will vouch for) says that instead of simply tinkering with existing code he went down to the socket layer and reworked it at the protocol level (now, many of you guys will know the significance of this better than me, I'm just reporting the conversation). He added that it is incredibly clever work and stunning that a 16 year old has done this (I am not scrimping on the superlatives because that is what was said). (NB: A conversation in a group ensued that this work perhaps suggests that because the browser market is a virtual monopoly, there's been little incentive to improve efficiency in this way -- indeed, it might be beneficial to product development to just eke out a leeeetle more efficiency now and then and advertise it as continuing innovation... but I leave that to further discussion among the well-informed).

And Adnan has indeed worked in all the existing media players AND a DVD player so you can watch a DVD while surfing. And incorporated in a voice agent that will speak web pages, for young children or for the sight-impaired. The improved efficiency angle got the notice of the few media reports done on this so far, but it's really not what Adnan himself was emphasising -- it's the whole package, said the MIT guy.

Not surprisingly Adnan now has more than one university interested in him. And he has apparently told the numerous companies who saw the browser in action and who wanted to commercialise it that, at least for now, he has no interest in commercialising it.

I will note that the MIT researcher had a big grin on his face and it was clear he found the whole project a pleasure to talk about. He also said he'd heard about the browser before he arrived at the Young Scientist exhibition and made a beeline to see it. Adnan apparently didn't really think it would necessarily win an award --the researcher told me it was clear that it HAD to win. So there you go. I'm sure we'll hear a lot more about all this soon.

And yes, he has copyrighted it.

Read More...

Karlin Lillington has more on the browser today and this seems informed!!

The Irish browser story: Ok folks, here's the scoop. I am just back from talking to one of MIT Media Lab Europe's researchers, who both checked out the browser and talked to Adnan. He says the browser is 'absolutely extraordinary'. He says that what Adnan has done is re-engineer the efficiency of how a browser operates, which allows it to run up to six times faster (but usually not that much faster -- two to four times faster is more common). So it's not managing bandwidth but managing the way the browser itself handles and presents information. The researcher (whom I know and will vouch for) says that instead of simply tinkering with existing code he went down to the socket layer and reworked it at the protocol level (now, many of you guys will know the significance of this better than me, I'm just reporting the conversation). He added that it is incredibly clever work and stunning that a 16 year old has done this (I am not scrimping on the superlatives because that is what was said). (NB: A conversation in a group ensued that this work perhaps suggests that because the browser market is a virtual monopoly, there's been little incentive to improve efficiency in this way -- indeed, it might be beneficial to product development to just eke out a leeeetle more efficiency now and then and advertise it as continuing innovation... but I leave that to further discussion among the well-informed).

And Adnan has indeed worked in all the existing media players AND a DVD player so you can watch a DVD while surfing. And incorporated in a voice agent that will speak web pages, for young children or for the sight-impaired. The improved efficiency angle got the notice of the few media reports done on this so far, but it's really not what Adnan himself was emphasising -- it's the whole package, said the MIT guy.

Not surprisingly Adnan now has more than one university interested in him. And he has apparently told the numerous companies who saw the browser in action and who wanted to commercialise it that, at least for now, he has no interest in commercialising it.

I will note that the MIT researcher had a big grin on his face and it was clear he found the whole project a pleasure to talk about. He also said he'd heard about the browser before he arrived at the Young Scientist exhibition and made a beeline to see it. Adnan apparently didn't really think it would necessarily win an award --the researcher told me it was clear that it HAD to win. So there you go. I'm sure we'll hear a lot more about all this soon.

And yes, he has copyrighted it.

Read More...

It's a good idea to punish the submitters and not the editors (since we obviously know when something's a dupe within seconds of it posting), but often difficult to find out who actually submitted the article (in this instance:)

The user you requested does not exist, no matter how much you wish this might be the case.

Well, in cases like this, we Slashdot the user! ;)

Without the equivalent of Perl's excellent DBI/DBD

Like ADODB?

What do you mean, sick and twisted things? Something like this?
"my document" hangs when explored
all fords ever maked
rape step by step pics
A place to play dating tests for kids age 11 to find out if I'm boyfriend material.
GAY WOMEN SPANK ME AND ARE SHITTING JIZZ OUT OF THEIR CUNTS
pres.bush in picture with hitler
WOMEN NUDE THAT 18 YEAR OLDS CAN LOOK AT!
touch typping
spell for larger penis

Nope, never seen such a disgusting site, sorry. Not here at work, anyway.

What sick and twisted things are people searching for?

Disturbing Search Requests: what blog owners find when looking through referrers in web server logs. These tend to be several-word searches, because single-word searches wouldn't take you to a random blog. Examples: "How to suck breasts", "build a giant robot", "cuntless otters", "worlds greatest asshole".

Google Adwords Keyword Suggestions: type a search term, and it will give common multiple-word searches that include your term. If you type in "porn", the multiple-word searches are child porn, free porn, kiddie porn, chill porn, cartoon porn, porn stars, gay porn, kid porn, lego porn, sex porn, porn nude, moose porn, and lesbian porn.

Keyword City: 10 most popular search words for the Sex & Pornography category. I don't know how reliable this site is. The top 10 are babe, sex, porn, hardcore, nude, xxx, anal, nudist, naked, and boob.

Metaspy Exposed: random searches on the Metacrawler search engine in real time. Because these are random, you may have to reload several times before you'll see any porn searches.

What's GHZ and how might GHZ be explained
for a high school physics class?...



oo__ don@saklad.org

Weblog Guide to Problematical Boston Public Library Use
http://GuideToProblematicalLibraryUse.WebLogs.com/ stories

What is Bell's Inequality?...



Cheer and seasons greetings!
oo__ don@saklad.org

Weblog Guide to Problematical Library Use
Updates
http://GuideToProblematicalLibraryUse.WebLogs.com
http://zork.net/~dsaklad
Stories
http://GuideToProblematicalLibraryUse.WebLogs.com/ stories
Forum
http://www.quicktopic.com/18/H/LvNZqHdLNB8

What is Bell's Inequality?...



Cheer and seasons greetings!
oo__ don@saklad.org

Weblog Guide to Problematical Library Use
Updates
http://GuideToProblematicalLibraryUse.WebLogs.com
http://zork.net/~dsaklad
Stories
http://GuideToProblematicalLibraryUse.WebLogs.com/ stories
Forum
http://www.quicktopic.com/18/H/LvNZqHdLNB8

Judging from most of the entries on Disturbing Search Requests, there would be a hearty market for that service.

I haven't done any Watson development, yet. (I'd like to give it a shot and compare it with Sherlock 3, when I get the time.) As noted above, Victor Ng has great notes on his experience with the SDK. As Victor notes, the most frustrating bit has to be the complete lack of feedback for even the simplest syntax errors. The developers of Watson have a brief, but informative comparison of the two SDKs, as well.

There are lots of comments on his trials with the new SDK as well.

If you'd like the code, I'd be happy to share it with you. I'd love to see it make it into production, and it's possible that the original sponsors might be able to make resources available to see it happen. Click the mail link on my blog if you want to get in touch.

John

My review has some details. It's like a recent Tom Clancy book set in a space opera. Lots and lots of talk before anything happens.