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User: yerdaddie

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  1. Reusable Proofs of Work on Comment Spams Straining Servers Running MT · · Score: 4, Interesting

    I myself run an MT blog and have been contemplating moving to wordpress to dodge the spam bullet, however temporarily.

    It occured to me thought that what would really fix this is to push the load onto the spammers by building a Reusable Proofs of Work (RPOW) system.

    For those who are unfamiliar, RPOW is a proposal to stop mail spam by asking the sender to do a little "work" that would make sending a lot emails computationally too expensive.

    As I'm in the last throws of my PhD I'll have to delay on this one, but maybe the lazy web can help out on this one, so the same thing doesn't happen to wordpress or whatever blogging monocultures exist.

  2. The market has already changed on ATI's Athlon 64 Chipset with Integrated Graphics · · Score: 1

    The best thing that AMD can have happen for them on the corporate front would be to get major vendors like Dell, HP, and IBM to offer their chips in their products.

    IBM and Sun are already offering AMD based workstations, in addition to HP blades and supercomputers. At least at the workstation and server level, it seems as if the major vendors are already offering them.

  3. Shot for Shot Spoof of Rocket Bike Sequence on A Review of "The Incredibles" · · Score: 3, Insightful

    The movie is really clever in how it visually references other films. Particullary good was a portion of the film which is a shot-by-shot remake of the Rocket bike chase in Return of the Jedi. It also spoofs You Only Live Twice in some really humorous ways too. In short, good movie for film nerds.

  4. Perhaps "killer" isn't the word on A Killer App For Segway · · Score: 3, Funny

    If you're talking about 94-year old folks, I'm not sure if you want to bill something as the "killer app."

  5. Re:inflammable ? on Hitachi Shows Off A Fuel-Cell PDA · · Score: 1

    inflammable means capable of being set on fire:

    http://www.wsu.edu:8080/~brians/errors/inflammab le .html

  6. Distcc on Gentoo Linux 2004.0 Released · · Score: 1

    Once I figured out how to use distcc, I stopped whining about compile times with gentoo. It isn't ideally efficient, but adding a new machine basically adds a denominator to your compile time. Not everyone has several machines at their disposal, but if you do, the experience of using gentoo can be much improved by parallel compilation.

    You might also want distccKnoppix, which is a slick method to use your other non-gentoo boxen to help out.

  7. AKA Reconfigurable Computing on Grid Processing · · Score: 3, Informative
    The ability to adapt the architecture for the workload, as discussed in this article, is something common to many different reconfigurable computing architectures like:
    Quite a number of researchers are looking at the performance and density adavantages of reconfigurable architectures in addition to the work mentioned in this article. What's really intriguing is considering how opreating systems could support reconfiguration. Doesn't seem to be much work on the subject.
  8. Open Prototyping on Sketching A Webpage With Denim · · Score: 1

    The prototype linked is part of a broader effort to get interaction designers and end-users involved in open-source style interface design. Open Prototyping suggests that interaction designers release-early/release-often, but in this case sketches instead of code.

    The sketches created in DENIM are intentionally informal. The rational behind this is that people are more willing to speak up and change things that they feel aren't finished. Human-Computer Interaction people like to use informal tools to try out lots of different designs before someone wastes a couple years of their life coding up something totally unusable.

  9. Re:They dont make geeks like they used to... on IBM to Release 64-Bit, 1.8GHz Processor in 2003 · · Score: 1

    Do you think bits are some sort of speed measurement? Like, "bits per second"?

    Not to be pedantic, but with certain applications, certain 64-bit architecutres actually provide shorter execution. Superscalar performance is improved by using the larger registers to execute more instructions in parallel. This is because larger registers let you feed more data into the various processor components at a faster rate. With some applications this makes little difference, but with things like signal processing or matrix operations that benefit from SIMD; speed boosts would certainly occur. This assumes that you have more ALUs or FPUs to feed in your 64-bit chip.

  10. Other Rankings on Top Research Labs in Human-Computer Interaction? · · Score: 4, Informative

    How rigorous. Usability pundit picks pet criteria and decides that these are the top HCI labs. Those interested in the real state of the field instead of opinion might take a look at the more rigorous listings available:

    Top Research Labs by Topic, 1978 and 1997

    Where Researchers Want to Work

    BusinessWeek's Top 20 US Research Labs

    Google Cache of 1999 US News ranking of User Interaction Grad Schools

    MIT Technology Review Corporate R&D Scorecard (Requires subscription)

    HCI Academic Article Imapct Rankings

    I think that few of the people on avant garde of HCI research take Jacob Neilsen very seriously. He is a usability specialist, not a interface researcher.

  11. Re:I want my EPS! on Mozilla 0.9.9 Released · · Score: 1

    NB: unreadable modifies EPS, not LaTeX. I think the obvious problem here is that LaTeX documents are usually distributed as PostScript, which is unreadable . . .

  12. Re:I want my EPS! on Mozilla 0.9.9 Released · · Score: 1

    You'd perfer some EPS?

    Markup languages are not meant to be terse, they're meant to be easy for someone to parse and to be readable by humans if need be. The design goals of the XML spec state as much:

    6. XML documents should be human-legible and reasonably clear.

    and

    10. Terseness in XML markup is of minimal importance.

    XML was developed as a reaction against the complexity of SGML, not to be perfectly tailored to your pet domain.

    Here's a useful project: Try writing a parser to take "x^2 + 4x + 4 = 0" and spit out the MathML. Ta da, suddenly you can share your math. And you don't have to use unreadable EPS, LaTeX, or send people your Mathematica notebook.

  13. Boon for linmodem on Warnings to Red Hat about AOL Buyout · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Sitting around sifting all these details through my head, it occured to me that all this AOL/Redhat talk might end up being super cool for the linmodem folks.

    To spell it out, an AOL/Redhat OS will obviously need to work with the innumerable makes and models of modems lying about on joe-ueser's box. Of course this will mean a pretty wide base of drivers. Last time I checked the linmodem folks were making a good start with some drivers, but still pretty far from complete support for the umpteen million software modem brands.

    Pure (another step-along) speculation for now, but I guess we shall see.

  14. Evidence that this is a hoax on MIT To Release Next-Generation OS "Cesium" · · Score: 2, Redundant


    finger hdunkirk@mit.edu
    [mit.edu]
    Student data loaded as of Oct 29, Staff data loaded as of Oct 27.
    URL data loaded once a month.

    Notify Personnel or use WebSIS as appropriate to change your information.

    Our on-line help system describes
    How to change data, how the directory works, where to get more info.
    For a listing of help topics, enter finger help@mit.edu. Try finger
    help_about@mit.edu to read about how the directory works. Please see
    help_url@mit.edu for questions about the new URL field.

    No matches to your query.
    carsonr@arsenal:~/notes$


    The penultimate line says it all. The email address for the author is bogus, as is the article. Additionally, the LCS folks I know haven't heard about this. Smells like BS to me.

  15. Hostile takeover of the UNIX project on Caldera to Open Part of UNIX Source · · Score: 1

    In other troll news today, RMS is trying to take control of UNIX. Using his dreaded GPL license and several years of hard work, the so-called-GNU project has been spitting in the face of other UNIX contributors. AT&T is not pleased and has threatened to leave the project and fork the code into a new project called Plan 9.

    today's subliminal message:
    Build a peer-to-peer interactive supercomputer using Octave, Matlab*P, and COSM.

  16. My Network Routing Table on The Real History of the GUI · · Score: 1

    I remember being asked to set up a router for a dot-com a few years back. They were dead set on using Windows NT and two nics. The MS front end to the router had a very complex gui which had stupidly cute icons which:

    "My Network Router"

    Which of course could be opened to see:

    "My Network Routing Table."

    God, what I wouldn't have given for vi and /etc/gateways.

    this space intentionally left unwitty

  17. c good model for high level graphics programming? on What is Happening with OpenGL? · · Score: 2, Informative

    At that point, a higher level graphics API will finally make good sense. There is debate over exactly what it is going to look like, but the model will be like C.

    It seems odd to adopt C as a model for universality. I was working with a co-worker of mine who was having trouble compiling some good-old-fashioned ANSI-compliant C code on MSVC 6.0, because it isn't standards-compliant. While most architectures seem to be able to compile a dialect of C, I dunno if one can really say C is universal. While the rate of change for introduction of incompadabilities with C seems to be slowing, it acts very much like an organism continually mutating and diversifying itself.

    An interpreted language like Python may be a better model, because it behaves transparently in spite of the underlying architecture. That and some folks are already using it as a high-level graphics language.

  18. Purchasing Decision Payback on Acknowledging Great Free Software · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Unfortunately, because I'm a lowly grad-student, I don't really have the disposable income to send folks a check (unless I have a strong craving for a week's worth of Ramen).

    What I did to do my part to pay those hardworking cygwin folks back was get my organization to purchase $7500 worth of their software. We had a little extra cash left on one of our research budgets, and were and need of a compiler for the ARM microcontroller. I recommended purchasing GNUPro Tools, which includes gcc. Yeah, I know it's freely available, and that I could cross-compile, but do the accounting people need to know that? So, in short, get your organization to buy some freely-available software, and send them a six-pack for good measure.

    ---

    octave + distributed.net + matlab*P = community-supported-interactive-supercomputing

  19. Books are bad for memory! Or so Plato thought. on Are Computers Stealing Your Memory? · · Score: 2

    Next time someone throws one of these "kids today" stories in your face, bring up the following.

    Socrates, as Plato's mouth-piece in Phaedrus suggests that books are going to destroy the art of memory. Basically, before there were a lot of books, people spent immense amounts of time memorizing entire works and repeating them. Simonides, for example, used what he called 'loci' to recite entire 20,000 line poems from his head. It's how we have have Homer's works and a lot of other "oral traditions."

    In Plato's Phaedrus, Socrates laments that Thoth, the Egyptian god who invented letters, had misjudged the effect of his invention:

    "This discovery of yours will create forgetfulness in the learner's souls, because they will not use their memories; they will trust to the external written characters and not remember themselves. The specific which you have discovered is an aid not to memory, but to reminiscence, and you give your disciples not truth, but only the semblance of truth; they will be hearers of many things and will have learned nothing; they will appear to be omniscient and will generally know nothing; they will be tiresome company, having the show of wisdom without reality."

    Yeah, so if you believe this PDA piece, then go burn down the local library while you're at it. I'm sure your local doctor would appreciate that (laugh). Memory prosthetics are good as long as you don't use them to stop remembering, but instead to be able remember more than you could possibly otherwise.

    My .01

    -carson-

    http://www.media.mit.edu/~carsonr/