Okay. I know that was an off-hand comment, so I'll forgive you. But next, time perhaps you should check the syllabus before you go about criticizing what was truly an excellent course. One of the best CS class I took at Rice, actually (just behind Keith Cooper's compiler construction class.)
You'll note that the very first substantial lecture is on ethics.
For those of you too lazy to ready the webpage: the assignment was in three parts. First, given a simple Java-based voting terminal (HackAVote), hack it (inconspicuously) to bias an election to serve your own nefarious purposes. Second, given another group's hacked terminal, how many of their hacks could you find without the source code? With the source code? Finally, design a provably secure algorithm (using cryptyc) for communication between the smart card and voting terminal, and an appropriate smart-card distribution scheme.
My experiences: hiding bugs is easy (duh). Finding bugs in black-box testing is hard (duh). Finding them with source code is substantially easier, but still non-trivial. Finally, getting it right, while not impossible, is non-trivial! There are a *lot* of cases to consider (nefarious poll workers, smart-card hackers, people with access to a machine that "fell off the back of a truck", etc.)
Dan wrote a paper about the experience. It's worth a quick read. Finally, his homepage is rather amusing, beyond the typical nerdly computer-science professor stuff.
...but not with off-the-shelf solutions. See the research of Dan Wallach, Rice University (my alma mater). He's been doing some research on baysian methods of determining a wireless node's location based on its signal strength at multiple APs. Surprisingly robust, even in the face of people maliciously modulating their signal strength, et al.
See his work here.
Remeber, it's still in the research stage: but if you could implement it on a large scale, you'd make a pretty penny doing so!
Godel, Escher, Bach is an excellent exploration of many facets of mathematics, including number theory, formal systems, logic and proof, chaos theory and recursion. It also covers many, many other topics including cognitive science, AI theory, and biology... according to the back, "an entire humanistic education between the covers of a single book."
GEB attempts to answer the question, "How is it that an amalgam of inanimate systems can develop something as striking as self-awareness, intelligence, conciousness?" Not light reading, certainly, but very entertaining if you love learning about "neat" things. The dialogs between each chapter are also no end of entertaining.
(And yes, phish, I will write a/. review once I'm finished... I'm only about 2/3 of the way through at the moment.)
It seems that each new device along these lines gets a vapor-ware article, a "delayed release" article, a release article, two or three "Tom's Hardware compares..." articles, plus a human interest story or two.
Honestly, cool hardware is great. (I was drooling over those HP Blade servers for almost half an hour!) But there are zillions of personal, portable MP3 players out there... did we really need to see another one?
Yes. Yes, yes, yes. I can start UT on a 256-mb machine, play for an hour, come back out into X and still not have any swap used. It passes my stress-test... we'll see about 3 days without a reboot or swapoff / swapon...
I would love to do a poll on the age of people who posted to these stories. Katz is as biased as any reporter/mudraker/conservative politician.
A freshman in college, I went to a highschool in a county in which existed an anonymous tip line for weapons in school. I imagine that the principles would have cut the lock off of your locker and searched it, had they been tipped you might be hiding a firearm there.
I never used it. I don't know of anyone who did. I also don't know of anyone who was a victim of a malicious tip. And I ran with the geek/nerd crowd...according to Katz, we should have been targets. But we never were.
C'mon, people. Give us some credit! Highschoolers, even middle-schoolers are intelligent. They are responsible. Yeah, I can see there being some losers, and some space for malicious abuse. But I don't see it being nowhere *near* as bad as our resident demagogue suggests.
I'm a freshman in college, with about as much experience and interest as you have...and the OpenSource world is very intimidating! My suggestion: start small. Really, really small. Eg, I have made exactly one contribution to the WINE project: if your Windows program calls GetDeviceCaps with capability "94", you get a fixme: unimplemented CAPS1 capability error. That's mine. (-; A couple of newly #defined constants, a few code comments...and an error message.
But, seriously, look at what I learned from the experience. (I learned to hate MS's undocumented API features, for one.) I can now maintain a WINE CVS tree. I can diff changes I make against a current tree. I have some feeling for the organization of the project. (I got my name in WWN this week!) I feel a little more confident...next, I might try my hand at the EnumFontFamilies bug that keeps MINITAB from drawing graphs....and I'll probably fail miserably. But the people on the wine-dev list have seen my name a few times, and maybe they'll help.
The other thing you can do is work on smaller projects. 160 Mb of Mozilla source is something I wouldn't even try to compile, much less try to contribute to. But look at littler, one- or two-man projects (like GtkTiLink)...they're riddled with bugs and usability problems...and the source code won't overwhelm you. When you see a problem, it's usually reasonably easy to track down the problem...even if you can't fix it.
Let's face it. Neither you nor I have the expertise to help Linus and Alan Cox with the latest 2.4.0 show-stopper. Heck, just compiling the blasted thing scares me. But there are still little ones you can help with, little contributions you can make...and those will help you step up to the bigger challenges.
Maybe I'm just seeing things... but with quotes like "uses elaborate software instructions rather than hardware to perform certain functions" and the last line about Intel "already [having] chips on the market that consume about the same amount of power", I came away with the impression of a serious Intel bias. Both seem to deliver the impression that Intel's solution is better (eg, not "elaborate" [ie, falt-prone], and without this particular problem). Does Intel hold a stake in Yahoo? If so, arent't they required to make note of it?
DETAILED DESCRIPTION, Paragraph 1: "The present invention overcomes the problems of the prior art and provides a microprocessor which is _faster_ that microprocessors of the prior art, is capable of running _all the software_ for _all the operating systems_ which may be run by a _large number of families of prior art microprocessors_, yes is less expensive than prior art microprocessors. (my emphasis)
in other words, the Holy Grail of computer architecture: processor emulation that's faster than the native processors. yes, sounds too good to be true, but at least it won't be vaporware...;-)
Slashdot Mirror
Okay. I know that was an off-hand comment, so I'll forgive you. But next, time perhaps you should check the syllabus before you go about criticizing what was truly an excellent course. One of the best CS class I took at Rice, actually (just behind Keith Cooper's compiler construction class.)
You'll note that the very first substantial lecture is on ethics.
Yep. I was in the course, actually.
For those of you too lazy to ready the webpage: the assignment was in three parts. First, given a simple Java-based voting terminal (HackAVote), hack it (inconspicuously) to bias an election to serve your own nefarious purposes. Second, given another group's hacked terminal, how many of their hacks could you find without the source code? With the source code? Finally, design a provably secure algorithm (using cryptyc) for communication between the smart card and voting terminal, and an appropriate smart-card distribution scheme.
My experiences: hiding bugs is easy (duh). Finding bugs in black-box testing is hard (duh). Finding them with source code is substantially easier, but still non-trivial. Finally, getting it right, while not impossible, is non-trivial! There are a *lot* of cases to consider (nefarious poll workers, smart-card hackers, people with access to a machine that "fell off the back of a truck", etc.)
Dan wrote a paper about the experience. It's worth a quick read. Finally, his homepage is rather amusing, beyond the typical nerdly computer-science professor stuff.
...but not with off-the-shelf solutions. See the research of Dan Wallach, Rice University (my alma mater). He's been doing some research on baysian methods of determining a wireless node's location based on its signal strength at multiple APs. Surprisingly robust, even in the face of people maliciously modulating their signal strength, et al. See his work here. Remeber, it's still in the research stage: but if you could implement it on a large scale, you'd make a pretty penny doing so!
"dual ARM9s..."
... does that mean the kernel is SMP? Do the ARM9s support it natively, making the kernel think it's only one processor?
So, someone tell me
Does uCLinux support SMP? (Next on the SMP docket: UserModeLinux... whee!)
I second this reccomendation.
... according to the back, "an entire humanistic education between the covers of a single book."
/. review once I'm finished ... I'm only about 2/3 of the way through at the moment.)
Godel, Escher, Bach is an excellent exploration of many facets of mathematics, including number theory, formal systems, logic and proof, chaos theory and recursion. It also covers many, many other topics including cognitive science, AI theory, and biology
GEB attempts to answer the question, "How is it that an amalgam of inanimate systems can develop something as striking as self-awareness, intelligence, conciousness?" Not light reading, certainly, but very entertaining if you love learning about "neat" things. The dialogs between each chapter are also no end of entertaining. (And yes, phish, I will write a
I think a change of titles is appropriate...
May I suggest the "HP Pavillion"?
It seems that each new device along these lines gets a vapor-ware article, a "delayed release" article, a release article, two or three "Tom's Hardware compares..." articles, plus a human interest story or two.
... did we really need to see another one?
Honestly, cool hardware is great. (I was drooling over those HP Blade servers for almost half an hour!) But there are zillions of personal, portable MP3 players out there
Yes. Yes, yes, yes. I can start UT on a 256-mb machine, play for an hour, come back out into X and still not have any swap used. It passes my stress-test ... we'll see about 3 days without a reboot or swapoff / swapon...
I would love to do a poll on the age of people who posted to these stories. Katz is as biased as any reporter/mudraker/conservative politician.
A freshman in college, I went to a highschool in a county in which existed an anonymous tip line for weapons in school. I imagine that the principles would have cut the lock off of your locker and searched it, had they been tipped you might be hiding a firearm there.
I never used it. I don't know of anyone who did. I also don't know of anyone who was a victim of a malicious tip. And I ran with the geek/nerd crowd...according to Katz, we should have been targets. But we never were.
C'mon, people. Give us some credit! Highschoolers, even middle-schoolers are intelligent. They are responsible. Yeah, I can see there being some losers, and some space for malicious abuse. But I don't see it being nowhere *near* as bad as our resident demagogue suggests.
I feel your pain! (=
I'm a freshman in college, with about as much experience and interest as you have...and the OpenSource world is very intimidating! My suggestion: start small. Really, really small. Eg, I have made exactly one contribution to the WINE project: if your Windows program calls GetDeviceCaps with capability "94", you get a fixme: unimplemented CAPS1 capability error. That's mine. (-; A couple of newly #defined constants, a few code comments...and an error message.
But, seriously, look at what I learned from the experience. (I learned to hate MS's undocumented API features, for one.) I can now maintain a WINE CVS tree. I can diff changes I make against a current tree. I have some feeling for the organization of the project. (I got my name in WWN this week!) I feel a little more confident...next, I might try my hand at the EnumFontFamilies bug that keeps MINITAB from drawing graphs....and I'll probably fail miserably. But the people on the wine-dev list have seen my name a few times, and maybe they'll help.
The other thing you can do is work on smaller projects. 160 Mb of Mozilla source is something I wouldn't even try to compile, much less try to contribute to. But look at littler, one- or two-man projects (like GtkTiLink)...they're riddled with bugs and usability problems...and the source code won't overwhelm you. When you see a problem, it's usually reasonably easy to track down the problem...even if you can't fix it.
Let's face it. Neither you nor I have the expertise to help Linus and Alan Cox with the latest 2.4.0 show-stopper. Heck, just compiling the blasted thing scares me. But there are still little ones you can help with, little contributions you can make...and those will help you step up to the bigger challenges.
Maybe I'm just seeing things... but with quotes like "uses elaborate software instructions rather than hardware to perform certain functions" and the last line about Intel "already [having] chips on the market that consume about the same amount of power", I came away with the impression of a serious Intel bias. Both seem to deliver the impression that Intel's solution is better (eg, not "elaborate" [ie, falt-prone], and without this particular problem). Does Intel hold a stake in Yahoo? If so, arent't they required to make note of it?
DETAILED DESCRIPTION, Paragraph 1:
;-)
"The present invention overcomes the problems of the prior art and provides a microprocessor which is _faster_ that microprocessors of the prior art, is capable of running _all the software_ for _all the operating systems_ which may be run by a _large number of families of prior art microprocessors_, yes is less expensive than prior art microprocessors. (my emphasis)
in other words, the Holy Grail of computer architecture: processor emulation that's faster than the native processors. yes, sounds too good to be true, but at least it won't be vaporware...