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One of the payloads is the SAPPHIRE satellite.

It has a digital camera on board to take pictures, just as a freebie add-on.

The interesting thing is the specs on that camera, the Logitech Fotoman Plus. A resolution of 496 x 360, with 256 levels of gray. Stores 32 pictures in RAM. A serial interface. A cost of $520.

See... they had to pick the camera back in 1994. So they're using 7 year old technology. Amazing how far things hav come, isn't it?

One of the payloads is the SAPPHIRE satellite.

It has a digital camera on board to take pictures, just as a freebie add-on.

The interesting thing is the specs on that camera, the Logitech Fotoman Plus. A resolution of 496 x 360, with 256 levels of gray. Stores 32 pictures in RAM. A serial interface. A cost of $520.

See... they had to pick the camera back in 1994. So they're using 7 year old technology. Amazing how far things hav come, isn't it?

Too Late, it's already nuked and glowing!

change of subject:

I remember back in 1981, at Washington University, the anti-nuke groups were protesting that "any amount of radiation is dangerous". Hence, some friends and I formed a group called SOTS (Stamp Out The Sun). "Stamp Out The Sun... because any amount of radiation is dangerous". Looks like we knew what we were talking about!!!!

But when building a new application, Java is more often than not a better choice than C/C++, simple because it was build with networking in mind.

Or you can download ACE and get it all for C++. One of the most productivity-enhancing uses of design patterns I've ever seen.

I used an RCA Recomp III back in '74. Paper tape punch... You didn't program in assembler, you hand-assembled it and punched in the octal code onto paper tape!

And when I was about 8 (1970), I had one of those plastic 3-bit mechanical digital computers... anyone else remember the DigiComp?

The biggest violation that you missed was perpetrated by FDR during WWII. This was the closest America has come to a "final solution" so recently (terrifying).

Previously it was the American Indian (from our modern standpoint it is fortunate for America that the American Indian lacked access [GUN CONTROL in action] to a sufficient quantity of guns and ammunition to preserve their way of life ... visit some reservations to get a clearer picture ... the ones who faught are all dead now so we can't ask why they faught)

Because the second amendment, and those championing "gun rights", have never protected their rights and they never will. NOT EXACTLY ==> Guns Save Lives [News] Stories (eleven-pages of hyperlinks ... there would be more for 2001/2000 but there seems to be growing censorship of publishing these stories - memory hole???)

California's Government Code, Sections 821, 845, and 846 which state, in part: "Neither a public entity or a public employee [may be sued] for failure to provide adequate police protection or service, failure to prevent the commission of crimes and failure to apprehend criminals." (Please check this out as I only copy 'n pasted from a non-CA gov't website ... maybe it is misquoted ... whether misquoted or not you can still "Dial 911 and [wait to] die" ;-);-);-)

Of Holocausts and Gun Control (Washington University Law Quarterly)

GAMBLING WITH YOUR LIFE Is 911 an acceptable option?

Statistics the Gun Haters Don't Talk About

The Racist Roots of Gun Control

Taking Aim at Gun Control

"Dial 911 and Die (Radio Commercial)"

GUN CONTROL: A REALISTIC ASSESSMENT

The First Million Mom March

Guns and Violence: A Summary of the Field

Gun Control Advocates Purvey Deadly Myths

Research related to "Gun Control

"Genocide Delayed"

Jews and "Gun Control": Fear of Freedom or Freedom from Fear?

The Racist Origins of US Gun Control: Laws Designed To Disarm Slaves, Freedmen, And African-Americans

Post your mailing address so I can send you a yard signs and window stickers that say "The people in this home are unarmed. We depend on 911" and "Protected by 911"

I would post more links to DATA but the hour is late and we are beginning to go off topic from the First Amendment issue. Although I raised the other twenty-six Amendments as a "tangential editorial comment"

AC is correct, the category is refered to as Economic Science. A professor at Washington University was awarded the Nobel for it in 1993.

http://library.wustl.edu/units/spec/archives/facts /nobelprizes.html


The increase in tuition in 1994 made that little piece of trivia easy to remember.

Da. Stimmt. Very true. You are very right that variables, flow control, functions et al. are what are important.

The problem is that most CS departments don't like teaching languages. Therefore they must use a real (read: very powerful/widely used) language (C/C++/Java) for the into courses, so that later on, when students are doing more real-world things, they already have the language skills to do it.

Now, the first programming course I took (in high school) was a semester of C, then a semester of C++. Personally, I think that this is one of the best ways to go. C doesn't have any of the fancy OO stuff. It encourages you to use loops and function calls. It isn't some "pure" language (Smalltalk = pure OO, Lisp = pure functional, etc), and can therefore be used to teach a variety of styles. Porcedural-type programming is the simplest thing for a beginner to understand, but they do need to be introduced to recursion and OO too. C is a fairly solid, usable, simple language and allows such.

OK, now for the disclaimer. I said simple. There are 2 topics in C that are not simple, and I wish that there was a version of C where they were unneeded. Pointers and memory management. A lot of people find learning C difficult for the simple reason that pointers and memory management are confusing complex topics, and very integral to effective use of C.

Disclaimer part 2: I said usable. Another problem with C is that you can't do neat shit with it right away. Beginners want eye candy. They want to do something impresive, without too much difficulty. C is bad at that. No fancy graphics. No easy network code. None of the nifty things that other languages make fairly easy and removed from the hardware. You say that libraries aren't important for the first 3-6 months. I'd revise that to say teaching libraries isn't important for the first 3-6 months. But if you can provide some code that lets your students easily do something cool (they write maze-solving code, you write a graphical frontend for them), then they are more likely to stick with it.

Given that, I think that Java isn't that bad of a choice. Yes, Java is OO, which is a count against it as a teaching language. But it is garbage collected. It also has no pointers. These two things are very very nice for an intro language. I know that when we started pointers/memory management in HS, we lost 1/4 the class (and they had to take a drop). At the semester (where there was no drop penalty) we lost half again. The lack of these difficulties makes Java a very tempting choice. Also, Java has all of the eye candy one could possibly want, and then some. Yes, it isn't good to teach all of those fancy libraries to beginners, but giving them code that lets them use some of the fancy stuff is good encouragement.

Now, Java is OO. Most people teaching it as an intro language introduce the OO features. This is probably not good. But just because it has OO doesn't mean you have to use the OO. So there is some magic "public class fooclass{" stuff around all of your code. And instead of "int main(){" you have "public static int main(String []..." garbage. But you can still pretend that it is functional, or procedural, or whatever. Like C, Java is a hybrid language.

So, you say language features are unimportant. Fancy features are unimportant, but the simple features of

1. Garbage collection
2. No pointers
3. Hybridness

Oh, and I'm not talking entirely out of my ass. My first CS course in high school was in C, but the intro college course I took was taught in Java. CS 101, while it did focus more on OO than I thought healthy, was a very good intro class nevertheless. The labs had a lot of provided code, and then ask you to fill in simple methods for it to work well. Overall, an excellent course, if a bit slow for someone who already knows how to program.

I guess it sums up that Java isn't a bad language to teach in, but that you need to teach it correctly (no OO, no libraries) for it to be good.

Now given the nature of the GPL people working for the US government have little choice when they work on the GPL software than to write more of it. It seems clear to me that M$ is going to push hard to prevent university staff from using or contributing to the GPL code base. I think that if they succeeded they would essentially cripple large parts of the computer using research sector in the US.

Of course in the end both US and other research sectors have benefitted from the GPL. It makes collaboration a lot easier, because the GPL is irrevocable. You know that collaborators can not later withdraw data or source code on you. In the days of NDA's this is a welcome relief.

There is also a fascinating manifesto from one researcher explaining why he choose to release his software under GPL. Well worth reading.

Phil

I just checked out the IMDB web page. They do have fairly strict limits on what you can do with it, but you can download the entire database in ASCII text from http://us.imdb.com/interfaces. They also provide link to many clients for various systems.

Compare that to CDDB where they only want you to access their database through 'approved' clients and don't want you to keep a local copy of the data.

I found that I could test about half of my installed memory on a debian PPC macintosh.

-Marcel

BTW: mlock()ing some memory temporarily can be useful for performance comparisons...

If it weren't for the regulation of society through the mechanism of slavery, and hence the suppression of the free market, we could have had the industrial revolution 2000 years ago.

200 BC: Alexandria, Egypt: A cultured city with a population of 500,000, the world's first lighthouse, university, library with 500,000 manuscripts/books, multi-decked shipping, theatres, temples with automatic sliding doors, and engineers working with a simple steam engine. From: Peter James and Nick Thorpe, Ancient Inventions.

In which case we would be about where we are now in high-tech back in AD 200. By AD

230 Billus Gaticus and Laurence of Ellisonius would be multi-trillionaires, clone many offspring, build a sanctuary in space, and then des troy the planet, so they can make version 3.1 the way it was supposed to be, and then encode their plan in DNA, enslave their new creations, and create a secret society so the information isn't lost.

Who needs money when you can have a planet of slaves?

For anyone interested, take a look at some of the work at Washington University. The Applied Research Lab is doing some really cool work here on optical burst switching.

Derek

I did quite a bit of analysis on her Ph.D. thesis several years ago. A lot of the things she did in it were pretty cool. Unfortunately, some of it was totally bogus. None the less, she often has very interesting things to say. A gratuitous link.

That was sarcasm. You could tell by our user id that we "joined" slashdot at about the same, assuming each of these accounts are our first. Although given what time we're each posting, I'll just assume we're tired. Btw, I'm guessing we're roughly the same age, I go to Wash U.

Kurdt

It's odd that this just made it into the media, as this project (known as SUO SAS) has been around for the better part of 2 years now--not counting the previous phases of development, which go back several more years.

While the article got a lot of things right, it was also a good portion of hype. I worked on the networking software for this (which is built on top of the TAO CORBA ORB, btw), and while it is conceivable that it might scale up to 10,000 nodes, it is unlikely to do so in it's current form (well, as of a few months ago, anyway). In fact, we faced more or less the same scalability problems that any ad-hoc wireless network system faces, plus the added complexities of having to guarantee consistent tactical picture maintenance (how do you keep a consistent data 'picture' of an entire battlefied among 10,000 separated nodes, with no guarantees on connectivity, or even addressing between any two particular nodes? Now, how do you tackle message-based quality-of-service on top of this mess?). So, for those of you wondering, the problem tackled by this system is a lot bigger and more complicated that than faced by peer-to-peer filesharing systems (think superset of the gnutella problem), and the algorithms we were developing weren't perfect--or even good, necessarily. The problems facing ad-hoc networking are certainly as unsolved and difficult as they were before.

Another important note is that while we ultimately got our way and were able to use Linux for development (partly because we absolutely refused to work with a platform where we didn't have access to the network stack code), it was kind of an uphill battle with DARPA to do so. Linux still isn't qualified to be running on any type of deployed military system, and believe me, we heard about it constantly (I still shudder at the thought of trying to do our development in Windows...)

All that said, the concept of the project was/is pretty cool, but, as always, reality is less dramatic than its press release. If you want more info on the project and related research, here are some links:

Info on geo-routing algorithms (directly relevant to the SUO SAS problem)

A blurb on SUO SAS by SRI

The DARPA ATO web page describing SUO SAS

It has to work on Windows...

Apple has announced it has no plans to support a JVM later than 1.1.8 on the classic Mac OS so you can't use all those great collection classes in Java 1.2 and be cross platform! (See Apple's Java Developer page and scroll down to where it says "Mac OS Classic Java".)

Use a cross-platform application framework. That way you can program on Linux, Mac, BeOS, Windows or maybe even QNX and deliver for all those schoolkids running Windows ME on their parents' PC.

One such framework, for C++, is ZooLib. There are many others, as you can see from The GUI Toolkit, Framework Page.

Read about why it's important to write cross-platform code.

I'm most familiar with ZooLib, because I've been working with it on the products I write for my clients, and I helped ZooLib author Andy Green prepare it for open source release late last year under the MIT License.

ZooLib offers all of the following implemented as C++ classes:

• Multithreading, with cross-platform C++ thread classes and various kinds of locks (simple mutexes, reader/writer locks) - multithreading is important for something like a servent. For systems like the Mac OS that don't have preemptive threads it has a handrolled thread scheduler.
• GUI, with a uniquely flexible layout method. The widgets are rendered by platform appropriate renderers, and you can make custom widgets. There's a renderer that will call through to the Appearance Manager on the Mac OS, if it's running.
• platform-independent TCP networking, it's implemented in terms of sockets on Linux, WinSock on Windows, sockets on BeOS and MacTCP on Mac OS. I think Open Transport may be working too on the Mac, I'm not sure - but on all platforms you use the same C++ classes for your networking with no platform-specific client code needed.
• Thread-safe reference counted smart pointers, for quick, efficient memory management that's free of leaks.
• Extensive debugging support - assertions in core components and a debugging memory manager, handy macros for assertions and the like
• Single-file database format with C++ interface. Create ZDatabase objects with ZTables in them. Much zippier than SQL and more pleasing to the object-oriented soul.
• File objects - you instantiate a ZFile object from a ZFileRef object, then use its Open, Close, Read and Write methods
• Platform-specific file open and save dialogs with an API that's consistent with the rest of ZooLib. Filter by filetype on the Mac or filename three letter extension on windows. While ZooLib is cross-platform, it breaks out into platform specific code in cases like this where it's appropriate, in a way that's considered entirely sacreligious by the Java community.
• Streams that can be chained to provide filtering, somewhat like the iostreams classes in the C++ standard library but more appropriate for use with binary data. This is how you typically read or write to a file or network connection.
• Handy preprocessor macros to deal with platform specific code or selecting options like debug builds.
• Offscreen graphics buffers that may be manipulated directly via pointers or accessed in a manner that is transparent to the bit depth via GetPixel and SetPixel calls. All platforms have the same API that provide a wrapper around platform bitmap buffers. I believe there's a purely homegrown in-memory implementation, plus platform implementations bounds to the native GUI layer like GWorlds on the Mac OS.

ZooLib 0.81 is known to build with MetroWerks CodeWarrior on Windows and Mac OS, gcc on Linux, and gcc on BeOS for Pentium.

If you use CodeWarrior you can cross-compile and cross-debug; check out Thursby Software for some filesharing solutions that work well for this. (Tip - on Windows, select the "MacBinarize" post-linker in the target linker prefs when building a Mac target - you also need to derez all your resource files and include them as Rez text source).

While it should ultimately work, there are known build problems with BSD, CodeWarrior for BeOS PowerPC and Visual C++ on Windows. These are all being worked on and full support for all these platforms is expected before long.

Other cross-platform frameworks I'd like to note are:

• The Adaptive Communications Environment for cross-platform networking
• GTK - yes, that's right, GTK! but you must forgo using XLib calls and POSIX calls that are not in the ANSI C Standard Library
• The Netscape Portable Runtime for the non-GUI aspects of cross-platform development
• The Mozilla XPToolkit for cross-platform GUI
• Mozilla Netlib for network and file stream access
• Mozilla XPInstall for cross-platform installation, packaging and updating.
• Also check out AbiWord, a great cross-platform WYSIWYG word processor that's open source, with an open file format. As far as I know the only product coded in AbiWord's XP framework is AbiWord itself, but it's worth looking into for another look at how people architect these things.

People often mistake these problems for valid arguments that one should not do cross-platform development, or perhaps not render your own widgets when doing so but depend on platform specific ones (like AWT vs. Swing), but I think the lightweight, well architected, efficient and easy to use ZooLib answers those arguments very eloquently.

Help me teach the Free Software community to write quality code.

Mike

Even better, they make use of Design Patterns, Extreme Programming concepts, and other great software engineering practices (and as an added bonus: nice, friendly, insightful discussions minus the egos on their mailing lists).

The source code is free for the taking (very liberal license), super-cross-platform, and you can buy solid commercial support if you like.

It's good stuff; check it out.

I hope that it keeps half-assed attempts to get on-air away, as they would only add to the noise. However, I hope that it does not inhibit those who wished to start a small market station to fill in the voids left by corp. radio. Perhaps this will be a "start", with the opportunity for more lisences to increase assuming responsibility is shown?

Such "half-assed attempts" to go on the the air would not make it through the LPFM screening processs, as applicants would have to demonstrate the same technical competence as those for already existing lower class licenses (i.e. educational class d). Really the only distinction between LPFM applicants, and those for existing lower-power licenses is that LPFM applicants must demstrate some "community purpose," to be in tune with the spirit of LPFM.

As for whether this may inhibit the creation of a smaller, non-commercial radio market, let me relate my experience with the campus radio station, KWUR, that I've worked at for the past two years.

KWUR has been broadcasting in some form since 1964. Until 1976 it was a carrier current AM station only available on the dorms' electrical wiring net, after which it received an educational Class D license, allowing it to broadcast FM at a whopping 10 watts (~2 mile broadcast range). This makes it older than many of the 1.21 Jigawatt commercial stations that operate in St. Louis (ok, maybe not quite a Jigawatt), made even more unique by the fact that the station has been continuously student-run since its inception (quite a feat, considering how the staff turns over wholesale every 3-4 years).

For the past 10 years, possibly longer, we have submitted multiple pettitions to the FCC for a 100Watt wattage upgrade, and on each occasion, our pettition was struck down, largely because a local, 10KWatt NPR station on the 2nd-adjactent channel has consistently fought it tooth and nail. (They claim THEIR signal would interfere with ours, were we to upgrade, so they're really just looking out for our own interests. Funny, isn't it?). Anyway, in its decades of existence, the KWUR has garnered strong support and recognition from local musicians, art communities, and especially from nationwide associations of college radio stations...all to little avail. We broadcast to more people online, outside of St. Louis, than we could ever hope to reach right here in St. Louis.

The LPFM initiative would have been a great hope for us, as we would have used it justify new programming more directed at the local comminity, rather than the current indie college radio fare. Unfortunately, this hope is no more, since the "3rd-adjacent channel" restriction that has been shoe-horned into the LPFM bill by corporate lobbyists nixes ALL LPFM channels that would have been available in St. Louis.

So, does this hinder the engendering of grass roots radio markets that would actually have some origin from the audience they're broadcast too? Absolutely. Do such listeners actually prefer top-40 commercial radio continuously playing Eminem/Britney/Backstreet Boys on an automated 8-hour cycle? I doubt it.

...where the documents are:
http://ifarchive.org/if-archive/infocom/info/infoc om-paper.pdf and
http://ifarchive.org/if-archive/infocom/info/infoc om-presentation.pdf
(maybe a /. expert can tell me why those spaces are appearing in the text above? It's not in what I'm typing, and the links appear to work fine...)

But if that one goes away, it also has these alternates:

• Germany: ftp.gmd.de (ftp)
• USA: wuarchive.wustl.edu (http)
• USA: ftp.nodomainname.net (http)
• Finland: ftp.funet.fi (ftp)
• Australia: mirror.aarnet.edu.au (http) (ftp)

• http://www.ifarchive.org/ infocom-presentation.pdf and infocom-paper.pdf
• http://wuarchive.wustl.edu/ infocom-presentation.pdf and infocom-paper.pdf

• http://www.ifarchive.org/ infocom-presentation.pdf and infocom-paper.pdf
• http://wuarchive.wustl.edu/ infocom-presentation.pdf and infocom-paper.pdf

Here is a decent page on Electronic Democracy.

Find it at ftp://metaverse.wuh.wustl.edu

Enjoy...

If done properly, the short answer is "no" (the long answer is "not without a lot of work").

There is a project underway at my old school (Washington University to do magnetic fingerprinting of credit cards. The gist of the research is that a magnetic stripe with even a direct bit-for-bit copy would have different magnetic properties than the original, although the data would be the same.

If I recall correctly, the proof has been demonstrated and a commercial grade (i.e. not $12,000,000) device had been constructed.

So if included on the card was some sort of encrypted checksum of the fingerprint, a suitably equipped reader would flag a discrepancy between data and card, and thus the counterfeit would be immediatly obvious.

Now, I'm not so naïve as to suggest that the technology to defeat the fingerprinting won't come around, but it will take a while.

If done properly, the short answer is "no" (the long answer is "not without a lot of work").

There is a project underway at my old school (Washington University to do magnetic fingerprinting of credit cards. The gist of the research is that a magnetic stripe with even a direct bit-for-bit copy would have different magnetic properties than the original, although the data would be the same.

If I recall correctly, the proof has been demonstrated and a commercial grade (i.e. not $12,000,000) device had been constructed.

So if included on the card was some sort of encrypted checksum of the fingerprint, a suitably equipped reader would flag a discrepancy between data and card, and thus the counterfeit would be immediatly obvious.

Now, I'm not so naïve as to suggest that the technology to defeat the fingerprinting won't come around, but it will take a while.

Try looking at ACE.

The ADAPTIVE Communication Environment (ACE(TM))

It provides abstractions for mutexes, threading models, standard libraries, etc. It's not perfect, but it works pretty well. And it's free, open source, and cross-platform. Does this fit your bill?

- Spryguy

1. Go to http://www.debates.org
2. Click on the "Share Your Reactions To The Debate." link
3. Let them know that you DID NOT FIND THE DEBATES USEFUL, and that YOU WOULD LIKE TO HEAR WHAT [Harry Browne|Ralph Nader|Your Favoriate Candidate Here] HAS TO SAY ABOUT SOME OF THE ISSUES.

Despite the trolls, Instant Runoff Voting (IRV, aka Preferential Voting) is generally considered far superior to plurality winner-take-all. In the US, there is no constitutional problem with IRV (in fact, it has been endorsed in a consenting opinion by the Supreme Court, and by figures as diverse as Ralph Nader and Rush Limbaugh).

Due to a recent supreme court decision which invalidated blanket primary systems, the state of WA is revamping its primary system. Instant runoffs, due to their ability to collapse multiple virtual runoffs into a single round, are a cheaper replacement for primaries. It is very possible that the many groups interested in better democracy in WA (the Grange, the League of Women Voters, and the minor parties) will use the citizen interest in this issue to run IRV as a state initiative. If you're interested in this issue, contact me via email (it's not even obscured; leave the cookie in, please, even though I can handle it with or without).

ObOnTopic:
Anyone interested in voting systems should know about Arrow's Theorem, which states that there are no "perfect" ; voting systems. The only way to have a group of people preferentially rank a group of options so

1) new options will fit neatly into the ranking without mixing things up;

2) if everybody agrees on a ranking that ranking is chosen;

and 3) new voters who prefer A to B never cause B to win over A

is to have a dictatorship (ignore all voters except one). My personal choice of "ideal" system is to elect executives via borda selection among the condorcet-winning group. And then a house selected by proportional representation and a senate by approval voting. Hey, a boy can dream.

--

No, I did not intentionally leave out Corel, Suse, or any of the other distributions. I just mentioned a few of the big names that came to mind. I left out many distributions that use KDE as the default and many that use Gnome as the default.

And HP and Sun hardly will be the future of the workstations. Sounds more like server manufacturers wanted to define the desktop "standard".

HP and Sun do not just sell servers. They sell many, many UNIX workstations. Both of my previous programming jobs used these workstations. At the Washington University Electronic Radiology Laboratory we used Solaris on Sparc stations. And at Unigraphics Solutions my workstation was an HP-UX box.
----

I find myself in the following situation. I've completed 2 years of my bachelors in Computer Science at Washington University. Due to school expenses and other personal reasons, I have decided to take a break from school and work full-time, perhaps finishing my degree taking night classes. I have some experience programming in C and Java (both in my classes and at two interships), but I am definitely still scratching the surface. Given that I don't have a degree (yet), and I'm still developing my programming skills, how can I go about finding a job that will give me further experience and moderate to decent pay? I cannot demonstrate expertise in a language. What should I emphasize? Anyone else find themself in a similar situation?
----

I was recently pointed to this by a fellow Slashdotter, it's ACE the The ADAPTIVE Communication Environment . It's an Object Oriented Networking Toolkit written in C++.

Ed, ED, *ED* is the standard!

Absolutely.

(Yes, I still use ed on occasion, if I want to do a quick short editing job. I use KDE on my home machine, though; it mostly runs xterms and Netscape and xmms/xmcd, but I do find the folder icons more convenient for browsing through the pile of PDF standards documents than finding a free xterm or popping up a new one - or keeping one around, iconified - and cding around and firing up Acroread by hand.)

Well, here at WUSTL, we have one professor who supposedly does user interfaces full time (although his web page blows).

Also, there is a whole lab devoted to "visualization, which while their web page shows a bit of an emphasis towards video/multimedia, they do to a lot of work on data presentation and control layout.

I can't find any web resources for it, but there's a neat display on somebody's research into CHI (computer-human interaction) where they visualized the execution of a program very well, and then tied the visualization to execution control, such that you could very easily set optimization/execution priorities.

I suppose none of this is really straight GUI research, but more of CHI research with graphical focus.

Well, here at WUSTL, we have one professor who supposedly does user interfaces full time (although his web page blows).

Also, there is a whole lab devoted to "visualization, which while their web page shows a bit of an emphasis towards video/multimedia, they do to a lot of work on data presentation and control layout.

I can't find any web resources for it, but there's a neat display on somebody's research into CHI (computer-human interaction) where they visualized the execution of a program very well, and then tied the visualization to execution control, such that you could very easily set optimization/execution priorities.

I suppose none of this is really straight GUI research, but more of CHI research with graphical focus.

TAO is am extremely well-written, standards-compliant, open-source ORB that supports the entire 2.2 spec, and most of the 2.3 spec. I've been using this thing at work for the last 6 months or so, and I've been quite impressed. While it's not perfect, it has fewer gotchas than the commercial ORBs I've used. Did I mention that it's cross-platform, as well?

Here's the URL:

http://www.cs.wustl.edu/~schmidt/TAO.html

Iodine has a relatively short half-life of 15.6 Myr, and is generally considered useless for measurement on this time scale (i.e. almost 300x the half-life) After 300 half-lives, you'd expect 1 part in 2x10^90! That's one single atom left from 1.77 x 10^65 kg of I-129 - more than the mass of the universe, much less the mass of the I-29 in the universe (and, I'm willing to wager, more than the mass of the meteorite!)

The WashU Laboratory of Space Sciences has a page on isotope age determination in meteors, geologic formations and other ancient inorganic structures. Here's what they say on this very point:

Iodine-129 is now extinct in nature. Its short half-life, 15.6 million years, means that Iodine-129 has long since decayed away in a solar system that is 4.6 billion years old.

Furthermore, any radioisotope age determination is based on two things: a) a knowledge of the relative prevalence of the isotope; and b) the half-life. [If the original prevalence is not known, you can sometimes make estimates from decay products of multiple unrelated isotopes]

According to the 'standard' half-life, I-129 is not a useful isotope, but to make things worse, this sample was irradiated by the high-energy space environment for a very long time (I'm assuming millions or billions of years). Irradiation can cause accelerated decay, changing the effective half-life.

Bottom line: unknown original prevalence (somewhere in space, at some unknown time), unknown effective half-life, due to unknown but significant irradiation history, and an unsuitable isotope. Ugh. This is Scientology!

You'd get a better estimate by flipping coins for binary bits. Wait! Maybe they did! How else did they get that number at all?

-----------------
Brought to you by the guy who outed Katz as a Scientologist!

C doesn't have any particularly aesthetically pleasing IO libraries for this, primarily because by the time network programming becase so ubiquitous that better frameworks were needed, much new development had moved to C++. For an example of an extremely well designed C++ networking framework, see the ACE project which supports many different single and multi-threaded programming models in a portable fashion while still allowing you to use high-performance features (such as asynchronous IO) that are not supported on all platforms if you want to.

And in other news, following their glowing success in their suits against MP3 dot Com and Napstar dot Com RIAA has decided to "let it ride!", filling suits against Washington University, Necmer Soft, Inc.,The Apache Group, Netscape, and Microsoft. Only Microsoft was available for comment saying, "... this is no different than STAC...", making reference to the buyout and dissolution of STAC by Microsoft a number of years ago.

Gez. Fuck it! Let's sue the whole damned country. (*whisper*) Oh, Metallica is already doing that...

[And people say Communism and Socialism are Evil (tm).]

They'll interview and ask for a sample of your blood. If you can't go to their site, they can interview you over the phone and have a local physician or blood lab take the sample and mail it in.

michael@geometricvisions.com

Tilting at Windmills for a Better Tomorrow

Michael D. Crawford

Something you should check out are ACE and TAO. ACE is essentially middleware for C++ programming that will allow you to write code which will compile almost anywhere (all flavors of Unix, Windows CE/NT/9x/2k, various real-time OSs). TAO is a CORBA compliant ORB with the same properties. Basically, if you write your code using ACE (and TAO if you want), it will compile cleanly anywhere without you needing to account for cross-platform weirdness. Oh, and if I recall, ACE & TAO are LGPL'd.

Something you should check out are ACE and TAO. ACE is essentially middleware for C++ programming that will allow you to write code which will compile almost anywhere (all flavors of Unix, Windows CE/NT/9x/2k, various real-time OSs). TAO is a CORBA compliant ORB with the same properties. Basically, if you write your code using ACE (and TAO if you want), it will compile cleanly anywhere without you needing to account for cross-platform weirdness. Oh, and if I recall, ACE & TAO are LGPL'd.

And here is an HTTP link: http://wuarchive.wustl .edu/doc/gutenberg/etext93/pimil10.txt

Amiga stored its configuration files in two places - in the virtual file system volumes ENV: and ENVARC:. ENVARC: was typically stored on disk, and ENV: was usually a temporary copy usually stored on the RAM disk. Having a temporary configuration state for the current session was pretty convenient. If you broke a file, you always had an unbroken copy in ENVARC. =) The files in ENV: lived until you turned off your computer. The files in ENVARC: were persistent. However, almost each and every Amiga program that needed configuration files placed them in ENV: and ENVARC: by default, and when added up, these could use quite some space. Memory was more expensive in those days and AmigaOS did not have any support for virtual memory hardware.

What HappyENV did was create a virtual device which would expose each of ENVARC:'s files as ENV:'s. It would not be loaded into RAM until you actually open()'ed it in which a new file would be created in RAM, managed by HappyENV. It was not exactly copy-on-write, more of copy-on-read.. but the principle is there and it can probably be changed into using copy-on-write very easily. I believe that the author have thought of copy-on-write and figured that it would be more efficient to keep files in memory for reading as well.

HappyENV can be found in the software archive Aminet, for instance here and is Cardware (you should send the author a postcard) with source code included. (assembly language)

It may not last more than 15-20 minutes, but it was 15-20 minutes of laughter so concentrated that my lungs now hurt. The original game is so mind-bogglingly crappy it'd probably make one laugh anyways (as a defensive measure for your brain), but the MST3k-ification of it all turns it into an incredible masterpiece. EVERY old school text adventurer should check it out.

Even if you don't have frotz yet, get it and try it out. I'll even make it easy for you:

MST3Kified z-code game 'detective'

FT P Directory with Frotz (Most would want to get the src.rpm)

It's definately worth the time.

--
rickf@transpect.SPAM-B-GONE.net (remove the SPAM-B-GONE bit)

I get *so* tired of the endless yapping about Quake IV, Monkey Island XIII, and other churn-out-a-rehash crap...

Anyway, there are plenty of Infocom interpreter knock-offs available. The IF (Interactive Fiction) Archive's main site is an FTP site in Germany that's bog-slow; a list of mirrors follows.

Go to the subdirectory "infocom" then "interpreters" and pick your poison -- my personal favorite is Frotz. Happy adventuring.

in the USA:
http://wuarchive.wustl.edu/doc/misc /if-archive/
http://ftp.nodomainname.net/pub /mirrors/if-archive/
http://ifarchive.org/
ftp://www.plover.net/pub/ifarchive/

in Finland:
ftp://ftp.funet.fi/pub/misc/if-archive/

in Australia:
http://mirror.aarnet.edu.au/pub/if-arch ive/

in the UK:
http://www.firedrake.org/if-archive/
or ftp://ftp.firedrake.org/if-arch ive/

You might want to look at the license for ACE and TAO. If I understand them correctly, they are BSD-ish in that they allow anyone to use the software without supplying source or having to return modifications.

However, the license also contains a clause where you agree that if you do submit a patch, you implicitly agree to assign copyright to the ACE/TAO maintainers.

ACE and TAO are an interesting open source project -- run by a university research group, with industry support for Dr. Schmidt's group and with private companies offering support, packaging, and custom development.

Good luck, whatever you do.

You might want to look at the license for ACE and TAO. If I understand them correctly, they are BSD-ish in that they allow anyone to use the software without supplying source or having to return modifications.

However, the license also contains a clause where you agree that if you do submit a patch, you implicitly agree to assign copyright to the ACE/TAO maintainers.

ACE and TAO are an interesting open source project -- run by a university research group, with industry support for Dr. Schmidt's group and with private companies offering support, packaging, and custom development.

Good luck, whatever you do.

For those interested, the UVM web page describes the UVM virtual memory system used in NetBSD.

-AC