Slashback: Bricks, Consoles, Projects

More Lego Sculptures! More game collections going to the highest bidder! More ... P4 benchmarks. Updates below to recent Slashdot stories, and a few tangents not yet here explored. Go crazy!

Ma'am, I'm afraid that Ritalin by itself won't help in this case. Somehow this email from Lego madman (insomniac?) Eric Harshbarger ended up in Hemos's hands, and it's hard to resist. Here he confirms the suspicions of a number of Slashdot readers who looked closely at his previous efforts featured on these pages.

Well, A few weeks ago when I announced my LEGO Mona Lisa, a few folks from Slashdot.org noticed the lower half of a statue ... and some guessed what my next project announcement would be. I've now finally completed a

statue of 'San' from the Japanese Animation film Princess Mononoke.

I wrote quite a lot about this model ... and took many, many pictures, so I hope you enjoy browsing.

I also recently finished a much smaller model of the BSD Daemon mascot.

cheers,

eric

Enough already! crizh writes "Anyone interested in another arguement about the merits of the P4 and whether Tom Pabst is biased against Intel/AMD might want to check out the further update he posted on P4/MPEG4 this morning."

Further submissions in this category must be accompanied by sizeable bribes or at least juicy blackmail. Let's see what people think of the P4 vs. whatever Athon variety is cool in 12 months from now and talk about it again then;)

Sore thumbs, perhaps. An unnamed correspondent points out this enormous videogame auction, venturing as he does so: "Seems to be as big if not bigger than the previous one posted."

I dunno about that, but it sure is a lot of games. Is everyone dumping their consoles to spend the proceeds on exotic vacations, or what?

fuuzy math for a new era Erik Inge Bolsø writes "Earlier this year, slashdot had a scoop about a 1990 and 1995 study called fuzz, which tested the quality of UNIX utilities.

In july this year, a followup study was published, in which they did subject a collection of common apps on Windows NT (and 2000) to the same tests. The results are interesting... Full paper available here."

Brother, can you spare some time? swgill writes "After reading about Microsoft's attempt to reach beginner programmers with free copies of Visual C++ for schools I thought about the main problem that was found: Visual C++ and the related teaching material is all based on the Windows API, and algorithms are treated as secondary as best. I am actually in college in England doing an A-level in Computing where I can see the effects of this educational policy (although we use VB6 instead of VC++6). I have decided to found the libteach project at sourceforge. The idea is to prevent people learning to program in school from being forced to relearn their skills when Micro$oft switches focus again and to also give them an idea of programming for another type of system (RT-Linux anyone?)."

Sounds like a worthy project, albeit for now still in the planning stages. Of course, it's helped by the fact that there are several Open Source OSes chock full of programming languages out there, but not by the lack of decent IDEs available for them.

Update The latest in our Hellmouth Revisited series is now online .

Athlon back in the lead! (link)

http://www.amdzone.com/flask.cfm

Athlon-optimized FlaskMPEG on a 1.2GHz DDR Athlon board now outguns Intel's P4 optimized version, with more improvements to come.

Re:Reply to the Visual C++ rant:

I'm actually a student taking a C++ class in school, and if it weren't for microsoft providing the materials, quite frankly, my school would have no computer department. period.

Too bad this isn't true. GCC works just fine as a C++ compiler, that's a lot of the cost right there. Now for information what exactly does MS provide? Visual C++ Manuals? Look up crap like that on the net, you can find all kinds of C/C++ tutorials, documentation and information teachers can use.

-- iCEBaLM

Re:Reply to the Visual C++ rant:

And Microsoft also is willing to cheapyly site-license this stuff to colleges and universities that have the money to pay full price. This is not charity. Most colleges are not so strapped for cash that they couldn't pay for MS Office just like a regular corporation. They could afford to go to a Unix based solution like Framemaker, but MS wants itself to be established as the standard computing platform everywhere. So, MS offers site-licenses really cheap in order to indoctrinate the students into thinking that everyone uses MS.

This is the same policy that Apple uses, so I am not singling MS out as particularly bad. No company does this as charity.

Walt

So much for the auctions...

Anyone else find it interesting that the "high" bid on the first auction was exactly $75k, which happened to also be the reserve, and was placed by the person who was selling the second auction (simpsonseller). And then his bid on the first auction gets cancelled saying that he didn't think anyone had 75k to spend on games (which sounds more like something the seller would say), and then the first auction immediately gets cancelled. And the second auction gets cancelled at the same time.

Like a lot of people called it, looks like it was fake from the start.

-Todd

---

Re:Fuzz

The 1995 version of the paper was never actually published. Nevertheless, it's one of the most popular papers ever published at UW/Madison.

The SWEng community who were refereeing it wanted to see more stuff about testing methodology, whereas the fuzz tests are incredibly simpleminded in their approach and don't fit in to any of the accepted "testing paradigms". That's not to the tests' discredit at all, though, as what they exposed (the incredible fragility of many common C programs) is absolutely amazing.

I went to a talk that Prof. Miller gave on fuzz about a month ago, discussing the 2000 NT results. I'd personally be really interested to see where the blame for this lack of robustness lies: the applications, the MFC, or the Win32 API. Unfortunately, there's really no way to do that with such simple testing tools.

You can see Prof. Miller's fuzz page here [wisc.edu]. Bart Miller is a great professor and researcher; as an aside, you should really check out the Paradyn project [wisc.edu] (which is sadly slightly less well-known than fuzz outside of the scientific computing communities) and its child, the dyninst API [dyninst.org]; the purpose of these projects is to allow alteration and instrumentation of stock binaries.


~wog
My opinions are my own and not those of the research group or the university that I am affiliated with.

Hmm..

My school uses gcc. It's free.

legos?

Great..just what I need. I was cruising the site, and my little brother was looking over my shoulder...he saw the legos...and since he is already very into legos, he is going to start doing things like this! Thanks a lot slashdot! Now I have to put up with my little brother making weird time consuming/wasting lego creations and then he will ask me to make a webpage for it!!! I think i need a little more net privacy for reading slashdot!!

Reply to the Visual C++ rant:

I'm actually a student taking a C++ class in school, and if it weren't for microsoft providing the materials, quite frankly, my school would have no computer department. period. The teachers simply lack the funds and initiative to create a computer department unaided. Trying to villianize MS for being charitable is completely rediculous. It's as though you ran out of bad things they've done, and attempt to twist their virtuous acts into something that sounds as though it promotes your whole irrational anti-microsoft stance.

Microsoft will probably never become free for everyone or open sourced, but just deal with it. However, when they do provide charity (for FREE) to schools so as to aid in education, you had better respect that.


-CoG

"And with HIS stripes we are healed"

visual c++

Not all classes that teach C++, using the free M$ VC++ compiler, focus on the Windows API. I know someone who is taking a class now and the class focuses on objects and algorithms. The Windows API isn't even mentioned in the class, the only programs they are writing are console win32 apps.

Of course, the GNU compiler + a text editor + gdb is the best way to learn how to program. Many colleges use it as a teaching tool, so it's good to learn how to use it early so you don't run into it later on, after using the VC++ compiler for a while. The nice thing about this compiler is that it forces you to learn about makefiles, object files, etc. These types of things are hidden from the programmer in a simple VC++ environment.