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Caldera Employee Was Key Linux Kernel Contributor

Christoph Hellwig has been, according to this web page, "in the top-ten list of commits to both the Linux 2.4 and Linux 2.5 tree". The page also mentions another fascinating piece of news, that he worked for Caldera for at least part of the time he was making those kernel contributions:

"After a number of smaller network administration and programming contracts he worked for Caldera's German development subsidiary on various kernel and userlevel aspects of the OpenLinux distribution."

In 2002, he offered a paper on "Linux-ABI: Support for Non-native Applications" which is described like this:

"The Linux-ABI project is a modification to the Linux 2.4 kernel that allows Linux to support binaries compiled for non-Linux operating systems such as SCO OpenServer or Sun Solaris."

Back in 2002, he was described, in connection with his appearance at the Ottawa 2002 Linux Symposium, like this:

"Christoph Hellwig
"Reverse engineering an advanced filesystem
"Christoph Hellwig is employed by Caldera, working on the Linux-ABI binary emulation modules. In his spare time he cares for other parts of the kernel, often involving filesystem-related activities."

So, in short, he was contributing to the kernel and working for Caldera on Linux/UNIX integration at the same time. His work for Caldera was on the Linux kernel ("he worked for Caldera's German development subsidiary on various kernel and userlevel aspects of the OpenLinux distribution"), and he also did work on his own on the kernel. Did Caldera know about his freelance contributions, in addition to knowing about his work for them? What do you think? He used his hch at caldera.de email address when doing it. All contributions to the kernel are publicly available anyway. They certainly could have known. As for his job, his signature on his emails back in 2001 was:

"Christoph Hellwig
Kernel Engineer Unix/Linux Integration
Caldera Deutschland GmbH".

He used the email address hch at bsdonline.org sometimes too, and here you can see some of his Linux-abi contributions. Here are some of his contributions to JFS, Journaled File System. Yes, that JFS. Here he is credited as sysvfs maintainer, and he confirms it in this email, writing, "I've run native sysvfs tools under linux, but as now that I'm Linux sysvfs maintainer I'm looking into implementing free versions of it."

Here is a list of the operating systems that use or can handle the file system sysvfs:

"sysvfs: UNIX System V; SCO, Xenix, Coherent e21
"operating systems that can handle sysvfs: FreeBSD (rw), LINUX (R), SCO (NRWF)"

Here's a page listing by author (alphabetically by first name), with his emails to linux-kernel in June 2003, so he is still contributing.

Here he is listed on the Change log for patch v2.4.17. Here he tells Andrew Morton in 2002 that he will

You mean something like adding ACE and other middleware packages to the STL? Might not be a bad idea. I agree that the STL is terribly underused.

Not according to that site you(?) posted the link to.

Yes, but most laws require intent (with some exceptions, such as speeding - somebody had a post here a couple of months ago addressing this... alas I can't remember enough of it to even do a proper search ... how about here - look for part D). Not that you intend to break the law, but that you intend to do what you are doing (such as somebody intending to scare somebody and their actions end up killing them instead - that still counts as intent).

Now here's an idea, get the RIAA to start prosecuting singing in the park, and we'll see how fast Congress changes the law to something more reasonable. (Well, a guy can hope, can't he?)

Studies like this one show that 'addictive personalities' tend to be prone to addiction to many things. Alcoholics are frequently gamblers or smokers too. He's going to get hooked on gambling if he goes to Vegas and still try to defend it as escapism.

-T

Another assembler for Java? How quaint. Seriously, the JVM is one of the most secure VMs in existance. It is also rather pragmatic. The default is to leave the door open for programs, but allow them to install security managers at any level in order to lock down code in the VM. Don't want code to use reflection? Bam! Security manager's got it locked down. Both Applets and Java Web Start include security managers by default to prevent malicious code. The *only* examples of true VM exploits are via Microsoft's VM. That thing has holes so large you can drive the U.S.S. Enterprise (CV-65, not CV-6) through them. Of course, that isn't actually Sun's fault, that's because Microsoft *likes* to punch security holes in the name of "ease of use". Don't even get me started on ActiveX.

http://wuarchive.wustl.edu/users/tom/mirrors/hub bl e/full_jpg.jpg

is a mirror of the full JPEG - about 5M. Enjoy.

20 Year Price List for the Cost of 1 TeraByte of Magnetic Disk Storage

As they state in the article, C. elegans have a life cycle of 7-10 days. As they also state in the article, the shuttle, at the end of its mission, crashed on Feb. 1. That was 89 days ago. But somehow they've only managed to go through 4-5 generations? It's a pretty simple calculation.

More interesting (like CNN hasn't ever had a problem with pretty obvious facts) however is the survival. If we were talking about fungi or bacteria, organisms which are able to enter a dormant/stationary phase of the life cycle, it wouldn't be too surprising that they could survive. But C. elegans just have a pretty basic (egg-->larva-->adult) life cycle so they don't have a mechanism for surviving extreme situations (like a flaming fireball smashing into earth).

One of the great things about C. elegans is that they're easy to mutagenize and determine which genes give rise to characteristics such as resistance to UV/ionizing radiation, long life, ability to consume large volumes of alcohol, etc. I hope that some of these super space worms get into the hands of folks like Leon Avery or Tim Schedl so they can figure out what helped these guys survive.

Assuming you are serious...

Check out this Nixon enemies list info about how the government can use its power to screw over citizens who disagree with it.

I worked for Cong. John Conyers for a few years, and I know the FBI and IRS was used against him personally, in part because he helped lead the impeachment process.

Anyone who believes the government won't abuse its powers and use them against honest citizens is sadly misinformed.

I agree completely. I use to play TNT (a simple and ugly dynablaster clone) a lot with my friends. This post actually make me find the game on the web. here it is

I suggest you read this.

Interesting. For genome analysis Hidden Markov Models have been used in a lot of software.

Maybe if you could have an image recognition system do the Hard Machine Vision probelm of generating a schematic of the picture, and then fed the "leg bone is connected to the hip bone" kinda data into a HMM you could work out which fossils are ancient Cambrian crustations and which ones are Trogdor the Burninator.

My medical opinion is that this guy has a bad allergy to Pyrimidines and Purines. He probably should watch out for those Phosphorous compounds as well. I suggest he move to a place far away from these dangerous chemicals.

Though I live in San Francisco now, I still consider myself a St. Louisianan and so must point out that St. Louis is the 18th largest city in the US (by metro-area population, not inner city population, which all major cities have been hemorraging for decades now). What's more St. Louis was the 3rd city to host an Olympic Games, and has one of the best universities in the nation, which means one of the best universities in the world.

A little reading would go a long way in your search for truth.

From the linked article:

Using the NanoSIMS probe, the Washington University investigators then measured the relative amounts of two isotopes of oxygen in more than a thousand grains from nine IDPs. The data told them which grains had come from stars.

From a link in the article:

The NanoSIMS is a first-of-its-kind ion microprobe in the Laboratory for Space Sciences in Arts & Sciences and is housed on the fourth floor of Compton Hall. The $2 million instrument is the first in the world built to analyze the isotopic and elemental composition of extremely small samples, such as interplanetary dust particles, at a sub-micrometer scale, allowing a first-time look at those particles' subcomponents.

And from a link on the NanoSIMS homepage:

Results: Of all the subgrains defined in 25 images from 9 cluster IDPs, roughly 1031 were measured with sufficient precision to distinguish solar material from circumstellar dust as shown in Figure 1. Only grains > 200 nm were measured with this level of precision. Six of these grains have O isotopic compositions which fall well outside the range of solar system materials, marking them as stellar condensates.

Seems to me like these cats know what they are doing.

A little reading would go a long way in your search for truth.

From the linked article:

Using the NanoSIMS probe, the Washington University investigators then measured the relative amounts of two isotopes of oxygen in more than a thousand grains from nine IDPs. The data told them which grains had come from stars.

From a link in the article:

The NanoSIMS is a first-of-its-kind ion microprobe in the Laboratory for Space Sciences in Arts & Sciences and is housed on the fourth floor of Compton Hall. The $2 million instrument is the first in the world built to analyze the isotopic and elemental composition of extremely small samples, such as interplanetary dust particles, at a sub-micrometer scale, allowing a first-time look at those particles' subcomponents.

And from a link on the NanoSIMS homepage:

Results: Of all the subgrains defined in 25 images from 9 cluster IDPs, roughly 1031 were measured with sufficient precision to distinguish solar material from circumstellar dust as shown in Figure 1. Only grains > 200 nm were measured with this level of precision. Six of these grains have O isotopic compositions which fall well outside the range of solar system materials, marking them as stellar condensates.

Seems to me like these cats know what they are doing.

Washington University

I used to do 8086 assembler, and now do Java, so now Java bytecode assembler is interesting!

I thought that carbon nanotubes have extremely high tensile strength (50-60 times that of high end steel). If you were to launch something at a shaft of nanotubes, I bet that you would see the structure flex back and rebound sending your projectile in the opposite direction at a slightly lower speed. In fact, I would fly the plane myself just to see something like that happen :)

Wuarchive was established in 1988 through a variety of grants and donations. During the era of Good Times, before the World Wide Web was anything but a pipe dream of the common spider, before the dot-com explosion and subsequent implosion, and some time after man first set foot on the moon, there was Wuarchive. Rumor has it that a year or two after its creation, Wuarchive was involved in 15% of worldwide Internet traffic. To the relief of those who pay our bandwidth bills, this is no longer true, but Wuarchive remains a useful resource for both the Washington University community and the public at large.

See this article for a slightly more technical treatment of the item.

Not necessarily *all* FM radio sucks. Let's not forget college radio! If you think it sucks, then at least it's something *different* that sucks, and you had the chance to hear something new.

And now, a shameless plug for the station I am involved with, where you don't often hear something that ClearChannel would play: KWUR 90.3FM. Since you probably aren't within our rather small broadcast radius (10 watt transmitter) you can listen to our MP3 streams.

I forgot to mention in my previous post this paper. Among other things, it mentions that the CORBA standard is one supported by a consortium of 700+ companies collectively referred to as the Object Management Group. CORBA wasn't thrown together haphazardly, a lot of thought went into it.

Among others.

"What is the limit where the media falls apart and send shards of plastic into your jugular and eye socket?"
About 30000 rpm, according to this page (this is a mirror, the original got irrevocably Slashdotted a couple of months ago). When they start to reach that speed, you better take cover... I quote from the page:
"The CD fragments left the disc at such high ejection speed that they deformed the shrapnel protectors, made out of 1.0 mm aluminium. The protectors were dented, torn up, and knocked off their fastening bolts."

This sounds a like a perfect recipe for Senseless Explosion

Dr. Doug Schmidt hosts the Adaptive Communications Environment (ACE), which is essentially a C++ library or framework of building blocks. Although the learning curve is a bit steep, I have since created several Win32 NT-service client/server apps using the ACE library. I find that the ACE mindset simplifies design, and once the project's designed, implementation is very rapid since it's just a matter of gluing together various pieces of the ACE library. Please forgive my sorry introduction to this wonderful toolkit, and go read about ACE for yourself! You will be glad that you did!

Boy, does that bring back memories. In the fifties computers were invariable referred to as "electronic brains" or "giant brains" and at regular intervals from the fifties through, maybe the seventies it was announced that computers that "rivalled the brain" in processing power had just been built.

About the time Hubert Dreyfus published "Artificial Intelligence and Alchemy" everyone started to get a little more restrained about this.

Of course, estimates of the brain's processing power have been made periodically, notably by Nicolas Rashevsky , but since all such estimates are based on the assumption that we understand how the brain works, and since we don't, in fact, understand how the brain works, they should be regarded as very suspect.

Actually, the Corona program did use Kodak film. Due to static problems with early film (which caused arcing on the exposed negatives), Kodak developed polymer-based film.

I work in an electron microscopy lab and the film used for the EM systems is Kodak 4489 "ESTAR Thick Base" -- which means that my paychecks depend directly on something that was developed for use in space. (As a space buff -- Buran is/was the Soviet space shuttle -- I'm quite pleased with that situation.) A spinoff, as they're commonly called.

The EM film is mounted on metal plates for exposing and when developed yields 8cmx10cm transparencies using Kodak D-19 developer. For Corona, the exposed film was placed in a reentry capsule which parachuted back to earth and was retrieved midair by a C-119 Flying Boxcar aircraft. It doesn't take that long to develop at all and can be ready for analysis the same day.

According to the Kodak EM film page:

"KODAK Electron Micrography Film 4489 has approximately half the speed of KODAK Electron Image Film SO-163 film, but exhibits less curl and shorter pump-down times. Coated on a 7mils Estar support, KODAK Electron Microscope Film offers exceptional dimensional stability and eliminates the use of traditional glass support products."

We are still using film because (1) electron microscopes are very expensive, so ours are from the mid-1970s, (2) it's not that easy to retrofit them, at least as far as I understand it, for full digital, and (3) it's not all that hard to put the negatives on a lightbox and shoot them with a professional digital SLR, which is how we get the images into computers for processing. And, of course, (4) digital camera technology still hasn't beat out film for quality yet, though we're hoping to get a Canon EOS-1Ds soon that will start to close the quality gap.

(The film is kept in a vacuum once in the microscope -- something else which I'm sure was a benefit for Corona.)

If you want to see some sample EM images taken with the Kodak film, see our lab's image gallery. Don't bother with Kodak's sample images, they suck. ;)

I'm pretty sure that Kodak also designed the Corona camera system, though I'm not certain who the actual builder was.

My personal favorite is Adapted Wavelet Analysis from Theory to Software by Victor Wickerhauser. Victor wrote the fast wavelet routines I used in my tool XWPL, and he contributes practical coder's experience, not just theory. One of the examples he gives from his own personal experience is the FBI's fingerprint compression algorithm, developed in 1993 or so.

My personal favorite is Adapted Wavelet Analysis from Theory to Software by Victor Wickerhauser. Victor wrote the fast wavelet routines I used in my tool XWPL, and he contributes practical coder's experience, not just theory. One of the examples he gives from his own personal experience is the FBI's fingerprint compression algorithm, developed in 1993 or so.

There were SCSI-Networking drivers from the Amiga world back in the early 90s for the Amiga (and PC). At the time, one could do Amiga-Amiga, Amiga-PC, PC-PC. This is the only evidence I can find now, but I remember the hack.

The amiga was heavily used for Render Farms around then, it was the beowulf-cluster of its day, people in the tv and direct-to-video film industry used to buy 30 amigas running Lightwave and network them instead of a high-end unix box.

That has been debated! Scientists tend to be pigheaded about their pet theories and thus the subject of Homo Sapient/Neandertalis hybrids has become the cause of full blown trench warfare among scientists.

But enaugh about the bonfies of (scientific) vanity. Geneticists claim they have extracted Homo Sapiens Neandertalis DNA from fossils. Now..... some of the people who evaluated these results claim that interbreeding was impossible or at best extremely unlikely. Critics of this assertion point out that if Camels and Guanacos (30-40 million years of genetic isolation) can produce viable hybrid offspring the same should be the case with Homo Sapiens Sapiens and and Homo Sapiens Neandertalis where the Genetic isolation was much, much, smaller. This seems to be born out by evidence from Israel (debated) and especially new discoveries in Portugal . Some of the aversion to the possibility of Neandertal/Cromagnong hybrids seems to be almost Eugenic with some people which is probably due to the Neandertals undeserved reputation of being a primitive hominid when, at least in my humble opinion, they fully deserve the title "Sapiens". Personally I would not be at all disappointed to find I had some Neandertal DNA. There is a legion of worse possibilities when it comes to embarrasing ancestors than Neandertals. Feel free to make fun of me for saying that, I'm sure some of you can will not be able to resist it.

Ps. I am not an anthropologist and I may be misusing the term Homo Sapiens Sapiens, these hominids are also sometimes referred to as Homo Sapiens Cromagnon.

Douglas Schmidt's Adaptive Communication Environment (ACE) is a fantastic pattern based os abstraction library. You can get a copy of it at cs.wustl.edu. It will provide you with abstractions for threads, IO, configuration, etc and it runs on every platform imaginable. It also support many compilers. You can use the built in make system as well to do cross platform compiling. Another good cross platform build system can be found in the mozilla source code. You can grab a copy of it at mozilla.org and see how they handled cross platform compiling. It uses nspr, another pretty good os abstraction library.

One thing that blocks the use of Gtk for some projects is its internal use of CORBA. If your code also needs to use CORBA for some reason, then you can run into linking conflicts where each library tries to bring in its own version of the ORB.

(I've seen this specifically with Gtk vs ACE/TAO. But then again, ACE isn't something you should ever use if it can be avoided.)

A virtue in programmers is laziness well applied.
The easiest way to be lazy is to make use of
someone else's work. Best of all is if it's free.

The Adaptive Computing Environment
has already done most of the heavy lifting in terms of cross-platform stuff. Free as in beer, free as in liberty.

I've developed several multi-threaded mulit-plateformed applications using ACE. This is a very well thought out package using various patterns to abstract the vulgarities of the different OS / compilers. ADAPTIVE Communication Environment

I've heard good things about the ACE/TAO cross platform library. From what I've heard, it has a learning curve, but it adds a very strong layer of abstraction over top of the operating system services (network, threading, syncronization).

ACE/TAO are open source and will build on a number of platforms with a number of compilers.
Overview:
http://deuce.doc.wustl.edu/doc/RandD/TAO/Overview/

I don't think you're talking about the Skinner box, which is a device used in the psychology of learning, but rather the Chinese room, which is John Searle's take on AI and the Turing test.

You can also read the story here.

I'm half-expecting Waterston to also get the Nobel sometime in the near future, once the entire public human genomic sequencing effort has yielded all of its results. The processes and data gained have been valuable to the entire community to a whole, and he's been instrumental in bringing everything together.

I'm half-expecting Waterston to also get the Nobel sometime in the near future, once the entire public human genomic sequencing effort has yielded all of its results. The processes and data gained have been valuable to the entire community to a whole, and he's been instrumental in bringing everything together.

ZThreads and ACE are the ones that comes to mind. I particularlly like ZThreads Executor classes - sort of like CSP. I think the author has a paper on his web page about it.

Does anyone still use straight POSIX for threading? The old C interface is woefully inadequate for modern C++ code and ideas. I use something like ZThreads or ACE.

Dory

On the web, see: Assoc. for Uncertainty in Artificial Intelligence -- this is the primary conference devoted to belief networks, which are a class of graphical (in the circles and arrows sense) Bayesian probability models. There are tutorials and other papers on the main AUAI web page, and links to the last several years of conference proceedings. By the way, Heckerman and Horvitz, now doing belief networkish work at MS Research, are in the AUAI crowd.

In print, my favorite reference is E.T. Jaynes, "Probability Theory: The Logic of Science", which is due out soon. See this web site devoted to Jaynes' work for the status. I am also fond of Castillo, Gutierrez, & Hadi, "Expert Systems and Probabilistic Network Models".

There are a vast (well, maybe just large) number of alternative models to classify things; a good introduction is Hastie, Tibshirani, & Friedman, "Elements of Statistical Learning". Incidentally, they use spam classification to illustrate several kinds of models.

Finally, if you're wondering what the heck is the difference between Bayesian probability and any other kind -- just google the posts in sci.stat.math; there is a Bayesian vs frequentist flame war about once a year. :^)

Two caveats: first, changing lighting conditions shift where skin falls in the chromosity plane, so the UV look-up table needs to be retrained for new environments or automatically shifted to account for lighting. Second, we found that because we ignore the Y component, certain shades of red are labeled as skin even though they dont resemble skin to a human eye. As such, for more robust skin detection the Y component cannot be completely ignored.

Michael Dixon
Media and Machines Lab
Computer Science and Engineering
Washington University in St.Louis

Unless I'm hallucinating, it looks like the Washington University people just updated their Lewis Webpage once they realized that they were being slashdotted. They've addressed a lot of the issues raised here, including why they built it in the first place. They also added a nice page of specs and some robot-photos too.

Unless I'm hallucinating, it looks like the Washington University people just updated their Lewis Webpage once they realized that they were being slashdotted. They've addressed a lot of the issues raised here, including why they built it in the first place. They also added a nice page of specs and some robot-photos too.

Unless I'm hallucinating, it looks like the Washington University people just updated their Lewis Webpage once they realized that they were being slashdotted. They've addressed a lot of the issues raised here, including why they built it in the first place. They also added a nice page of specs and some robot-photos too.