Can anyone enlighten me as to any really useful research that has emerged yet from Microsoft? Please don't tell me about sub-pixel rendering... there's plenty of prior art on that one (that Microsoft patent attorneys are all too eager to ignore I might add).
My impression is that Microsoft Research has purchased some big-name profs from academia and paid them insanely high salaries (with some of the licensing fees they extorted from consumers who were forced to buy Windows pre-installed on their machine) with the hope that something will emerge to help Microsoft (the Corporation) futher extend its monopoly. There is of course nothing better than a tax-free non-profit environment in which to conduct this kind of "research" (hence the creation of the Institute).
I guess my main gripe with Microsoft Research is that the researchers are being paid with blood money. If there was truly impressive research coming out of this place (on par with Bell Labs or IBM), then perhaps the researchers there could be forgiven for working for such an anti-intellectual individual as Bill Gates. (For starters, if all scientists viewed the world like Bill Gates, we would likely not have libraries that freely and openly discuss prior discoveries in various fields of study, progress on which future scientists can build.)
I recently spoke with an employee of Microsoft Research who was formerly very pro-Linux and anti-Microsoft (while a student). A couple of months there has turned him into a rabid pro-Windows user, who disparages the efforts of Linux hackers as the work (or rather waste of time) of those poor unfortunate souls not capable of conducting truly fundamental research, like presumably figuring out the origins of the universe.
Funny thing is that when I looked at the Microsoft Research webpage, there is not much discussion of this "truly fundamental" research taking place, so I won't hold my breath. But I did see plenty there that has the potential to help Microsoft further extend its monopoly.
When I learned that Series 2 Tivo cryptographically signs the kernel and uses filesystem checksums, I quickly packed mine back in the box for a full refund.
If publishers would release to the public the copyrights to their journals, then the process of scanning them in and making them easily available to researchers could begin in earnest.
Although there are some projects which have already managed to bring bodies of material online, they are invariably dogged by nuisances like "rolling windows" (that block out the most recent 3-5 years) and user access restrictions (passwords or domain checks).
The hassle of tracking down bound journals (go the library, hope they have it, find it, split it open and bend back the binding to photocopy it, read through it without ease of keyword searching...) are enough to discourage researchers from looking at anything that is not provided to them in electronic preprint form unless absolutely necessary.
It is an outrage that university libraries pay the obscene subscription prices they do for many of the most important scholarly journals out there and still cannot make the contents of these journals available to their patrons in the most useful and easily accessible form possible.
Is it still true that no one has managed to "log into" their Series 2 Tivo and bring up a bash prompt? When I bought one a few months ago and learned that all the nice hacks were restricted to Series 1 Tivo's, I prompted returned my Tivo 2 for a full refund.
Now I'm using a homebrew box (which by the way cost the same as Tivo Series 2 + lifetime subscription) and am running MythTV.
And I could not be happier.
Things I wouldn't know how to do with a Series 2:
1) Customize the UI and navigate it with a wireless keyboard instead of a remote.
2) Burn content to DVD.
3) Integrate my MP3 collection and digital photos.
4) Update programming guide if Tivo went bankrupt and my "lifetime" subscription expired worthless.
5) Export recorded content to other machines sittings on my LAN.
I want to not only be able to freely shift in time, but also be able to shift content in space between machines on my LAN. One has to wonder if this Windows XP box puts restrictions on moving content off the machine to other networked computers. TiVo certainly does, and because of the draconian lockdown these folks implemented in their series 2 version of this product (with all that cryptographic signing of the kernel nonsense, checksums for the filesystem and propietary boot firmware) I decided to return my Tivo (within the first 30 days) and brave the wild world of open source PVR products.
Short story is that a few weeks later I successfully managed to get MythTV working (tonight in fact). Sure, it took me a while longer, but I learned a heck of a lot in the process, and it didn't cost me much more at all.
Series 2 + lifetime subscription to programming guide:
$550
The non-refundable cost of shipping/return shipping:
$30
My new Pentium IV with Asus P4PE motheroboard (supports hyperthreading CPU, with onboard firewire, usb 2.0, serial ata, RAID, Gigabit LAN and intel8x0 5.1 surround sound -- all linux compatible) and ATI TV-Wonder (stereo version, not VE mono) for video-in and NVidia Ti4200 LeadTek for video-out (which sports Conexant Tv-out chip that is HDTV compatible unlike Philips Tv-out chip and also produces better picture quality with richer feature set)
$700
The satisfaction of doing it yourself...
Priceless
So for all others out there like myself, remember there's www.mythtv.org
And why not also mention MythTV... another open source Tivo-style project that continues to be actively developed as a "media convergence" system, but already sports most of TiVo's features.
This is why I sent back the Tivo I ordered (it was Series 2 which to my knowledge has never been successfully hacked... yet). I don't want to be constantly locked out of my machine when some corporation decides to tighten the screws again by a forced software upgrade. In some sense, TiVo is worse than Microsoft, even though they nominally "support" open source by using Linux. With Windows, I choose when to install the Service Pack update... at least thus far:)
Instead I bought a Pentium IV 2.4, Asus P4PE, 512 333 MB DDR, Leadtek A250 GF4 Ti4200 (which has a Conexant HDTV-capable video out... don't buy a card with the lower quality VIVO Phillips chip) and a ATI TV-Wonder capture card. Grabbed two old 10Gig drives from another machine and I had something that cost me nothing more than the Series 2 TiVo.
What software will I run? Well, right now I'm leaning heavily toward MythTV. With this I will eventually be able to surf the web, check email, play games, as well as schedule programs and skip through commercials in TV broadcasts. A few bucks and an afternoon of tinkering will also hopefully allow me to control the channel switching on the digital cable box from the computer's infra-red port.
There is also Freevo, which I may consider looking at if I don't like MythTV, although the activity on the mailing lists indicate that this system is already quite functional for many users.
Hope this is useful to anyone out there still sitting on the fence. I reached my decision after several hours of research on the web. I hope I don't regret it!
This X extension might be the right place to correct a problem that plagues many LCD screens, namely a gradient in color intensity from top to bottom of screen when the color intensity should be constant
It appears that the problem is due to the fact that when one scales a given hue from full intensity to zero intensity (i.e. black), the latter is reached quicker on the top of the screen than on the bottom of the screen, i.e. any given mid-range hue will appear darker on the top of the screen than on the bottom.
What is interesting is that full intensity hues (say pure red, blue or green) show an acceptably constant intensity over the length of the screen. Hence in the process of lowering the intensity, both the top and bottom of the screen are starting from the same level. The issue is really how quickly the top of the screen becomes darker as the intensity is lowered relative to the bottom.
This problem might remind one of the so-called "gamma" that CRT's exhibit, although of course it is not the same issue. I believe that the problem which I have described could be completely corrected in software by viewing the middle of the screen as normal, and "bending" the intensity values as one approaches the top of the screen toward lighter values, and vice versa as one heads to the bottom of the screen.
Anyway, just a thought. I have always wanted to try to tackle this problem but have not been able to find the time. I kind of hope that maybe someone who has the expertise to work on RandR would be able to provide a solution to this problem quite easily.
I was just going to point out the same observation you make about how tax money is funding this nonsense. That is the real outrage here. I really couldn't give a damn whether or not they succeed in blocking the camcorders (since I rarely spend my time watching anything produced by Hollywood), but I sure as hell don't want my tax money paying to support such endeavors.
Yes, "lisp" is powerful, but emacs' lisp engine does not implement lexical scoping. Quite frankly, this is a serious flaw of "elisp" (as well as other early lisp implementations) which the folks who subsequently set the standards for Scheme and Common Lisp obviously realized.
Vim itself has powerful scripting capabilities, as evidenced by all the goodies you can find on www.vim.org. They have attempted to build a language independent model, kind of like GIMP allows users to script in Scheme, Python and whatever else. An interesting article appeared in a recent Linux Journal or Linux Magazine issue that compared the VIM and the GIMP's attempts at providing a language independent scripting framework. Their conclusion was that the GIMP is more successful on this front... might want to check out the article for details if this sort of thing interests you.
There are lots of great free books on many topics there. I recall in particular several introductory level physics texts including one by Prof. Firk, who by all accounts was a fantastic teacher at Yale in his day.
Perhaps the VideoCD lectures are a step forward from pure paper-based correspondence courses, or VHS for that matter.
But eventually I hope to see interactive online education supplant many of the traditional courses being offered at universities today. The author correctly points out that the best teachers should be teaching everyone (instead of paying thousands of graduate students to regurgitate the same material, often in broken English and/or illegible handwriting). In one example I know too well, the undergraduates pay roughly $2500 per course, while the teaching fellow gets roughly $5000 to teach the course, which usually has about 20-25 students.
Do the math, and see why universities are running the kind of surpluses they do. Sure, they have to pay to the heat the building and scrub the toilets, but don't forget what they take in from alumni fundraising... and their tax free status!
We need online education so that folks don't need to mortgage their home to send little Jane to school. We also need online education to level the playing field so Tom can learn what Jane is learning even if Tom's parents don't have a home to mortgage, because what universities today call "financial aid" is just a joke to alleviate the guilt some of the overpaid university administrators feel, you know, the ones pulling in say $300K a year.
Can't recommend it highly enough (if you need to code C++).
For Scheme (and Computer Science in general), the book Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs is hard to beat, and available online at MIT Press homepage, as is the book "How to Design Programs" (www.htdp.org). I also enjoyed reading Gary Knott's "Interpreting LISP" which can be downloaded off the web. For a nice intro to designing programming languages, check out the lecture notes available at:
http://www.cs.brown.edu/courses/cs173/2001/Lectu re s/
Is anyone sufficiently familiar with tax law to make a comment about the tax benefits that could accrue to the founder of this non-profit organization by structuring a "gift" to the mathematical community in the form of several $1M prizes for solving some of the hardest problems in all of mathematics, most of which are very unlikely to be solved in any of our lifetimes?
In particular, is Landon Clay free to spend some of the interest on the millions he has supposedly "donated" to math through these prizes in any way that he pleases, so long as a fraction of the interest is spent on some tenuous connection to "promoting mathematics". (Check out the link on the CMI webpage to the Clay-sponsored yacht cruise in the Boston Harbor.)
Rumor has it that the president of the Clay Math Institute was fired by the Harvard Math Department for spending too much time shaking Clay down for umpteen millions, and not enough time doing research. Can anyone provide a confirmation of this rumor? Furthermore, after being "dismissed" from the Harvard Mathematics Department, the president of CMI mysteriously popped up across the river at Boston University. Does anyone know how much the Clay Math Institute has donated to Boston University in the process?
Finally, more to the point of the Riemann Hypothesis, which we all want to see solved, what are folks' opinions about whether a $1M prize on the problem is likely do more to decrease the likelihood that a solution is found sooner than later, given that the money will create less incentives for researchers to share their insights and conferences or publish partial results in journals?
Personally I think the prizes smell too much of Clay's past career in the actively-managed mutual fund business, where it's all about out-performing the index for that bonus at the end of the year. Perhaps the first bit of math that Clay should learn (he supposedly dropped out of Harvard himself and never learned anything beyond high-school algebra) is a little statistics, which would show how an active manager's "ability" to beat the index has more to do with luck than business acumen. (Read the famous book A Random Walk Down Wall Street, or check out the site www.indexfunds.com). Then maybe he might realize the right place to "donate" his money is in the form of a refund to investors who got jipped by the front-end 5% loads they paid supposedly for Clay's investment genius. Clay's fund specializes in tax-managed investments, so I guess we can be sure that those skills for dodging the watchful eye of the IRS sure came in handy when setting up his retirement tax shelter... a.k.a the Clay Math Institute.
How secure is the Linksys Powerline product in an apartment complex?
Also, how well does it scale if everyone in the apartment decides to "plug in"?
Robot to Photocopy Book that also Turns Pages
on
MindStorms Madness
·
· Score: 1
Does anyone know of a robot (built with Mindstorm product or some other) that can flip a book and turn its pages as it photocopies it on a standard home scanner?
This would help me in my book digitization project since the books are too valuable to destroy by cutting off their spines.
I was quite disappointed recently to learn that
IBM has discontinued support for the Linux
ViaVoice SDK.
What can IBM tell us about the company's future plans for voice recognition under Linux, and in
particular, if IBM found supporting the ViaVoice
SDK economically unviable, is there any chance
that they could open source the code so that volunteers could continue to maintain/develop it?
As evidence of the open source community's
interest in the SDK, check out the projects
in Sourceforge that rely on it.
I just hope that IBM doesn't let the Linux
ViaVoice SDK go the way of Blender !!!
Does anyone know of a robot (built with Mindstorm product or some other) that can flip a book and turn its pages as it photocopies it on a standard home scanner?
This would help me in my book digitization project.
Slashdot Mirror
is an example. They just released a new version. AXIOM is also worth checking out. It is free as in freedom and free as in free beer.
Can anyone enlighten me as to any really useful research that has emerged yet from Microsoft? Please don't tell me about sub-pixel rendering ... there's plenty of prior art on that one (that Microsoft patent attorneys are all too eager to ignore I might add).
My impression is that Microsoft Research has purchased some big-name profs from academia and paid them insanely high salaries (with some of the licensing fees they extorted from consumers who were forced to buy Windows pre-installed on their machine) with the hope that something will emerge to help Microsoft (the Corporation) futher extend its monopoly. There is of course nothing better than a tax-free non-profit environment in which to conduct this kind of "research" (hence the creation of the Institute).
I guess my main gripe with Microsoft Research is that the researchers are being paid with blood money. If there was truly impressive research coming out of this place (on par with Bell Labs or IBM), then perhaps the researchers there could be forgiven for working for such an anti-intellectual individual as Bill Gates. (For starters, if all scientists viewed the world like Bill Gates, we would likely not have libraries that freely and openly discuss prior discoveries in various fields of study, progress on which future scientists can build.)
I recently spoke with an employee of Microsoft Research who was formerly very pro-Linux and anti-Microsoft (while a student). A couple of months there has turned him into a rabid pro-Windows user, who disparages the efforts of Linux hackers as the work (or rather waste of time) of those poor unfortunate souls not capable of conducting truly fundamental research, like presumably figuring out the origins of the universe.
Funny thing is that when I looked at the Microsoft Research webpage, there is not much discussion of this "truly fundamental" research taking place, so I won't hold my breath. But I did see plenty there that has the potential to help Microsoft further extend its monopoly.
Go figure.
Works like a charm and there is no "unique key" for each machine :)
Download your copy from www.mythtv.org.
When I learned that Series 2 Tivo cryptographically signs the kernel and uses filesystem checksums, I quickly packed mine back in the box for a full refund.
Now I'm happily running MythTV.
If publishers would release to the public the copyrights to their journals, then the process of scanning them in and making them easily available to researchers could begin in earnest.
...) are enough to discourage researchers from looking at anything that is not provided to them in electronic preprint form unless absolutely necessary.
Although there are some projects which have already managed to bring bodies of material online, they are invariably dogged by nuisances like "rolling windows" (that block out the most recent 3-5 years) and user access restrictions (passwords or domain checks).
The hassle of tracking down bound journals (go the library, hope they have it, find it, split it open and bend back the binding to photocopy it, read through it without ease of keyword searching
It is an outrage that university libraries pay the obscene subscription prices they do for many of the most important scholarly journals out there and still cannot make the contents of these journals available to their patrons in the most useful and easily accessible form possible.
Is it still true that no one has managed to "log into" their Series 2 Tivo and bring up a bash prompt? When I bought one a few months ago and learned that all the nice hacks were restricted to Series 1 Tivo's, I prompted returned my Tivo 2 for a full refund.
Now I'm using a homebrew box (which by the way cost the same as Tivo Series 2 + lifetime subscription) and am running MythTV.
And I could not be happier.
Things I wouldn't know how to do with a Series 2:
1) Customize the UI and navigate it with a wireless keyboard instead of a remote.
2) Burn content to DVD.
3) Integrate my MP3 collection and digital photos.
4) Update programming guide if Tivo went bankrupt and my "lifetime" subscription expired worthless.
5) Export recorded content to other machines sittings on my LAN.
6) Customize the commercial-skipping function.
7) Upgrade/replace a component (e.g. hard drive)
I want to not only be able to freely shift in time, but also be able to shift content in space between machines on my LAN. One has to wonder if this Windows XP box puts restrictions on moving content off the machine to other networked computers. TiVo certainly does, and because of the draconian lockdown these folks implemented in their series 2 version of this product (with all that cryptographic signing of the kernel nonsense, checksums for the filesystem and propietary boot firmware) I decided to return my Tivo (within the first 30 days) and brave the wild world of open source PVR products.
...
Short story is that a few weeks later I successfully managed to get MythTV working (tonight in fact). Sure, it took me a while longer, but I learned a heck of a lot in the process, and it didn't cost me much more at all.
Series 2 + lifetime subscription to programming guide:
$550
The non-refundable cost of shipping/return shipping:
$30
My new Pentium IV with Asus P4PE motheroboard (supports hyperthreading CPU, with onboard firewire, usb 2.0, serial ata, RAID, Gigabit LAN and intel8x0 5.1 surround sound -- all linux compatible) and ATI TV-Wonder (stereo version, not VE mono) for video-in and NVidia Ti4200 LeadTek for video-out (which sports Conexant Tv-out chip that is HDTV compatible unlike Philips Tv-out chip and also produces better picture quality with richer feature set)
$700
The satisfaction of doing it yourself
Priceless
So for all others out there like myself, remember there's www.mythtv.org
And why not also mention MythTV ... another open source Tivo-style project that continues to be actively developed as a "media convergence" system, but already sports most of TiVo's features.
Visit: www.mythtv.org
This is why I sent back the Tivo I ordered (it was Series 2 which to my knowledge has never been successfully hacked ... yet). I don't want to be constantly locked out of my machine when some corporation decides to tighten the screws again by a forced software upgrade. In some sense, TiVo is worse than Microsoft, even though they nominally "support" open source by using Linux. With Windows, I choose when to install the Service Pack update ... at least thus far :)
... don't buy a card with the lower quality VIVO Phillips chip) and a ATI TV-Wonder capture card. Grabbed two old 10Gig drives from another machine and I had something that cost me nothing more than the Series 2 TiVo.
Instead I bought a Pentium IV 2.4, Asus P4PE, 512 333 MB DDR, Leadtek A250 GF4 Ti4200 (which has a Conexant HDTV-capable video out
What software will I run? Well, right now I'm leaning heavily toward MythTV. With this I will eventually be able to surf the web, check email, play games, as well as schedule programs and skip through commercials in TV broadcasts. A few bucks and an afternoon of tinkering will also hopefully allow me to control the channel switching on the digital cable box from the computer's infra-red port.
There is also Freevo, which I may consider looking at if I don't like MythTV, although the activity on the mailing lists indicate that this system is already quite functional for many users.
Hope this is useful to anyone out there still sitting on the fence. I reached my decision after several hours of research on the web. I hope I don't regret it!
This X extension might be the right place to correct a problem that plagues many LCD screens, namely a gradient in color intensity from top to bottom of screen when the color intensity should be constant
It appears that the problem is due to the fact that when one scales a given hue from full intensity to zero intensity (i.e. black), the latter is reached quicker on the top of the screen than on the bottom of the screen, i.e. any given mid-range hue will appear darker on the top of the screen than on the bottom.
What is interesting is that full intensity hues (say pure red, blue or green) show an acceptably constant intensity over the length of the screen. Hence in the process of lowering the intensity, both the top and bottom of the screen are starting from the same level. The issue is really how quickly the top of the screen becomes darker as the intensity is lowered relative to the bottom.
This problem might remind one of the so-called "gamma" that CRT's exhibit, although of course it is not the same issue. I believe that the problem which I have described could be completely corrected in software by viewing the middle of the screen as normal, and "bending" the intensity values as one approaches the top of the screen toward lighter values, and vice versa as one heads to the bottom of the screen.
Anyway, just a thought. I have always wanted to try to tackle this problem but have not been able to find the time. I kind of hope that maybe someone who has the expertise to work on RandR would be able to provide a solution to this problem quite easily.
I was just going to point out the same observation you make about how tax money is funding this nonsense. That is the real outrage here. I really couldn't give a damn whether or not they succeed in blocking the camcorders (since I rarely spend my time watching anything produced by Hollywood), but I sure as hell don't want my tax money paying to support such endeavors.
Argh!!!
Yes, "lisp" is powerful, but emacs' lisp engine does not implement lexical scoping. Quite frankly, this is a serious flaw of "elisp" (as well as other early lisp implementations) which the folks who subsequently set the standards for Scheme and Common Lisp obviously realized.
... might want to check out the article for details if this sort of thing interests you.
Vim itself has powerful scripting capabilities, as evidenced by all the goodies you can find on www.vim.org. They have attempted to build a language independent model, kind of like GIMP allows users to script in Scheme, Python and whatever else. An interesting article appeared in a recent Linux Journal or Linux Magazine issue that compared the VIM and the GIMP's attempts at providing a language independent scripting framework. Their conclusion was that the GIMP is more successful on this front
There are lots of great free books on many topics there. I recall in particular several introductory level physics texts including one by Prof. Firk, who by all accounts was a fantastic teacher at Yale in his day.
www.theassayer.org
You might also mention his book "On LISP", which
is now out of print, but can be downloaded from
his webpage.
On LISP goes into LISP issues much deeper than
ANSI Common LISP.
Perhaps the VideoCD lectures are a step forward from pure paper-based correspondence courses, or VHS for that matter.
... and their tax free status!
But eventually I hope to see interactive online education supplant many of the traditional courses being offered at universities today. The author correctly points out that the best teachers should be teaching everyone (instead of paying thousands of graduate students to regurgitate the same material, often in broken English and/or illegible handwriting). In one example I know too well, the undergraduates pay roughly $2500 per course, while the teaching fellow gets roughly $5000 to teach the course, which usually has about 20-25 students.
Do the math, and see why universities are running the kind of surpluses they do. Sure, they have to pay to the heat the building and scrub the toilets, but don't forget what they take in from alumni fundraising
We need online education so that folks don't need to mortgage their home to send little Jane to school. We also need online education to level the playing field so Tom can learn what Jane is learning even if Tom's parents don't have a home to mortgage, because what universities today call "financial aid" is just a joke to alleviate the guilt some of the overpaid university administrators feel, you know, the ones pulling in say $300K a year.
I've been reading Bruce Eckel's
u re s/
"Thinking in C++" (available online)
Can't recommend it highly enough (if you need to code C++).
For Scheme (and Computer Science in general), the book Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs is hard to beat, and available online at MIT Press homepage, as is the book "How to Design Programs" (www.htdp.org). I also enjoyed reading Gary Knott's "Interpreting LISP" which can be downloaded off the web. For a nice intro to designing programming languages, check out the lecture notes available at:
http://www.cs.brown.edu/courses/cs173/2001/Lect
Is anyone sufficiently familiar with tax law to make a comment about the tax benefits that could accrue to the founder of this non-profit organization by structuring a "gift" to the mathematical community in the form of several $1M prizes for solving some of the hardest problems in all of mathematics, most of which are very unlikely to be solved in any of our lifetimes?
... a.k.a the Clay Math Institute.
...
In particular, is Landon Clay free to spend some of the interest on the millions he has supposedly "donated" to math through these prizes in any way that he pleases, so long as a fraction of the interest is spent on some tenuous connection to "promoting mathematics". (Check out the link on the CMI webpage to the Clay-sponsored yacht cruise in the Boston Harbor.)
Rumor has it that the president of the Clay Math Institute was fired by the Harvard Math Department for spending too much time shaking Clay down for umpteen millions, and not enough time doing research. Can anyone provide a confirmation of this rumor? Furthermore, after being "dismissed" from the Harvard Mathematics Department, the president of CMI mysteriously popped up across the river at Boston University. Does anyone know how much the Clay Math Institute has donated to Boston University in the process?
Finally, more to the point of the Riemann Hypothesis, which we all want to see solved, what are folks' opinions about whether a $1M prize on the problem is likely do more to decrease the likelihood that a solution is found sooner than later, given that the money will create less incentives for researchers to share their insights and conferences or publish partial results in journals?
Personally I think the prizes smell too much of Clay's past career in the actively-managed mutual fund business, where it's all about out-performing the index for that bonus at the end of the year. Perhaps the first bit of math that Clay should learn (he supposedly dropped out of Harvard himself and never learned anything beyond high-school algebra) is a little statistics, which would show how an active manager's "ability" to beat the index has more to do with luck than business acumen. (Read the famous book A Random Walk Down Wall Street, or check out the site www.indexfunds.com). Then maybe he might realize the right place to "donate" his money is in the form of a refund to investors who got jipped by the front-end 5% loads they paid supposedly for Clay's investment genius. Clay's fund specializes in tax-managed investments, so I guess we can be sure that those skills for dodging the watchful eye of the IRS sure came in handy when setting up his retirement tax shelter
Anyway, I'm starting to ramble now
Curious if there are any plans to extend the Google API for web searches to include searching the Google Groups archives?
I found a site I think I can trust:
www.spamgourmet.com
Their script is open-source too.
Curious if anyone knows whether or not Sneakemail plans to start charging after they get enough people hooked.
Their "Mission" statement is suspiciously vague about how they might restrict future use of the free service.
What I'd really like is a script that does the same thing as Sneakemail but using my home smtp server instead.
How secure is the Linksys Powerline product in an apartment complex?
Also, how well does it scale if everyone in the apartment decides to "plug in"?
Does anyone know of a robot (built with Mindstorm product or some other) that can flip a book and turn its pages as it photocopies it on a standard home scanner?
This would help me in my book digitization project since the books are too valuable to destroy by cutting off their spines.
What can IBM tell us about the company's future plans for voice recognition under Linux, and in particular, if IBM found supporting the ViaVoice SDK economically unviable, is there any chance that they could open source the code so that volunteers could continue to maintain/develop it?
As evidence of the open source community's interest in the SDK, check out the projects in Sourceforge that rely on it. I just hope that IBM doesn't let the Linux ViaVoice SDK go the way of Blender !!!
Anyone know the status of a Lisp interface to
Qt toolkit and KDE libraries?
Does anyone know of a robot (built with Mindstorm
product or some other) that can flip a book and
turn its pages as it photocopies it on a standard
home scanner?
This would help me in my book digitization
project.