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A few people have made the comment that Google can do this because 99% of the people will only use a few MBs of storage anyway. Reasonable theory, but here's another idea -- it doesn't matter if everyone uses a massive amount of storage.

First, figure out how many people there are in the world that might potentially use Gmail. Then figure out what is the potential maximum amount of unique data each of those people could generate on a daily basis. Then determine the size of the redundant information that could pass through the Gmail servers.

Note that a huge percentage of emails and attachments are sent to multiple recipients. For each piece of email or attachment compute and store a unique hash. Each account consists of only a list of hashes and some header metadata. This redundant information will significantly reduce the total storage space.

A quick seach finds this Berkeley study that suggests that there were about 400 PB of email (unique) generated last year. Assuming that you can save 1 GB of data for the fully-loaded cost of $1 (US), storing all of the internet's annual email traffic costs $500M annually in the worst case.

The best case is significantly better than that, as you can:

a) compress text by up to 80%
b) store every mail only once
c) store every large binary only once
d) add storage as needed, not up-front
e) reduce the cost of storage over time

This is off-the-cuff, but Google is looking at maybe a $50M annual investment in storage to store all the email on the internet, even if everyone uses it. They don't even need a storage limit. Period.

This part of the precambrian was previously known as the Vendian period. (Ok, the link does give an alternate name, but this news is at least a decade old).

A OS X port and potentially a linux port are both immenent with the release of the BOINC client. Not every project can release with all ports on all plateforms with a limited number of project workers.

I'm surprised the reviewer of this book didn't take the time to look into Weber's history. He's not a tech guy; he's a professor of political science. Not long ago I downloaded a draft paper of his called "The Political Science of Open Source" which seems to be a draft for this book - the themes overlap nicely. Weber is working at BRIE, the Berkeley Roundtable on the International Economy. The paper is here.

Pdf version Link to google's html version

The government can throw me in Guantanamo Bay...

Not if you are a U.S. citizen!

If you are a citizen you have a right to a fair and speedy trial by your peers!

Oh, wait...

"The government is moving quickly toward a more fascistic form of rule under which persons, including citizens, can be held incommunicado indefinitely, without charges or judicial review, based solely on the president's decision."
- RWOR.org

Leor Weinberger is the grad student, and if you re-read the article you'll see that his name and the link are both mentioned there.

Presumably the aftermath of the shoe event horizon!

I'm sorry to say that a lot of the western world thinks of the East as backwards. Maybe it's American cockiness, but we like to think of ourselves as more advanced. It's nice to see that notion being chipped away. It's great remind people that we're all on this Pale Blue Dot together.

Actually, Brooks ought to be recognized for his No Silver Bullet article from the 80's as it provided a very large foundation for what we know as software engineering, but the mythical man-month is notable as well.

Either way, you're right -- he should be listed here, and especially instead of business folks. Brooks was a true Computer Scientist, whereas Ellison and others simply commercialized computing.

UC Berkeley's (famous) Soda Hall looks better!

Clifford Stoll book "Cuckoo's Egg:Tracking a Spy Through the Maze of Computer Espionage" details his encounter with a german hacker in the 1980's. It was the book that inspired my interest and career in computers and eventually as a System Administrator. In 1990, Nova made a documentary about it called "The KGB, CIA, Computer and Me".

What is so ironic is that at the time the FBI did not even consider hacking a crime because Berkley couldn't show a sufficient monetary loss. This is despite the fact that the hacker was after military research. How times have changed! In any event, Stoll's ability to use his scientific training as a astronomer, his basic knowledge of computers and programming mixed with a quantum of social engineering and a massive honey pot, he was able to trace this hacker back to a KGB agent in Germany.

If I recall correctly, instead of being arrested, this hacker was found dead in his burnt out car in the middle of a forest somewhere in East or West Germany. It's a great read.

Pixie is a Renderman-compliant renderer that happens to be open-source. There used to be an example of subsurface scattering on previous versions, although not present on the latest version (even though subsurface scattering can still be achieved with the renderer). Highly recommended.

For much more info, head to the CDMS homepage, which includes links to preprints of the mentioned Phys. Rev. Letters article (note, the paper hasn't been published yet), as well as other (published and unpublished) papers, as well as general info.

Of course, it's actually a $100,000 mic, but hey, that's pretty close to $0.25 in space dollars. :-)

Good grief - there are so many things that can go wrong, and the next thing you know all your data is erased and people are notified of your death. All because the phone network went down while you were on a trip, or the inet connection dies (happens way too often here).

To hype anything as 'new' and 'revolutionary' is silly, since as we all know, nothing new has been invented since 1970. But there are certainly techniques which aren't as popular as they deserve to be. One is Delta Debugging as implemented by delta (a tool to automatically produce minimal test cases) and Ask Igor.

They might not be revolutionary, but the is a few ideas
which can be just to reduce the number of bugs in a program.

1) 100% unit test coverage of your programs.
2) Statistical Debugging

3) Valgrind

4) The D programing Language
with build in support for unit testing, contracts and class Invariants.

I was waiting for someone to mention this...

The ONLY security WEP provides is merely delaying any would-be 'hacker'.

Simply sit within the range of a wireless network with your laptop, collect enough packets with Ethereal or a similar tool, and you'll have the AP's WEP key.

Proof of concept: WEPCrack, open source program for cracking WEP keys from tcpdump, prismdump or ethereal captures.

For detailed info on why WEP is insecure, go here. Plenty of info on various types of Wifi attacks and vulnerabilities.

Don't these worm writers learn anything?

You're clearly speaking for yourself. (I will speak up for myself below - personal opinion follows:)

Personally, I don't want anyone getting my bank account numbers, credit card numbers, tax information, etc. because a couple people who don't do these things don't mind if someone screws around on *their* computer. I will use my own judgment as to what is appropriate on *my* computer.

Basically, I will grant some programs that I trust the ability to "anonymously track bugs" or maybe allow a program like SETI or Mersenne Prime Search. I would be willing to fill out a survey at the time of download, from a web page - not an app running on my PC. I do not expect any ads to randomly come to my PC from the internet. The only company that has a right to do this would be my ISP (maybe), and I would quickly switch. None of my personal information should ever be transmitted without my express consent. Anything else amounts to identity theft or the enabling of such.

You must be the last guy on earth to believe he actually said that. He didn't.

Just because it sounds OK to you doesn't mean it is OK. You see, that would involve the following series of propositions:

1) I am an expert at grammar.
2) The statement sounds correct to my grammar-expert ear.

3) Therefore, the statement must be correct.

The problem with such an argument is that it commits a logical fallacy known as the appeal to authority . You, sir, are not an authority on grammar (or, apparently, on logic).

Allow me to explain why the grandparent poster is correct.

"Were" is the third-person plural past tense of the verb "to be," (PDF file) which implies an action began in the past and concluded fairly shortly thereafter. In other words, the action was brief and did not extend over a long period of time. In the United States legal system, a person "stands accused" of a crime or civil liability for the period beginning with the indictment/arraignment/serving of papers/etc. until the jury returns a verdict, the judge hands down a decision, etc. (barring any appeal).

This necessitates the use of the perfect tense (action began in the past and continues in the present) or the present tense (action occurring now). The perfect tense (what I would have preferred, actually) is "They have been accused...," while the present tense is what the grandparent poster used.

I should also point out that if the accused had been killed before the story went to press -- an example that you invented out of thin air, by the way -- then past tense is still wrong, and you should have used past perfect tense instead: "They had been accused of spamming."

Of course, we could have avoided this entire debate if the AP story writer and the copy-editor in charge of looking over the story had used more proper terminology and said "They stand accused..." in the first place. (Yes, the original error comes from TFA, which I R.)

p

Wow nice random word generator.. Can I have a go?

Seriosuly, It's utter rubbish. I mean please explain to me how you stack an S-box into a corner of a cryptographic chamber..

It's just a substitution you muppet.. And cryptography isn't all hardware speed.. I mean WEP

Simon.

If you think this push of technology is even the least bit fishy, go pick up a copy of _High Tech Heretic_, by Cliff Stoll (the Cuckoo's Egg guy). I scooped up a copy a week ago and he has beautifully pontificated all my feelings about technology in education.

A reviewer on Amazon wonderfly offers, "Why are we supposed to wire every classroom? Whose best interests are served by programs that offer "computer literacy?" Can we really meet people online? Stoll asks the reader to check assumptions and suspend judgments, while we determine what's really best for our children and our culture."

Highly recommended ...

Uh...wrong BSD license. The original license was:

Redistribution and use in source and binary forms, with or without modification, are permitted provided that the following conditions are met:

• Redistributions of source code must retain the above copyright notice, this list of conditions and the following disclaimer.
• Redistributions in binary form must reproduce the above copyright notice, this list of conditions and the following disclaimer in the documentation and/or other materials provided with the distribution.
• All advertising materials mentioning features or use of this software must display the following acknowledgement: This product includes software developed by the University of California, Berkeley and its contributors. (This clause has since been removed.)
• Neither the name of the University nor the names of its contributors may be used to endorse or promote products derived from this software without specific prior written permission.

THIS SOFTWARE.... (cue disclaimers)

In discussing public libraries and the internet, I'm reminded of Cliff Stoll's book Silicon Snake Oil. In it, amongst other things he discusses that libraries that spend their money and time putting in computers for internet access aren't spending their money and time finding and buying new books for people. Thus, the library doesn't grow, it becomes a subsidized internet service provider.

There's geological evidence of water in the Precambrian (~550 million years ago - 4.5 billion years ago). The meteor activity in this eon was quite high (meteors are chucks of rock that enter the atmosphere, while asteriods are non-planetary object floating about in space). And during earth's consolidation 4.5 billion years ago, it was constantly bombarded with meteors.

There were no animals with skeletons or hard shells in the precambrian, and certainly no people.

In order for there to be a layer of water above the earth (an aquatosphere if you will), the pressure of the material below the water would have to be greater than that of the water in order to keep it there (like the ocean floor does at the moment, keeping water from sinking to the core of the Earth).

If your bible memory is correct, then the Earth formed with no consideration to the basic laws of physics, which it did.

See this project, published in 1997, started a few years earlier. Also had a compiler project that targeted it with C code.

See this project, published in 1997, started a few years earlier. Also had a compiler project that targeted it with C code.

"Normal" power output is "just enough for the tower to hear you with a minimal error rate". Maybe the poster meant "power of 1/1000 the typical amount".

My CDMA phone adjusts its power level 400 times per second, I believe. If I am close enough to the cell to only require 0.1mW, then that's all my phone will transmit.

Typically, my phone probably puts out 10mW. But it is designed for power output in any amount below 200mW. (See this link)

is there any Free software capable of exploiting the general computing power of modern video cards?

I expect that once it suddenly becomes clear that the GPU in a modern video card has serious processing power, that someone will release a version of the SETI@Home client which can use the rendering engine as a processor. Bearing in mind that most computers use their GPU's for a very small percentage of their logged-in life, I suspect there is real potential for using it for analysing on distributed computing projects.

Obviously you've never seen Clifford Stoll with one.

The man's a bloody menace.

Anyway, these guys have already prooved that, in some situations, is very hard to get useful information throught sound, even when you know what you may be looking for.

Not that I'm paranoid or anything. Ok, ok, so I'm paranoid and the governments' out to get me, but I still gotta wonder how quickly it was cracked by the boys with the big iron. Even though private/personal computational horsepower has increased dramatically over the years, while govt funding has decreased, I still can't see a general purpose CPU or network of CPUs being able to compete with dedicated crypto hardware .... Am I wrong??
Another interesting link here
Paper: "Architectural considerations for cryptanalytic hardware"
Cypherpunks Tonga

Lisa: Where are the dice?

Todd: Daddy says dice are wicked.

Rod: We just move one space at a time. It's less fun that way

The Simpsons, Episode "My Sister, My Sitter"

However, I didn't get the impression this was based on religion.

There are people out there opposed to games, and they'll be opposed to them even when the only games available are "Pink Pony Princesses in Powder Puff World."

Here at Berkeley(didn't make the cut) the wireless is pretty darn good, and fast improving (due to a grant from HP).
I'm rarely without a signal, and often surprised at its location/strength. I don't have experience with some of the areas on campus, but all the important buildings (math/cs/ee) are well covered. They also reciently installed WAP's in select dorm lounges. (Of course i already put a 802.11g router in my room, so i won't be taking advantage of that any time soon)
So i was quite surprised not to find us listed.
Perhaps, given that this ranking was provided by intel, and many many people here use macs (i'd say about 1/2) we were "conveniently" skipped. Some of our sister schools (of similar size/attendance - eg. #14 UCI, #16 UCR) were not...
*dons tin foil hat*
then again, maybe their wireless is simply that good. (Anyone from those schools to confirm?)

Anyway i can't stay, have to get back to watching a lecture webcast(.rm), since i was too distracted with my laptop in class to pay attention. *sigh*

cheers,
graham

PS-yes, my CS prof does speak deliberately and look like an elf. He's canadian.

Here at Berkeley(didn't make the cut) the wireless is pretty darn good, and fast improving (due to a grant from HP).
I'm rarely without a signal, and often surprised at its location/strength. I don't have experience with some of the areas on campus, but all the important buildings (math/cs/ee) are well covered. They also reciently installed WAP's in select dorm lounges. (Of course i already put a 802.11g router in my room, so i won't be taking advantage of that any time soon)
So i was quite surprised not to find us listed.
Perhaps, given that this ranking was provided by intel, and many many people here use macs (i'd say about 1/2) we were "conveniently" skipped. Some of our sister schools (of similar size/attendance - eg. #14 UCI, #16 UCR) were not...
*dons tin foil hat*
then again, maybe their wireless is simply that good. (Anyone from those schools to confirm?)

Anyway i can't stay, have to get back to watching a lecture webcast(.rm), since i was too distracted with my laptop in class to pay attention. *sigh*

cheers,
graham

PS-yes, my CS prof does speak deliberately and look like an elf. He's canadian.

Here at Berkeley(didn't make the cut) the wireless is pretty darn good, and fast improving (due to a grant from HP).
I'm rarely without a signal, and often surprised at its location/strength. I don't have experience with some of the areas on campus, but all the important buildings (math/cs/ee) are well covered. They also reciently installed WAP's in select dorm lounges. (Of course i already put a 802.11g router in my room, so i won't be taking advantage of that any time soon)
So i was quite surprised not to find us listed.
Perhaps, given that this ranking was provided by intel, and many many people here use macs (i'd say about 1/2) we were "conveniently" skipped. Some of our sister schools (of similar size/attendance - eg. #14 UCI, #16 UCR) were not...
*dons tin foil hat*
then again, maybe their wireless is simply that good. (Anyone from those schools to confirm?)

Anyway i can't stay, have to get back to watching a lecture webcast(.rm), since i was too distracted with my laptop in class to pay attention. *sigh*

cheers,
graham

PS-yes, my CS prof does speak deliberately and look like an elf. He's canadian.

Here is what they will do. Their DECLARATION OF PRINCIPLES CONCERNING ACTIVITIES FOLLOWING THE DETECTION OF EXTRATERRESTRIAL INTELLIGENCE says nothing about money. Besides each signal is analyzed at leats 5 times. Sometimes at the same time.

More importantly there are more useful distributed computing projects. Here is a pretty good index. For example there's Folding@Home which furthers our onderstanding of proteins, which are so important in so many life processes and diseases, and fightAIDS@home which has already found a promising new drug. Or how about SETI@home? Trying to crack encryption by brute force seems like such a waste in comparison to these.

Perhaps the encryption contests are so popular just because you can win money. It's like a lottery. Maybe the only thing that could be done would be to have a cash prize for significant findings in other projects, or if who did it can't be defined due to the nature of the algorithm, maybe even just an ordinary lottery?

The attacker appears to be deliberately targetting machines in academic and high performance computing environments, rather than attacking systems indiscriminately.

Make waaaaaaaaaaaaay for the Karma Whore!

1) The list of movies from Clearplay.
Nope, "Shaving Ryan's Privates" didn't make the cut (but, Band of Brothers did). You can sort them by MPAA rating, which yields this: no NC-17, no G ratings. Some (but not that many) R ratings. Basically, it looks like it's about toning down PG and PG-13 movies for kids. For god's sake, maxwell - won't you think of the kids?!?

2) From the lawyers mouth - hear the lawyers discuss the case in front of a law class at Berkley. Every time they almost get interesting their lawyerly nature comes through, but hey - THEY REALLY BE LAWYERS!! (no joke, I seriously considered preparing an edit script). btw: favorite quote - "In the entertainment industry, it's not about the money. It's about ALL the money."

3) Bowdlerizing for Columbine?: Why American directors have no moral rights to their movies. (that's the subtitle, not a troll)

4) There Shouldn't Be a Remote Control on How We Watch DVDs, a Commentary by Ernest Miller of the Yale Law School.

I was just getting a little tired of seeing section 106 pasted again and again again.. sometimes in text, sometimes marked up in bold, sometimes in italic...

Now, maxwell, that mp3 file is 1:29:10 long - no more posting till you've heard the whole thing, mmkay?

For example, in the SETI project, there is a hugh amount of data which needs to be analyzed, but one chunk of work has no dependence on another, so the work can be spread to thousands of workstations all over the world. This is the hallmark of an "embarssingly parallel" problem.

Hmm... not every machine is an Intel box running a Microsoft O/S

True, but that's not a reason to use pure java. Compare with setiathome, which is available in binary for a lot of processors and operating systems.

There's also the new BOINC architecture...

Hmm... not every machine is an Intel box running a Microsoft O/S

True, but that's not a reason to use pure java. Compare with setiathome, which is available in binary for a lot of processors and operating systems.

There's also the new BOINC architecture...

This presentation explains the problems with Java floating point.

Incidentally, C99 has very nice support for IEEE 754 (improved numerics support was, in fact, one of the biggest additions compared to the old C89 standard).

yes! Looking into this a little more, the time figure are close...

Perhaps this explains the jumps in evolution observed every 100,000 years or so.

from this article
"The time between magnetic reversals on the Earth is sometimes as short as 10,000 years and sometimes as long as 25 million years; the time it takes to reverse is only about 5,000 years."

Someone should look into this!

Get ready for a new body! Woohoo! :p

.

I'm not an american and I'm impressed by what your country is able to achieve. But then again, I wouldn't expect much less of an abundantly rich western country with 285 million citizens.

80% of the population shares less than 20% of the country's wealth (Stats from 1998, I'm sure it's gotten worse since).

I'm not quite sure about "abundantly rich"... at least on the citizen level. That top 20% didn't get that rich by spending money on space probes, either. It's amazingly hard to get funding for something that has no monetary return on the investment.

Which makes it that much more impressive, IMHO.
=Smidge=

You're probably referring to the Schumann resonance, the resonance of the earth-ionosphere resonant cavity. Energy from lightning around the world excites this resonance, which then rings--much as hitting a bell with a hammer causes the bell to ring.

Also like an acoustic bell, there is a fundamental frequency of resonance and many overtones that grow fainter as you go up in frequency. The fundamental Schumann resonance is approximately 7.8 Hz; the first few overtones are usually given as 13.8, 19.7, 25.7, and 31.7 Hz. There is a slight variation in the frequencies involved over long periods of time, as the ionosphere changes in response to solar activity.