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Yeah, but we've got the bastards' names so we can make sure we get them before the aliens get us.

This work actually originates in Bob Full's Polypedal Lab at Berkeley. Check out this SF Chronicle article published in 2000 to find out a little more.

This work actually originates in Bob Full's Polypedal Lab at Berkeley. Check out this SF Chronicle article published in 2000 to find out a little more.

This work actually originates in Bob Full's Polypedal Lab at Berkeley. Check out this SF Chronicle article published in 2000 to find out a little more.

Find out ;)

what, like this?

I had that idea a couple years ago too, except you forgot: network chess becomes amazingly fun when your friend is in your house as a ghost! They should build this & bundle with Chessmaster ?000 with network capability, so friends without the board can play on their PC!

We have rules to the extent that we limit play selection (for guys who want to go for it on their own 7-yard line on fourth down). Gamers won't be able to select offensive plays in certain situations. We'll also restrict the guys who like to move players around. Those guys who take a WR and put him at TE and move him way out in a formation, or a guy who uses fast wide receivers on the defensive line. It's the non-standard stuff the game is going to restrict. But the game has some real creative guys and I have to hand it to them. They are really good at exploiting every aspect. What we try to do is take out stuff we can't normally see in a football game.

While I love this game, I also don't feel comfortable when I hear these things that I interpret as arbitrary tweaks to cover up faults in the system.

For example, a local Econ professor did some research on decision-making and figured out that most teams are punting way too much. I chalked it up to traditional football thinking, and over a beer, he told me a little anecdote. Apparently in an old Madden game, gamers were going for it very successfully on 4th down(1). Once Madden heard about this, he thought it was "horrible" and the game engine was claimed to have been tweaked to make converting 4th downs artificially harder.

And why not play a WR as TE? There's Teyo Johnson drafted out of Stanfurd who's doing just that, IIRC from a Sporting News article. And it's not a stretch of my imagination to see Tony Gonzalez as a decent WR. Heck sometimes I draw up plays just for him so that I don't have to go and invest in an extra player....

When the developer says that he wants to restrict non-standard stuff, I simply don't feel comfortable. Admittedly they have done a great job in letting Michael Vick lead the league in my 2002 franchise running (well almost) and passing (rating-wise) but I think that basing player behavior on NFL teams is a less optimal result than I would prefer.

(1) In The Hidden Game of Football by Carroll, et al, the success rate on 4th down is quoted at 49% (p.23, revised ed.)

Windows Policies could be handy for this.

I seem to recall being able to restrict what programs can/can't be executed with that tool...

Sure, it isn't exactly unbeatable security, but I've never seen an "average" user manage to outwit it.

This might get you started.

For those of you blindly following that link and getting 404's or similar, here's both the corrected version (Berkeley is spelled w/ 3 e's) and in link form -
http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~bh/hackers.html

This is where TinySec comes in handy ;-) (making sure that at least one Berkeley reference shows up in this thread ;-))

The word "legacy" keeps popping up in correlation with mainframes, and this is really why most of them are still around - legacy code that no one wants to re-do for other systems. However, new applications are typically being written for scalable, multi-component architectures, not mainframes.
The reasons for keeping the legacy systems are obvious: cost of conversion, proven correctness, etc. However, I still think the scalability and reliability (e.g.: redundancy, resource pooling, load balancing, etc.) of NoW (Networks of Workstations) will in time push both the mainframe and nearly anachronistic programming language Cobol out the door. It's a simple matter of economics: it costs less to design, construct, implement, maintain and re-tool the different components of a distributed system as opposed to that of a mainframe.

Culler's paper on NoW is a classic.

A lot of people are answering the question of why there are bugs at all, and it's an important question, but I'd like to take a different angle and consider why there are so many visible bugs. Why does a bug in a driver, or even an application, bring down a whole system? In addition to reducing the incidence of actual bugs, IMO, we should also do a better job of containing the bugs that will inevitably exist even if we all use the latest whiz-bang code analysis tools (which rarely work for kernel code anyway). Some of the semi-informed members of the audience are probably thinking that's the job of the operating system; I'd argue that our entire current notion of operating systems is flawed. There are way too many components in a typical computer system that "trust each other with their lives" in the sense that if one dies all die. Memory protection between user processes is great, but there should be memory protection between kernel entities, and other kinds of protection, as well. One of the basic services that operating systems need to provide going forward is greater fault isolation and graceful instead of catastrophic degradation.

The Recovery Oriented Computing project at Berkeley has gotten some press recently for trying to address this issue. Many here on Slashdot don't seem to "get it" because they've never worked on systems in which a component failure was survivable; they don't realize that rebooting a single component - perhaps even preemptively - is better than having the whole system crash. "Software rot" is a real problem, no matter how hard we try to wish it away. ROC isn't about saying bugs are OK; it's about saying that bugs happen even though they're not OK, and let's do the best we can about that. Another project in the same space, with more of a hardware/security orientation, is Self Securing Devices at CMU. There, the idea is to find ways that parts of a system can work together without having to share each others' fate. While the focus of the work is on security, it shouldn't be hard to see how much of the same technology could be applied to protect a system from outright failure as well as compromise. There are plenty of other projects out there trying to address this problem, but those are two with which I happen to have personal experience.

The key idea in all cases is that current OS design forces us to put all of our eggs in one basket, and that's really not necessary. Designing fault-resilient systems is tough - few know that better than I do - but that's only a reason why we should do it once instead of devising ad-hoc clustering solutions for each specific application. Lots of people use various forms of clustering as a way to achieve fault containment and survive failures, but the solutions tend to be very ad-hoc and application-specific. Do you think Google's solution works for anything but Google, or that a database transaction monitor is useful for anything that's not a database? Fault containment needs to be a fundamental part of the OS, not something we layer on top of it.

Read "No Silver Bullet: Essence and Accident of Software Engineering" by Brooks. A copy can be found here.

Software is extremely complex. Developed to handle all possible states is an enormous task. That, combined with market forces for commercial software and constraints on developer time and interest for free software, causes buggy, unreliable software.

In case you hadn't made the connection yourself, the Slammer worm used many of the techniques described in the "Curious Yellow" paper, so indeed, it is not an unlikely scenario, as it has already happened.

Not just another kingdom - but a taxonomic level above kingdom has been added. This is the domain level, and was introduced because of the research of Carl Woese. He found, through genetic sequence comparisons, that non eukaryotic organisms (prokaryotes) are comprised of two groups (bacteria and archae) that are as different from one another as both are to eukaryotes. A good picture and explanation can be found here.

The strength of the old taxonomic systm is that it is extensible, but it depends on a few suppositions which have been shown to be false. One of the suppositions is that there are a finite number of well-definable species which were created and will always remain exactly the same. Charles Darwin questioned this supposition by pointing out species which appeared to be transitional, and which were extremely difficult to classify in one category to the exclusion of another. Such were usually called "subspecies" and were presented as evidence for the theory of natural selection in The Origin of Species. Darwin theorized that these subspecies were in the process of changing from one form to another.

Evolution poses a serious problem to a finite taxonomic system. After Darwin's theory was widely accepted, biologist began viewing biological diversity as a spectrum rather than as quantized sets. So how do you classify a spectral array? The electromagnetic spectrum is broken into regions, like IR, UV, microwaves, radio waves, the visible spectrum, etc. These boundary regions are not well-defined and tend to change from textbook to textbook. That's sort of what phylogenists are doing these days. Most have given up on unambiguous categorization, and are concentrating instead on making taxonomy consistent with evolutionary descent. Each taxonomic group should (theoretically) descend from a common ancestor. That's harder than it sounds, but genetic data is a powerful tool in figuring out lines of descent. Genetic data has provided quite a few surprises so far about who's related to whom.

from link:

In a blatant misuse of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, over the past two weeks a group of national retailers forced FatWallet.com (www.fatwallet.com) to remove Day After Thanksgiving sales information from its site. In letters sent to FatWallet, each retailer claimed that the Copyright Act gives it a monopoly over this price data. Today, the Samuelson Clinic and Gray Matters, on behalf of FatWallet.com, challenges those letters as abuses of federal law, insists on damages, and refuses to disclose identifying information on the individuals who posted the sales information. For more about this issue, please read the press release [PDF], FatWallet's online story or the Chilling Effects story.

from link:

In a blatant misuse of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, over the past two weeks a group of national retailers forced FatWallet.com (www.fatwallet.com) to remove Day After Thanksgiving sales information from its site. In letters sent to FatWallet, each retailer claimed that the Copyright Act gives it a monopoly over this price data. Today, the Samuelson Clinic and Gray Matters, on behalf of FatWallet.com, challenges those letters as abuses of federal law, insists on damages, and refuses to disclose identifying information on the individuals who posted the sales information. For more about this issue, please read the press release [PDF], FatWallet's online story or the Chilling Effects story.

from link:

In a blatant misuse of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, over the past two weeks a group of national retailers forced FatWallet.com (www.fatwallet.com) to remove Day After Thanksgiving sales information from its site. In letters sent to FatWallet, each retailer claimed that the Copyright Act gives it a monopoly over this price data. Today, the Samuelson Clinic and Gray Matters, on behalf of FatWallet.com, challenges those letters as abuses of federal law, insists on damages, and refuses to disclose identifying information on the individuals who posted the sales information. For more about this issue, please read the press release [PDF], FatWallet's online story or the Chilling Effects story.

Full disclosure, Haas MBA '97 -- I had never realized until tonight that it was the school's idealism (career center listings) to blame for the dot-com bubble. Damn us farkers and our idealism!

Okay Quattrone, you're free to go home now. Okay Andersen, sorry about all that commotion.

Yeah, it was our idealism of the Berkeley Business School to blame. In the face of a history of defeats to the well heeled landlording bourgeois, we remained loyal to the underdog. Go Bears! Give 'em the AXE, Right in the Neck!

Ignore the guys from Harvard and Wall Street. Presumably Berkeley is to blame because of its location. Oh yeah, except that Berkeley isn't even in the heart of the Silicon Valley and presumably that other business school, at the Jr. University holds less than idealistic views. Or maybe they are idealistic but in ways that conform to poster Shoten's viewpoints making them non-idealistic.

Huh? WTF? I want my last five minutes back. The parent's post is one non-sequitur after another.

Insightful? Or just a full bong?

If you took a Java benchmark and ported it "directly" to C (e.g., virtual methods turn into function pointers) I think that would diminish the speed advantage of C. You'd still get speedup from having structs, optimizers that have 30 years of experience behind them instead of 10, etc. But if you rewrote the thing to an equivalent hand-optimized C program, I think C would still be a lot faster.

The revolution will not be blogged, Brother.

I had the pleasure of seeing a lecture, A History of UNIX and UNIX Licenses, by Peter Salus at Setec recently.

He was a witness in the 1993 lawsuit between UNIX System Laboratories versus BSDI. The prosecution accused him of being Mentally Contaiminated for having viewed both sets of source code. Someone went out an made big red laquer buttons that said this and everyone who had seen source wore one to the trial. The contempt of court argument begins, and since it was a statement made by the prosecutor and not objected to by the court, then the buttons got to stay.

This case has some interesting similarities to the SCO accusations. SCO has much less of a leg to stand on.

I want a mentally contaiminated laquered button. If you've seen source code, then you are mentally contaminated. Maybe it's the start of a movement.

I found an excellent article on this subject in the Berkeley McNair Journal, that also goes some way towards explaining the "Asian gang" problem in California that I learned about from a friend at Rice: Re-examining the Model Minority Myth: A Look at Southeast Asian Youth

Nonetheless, we may both be being too simplistic. Check out this article: Different Factors Affect the Academic Achievement of Asian and Latino Immigrant and Second-Generation Students

One thing that bothered me about your post though, is your obvious belief in the superiority of Western culture. You do realize that Arab culture and science and Western culture and science have had complex interactions over the centuries, and that Western culture and science would not be where they are today without that interaction. In talking to Turkish and Japanese friends here in Germany, I've come to the conclusion that at least Turkish culture is significantly more similar to my own, than is Japanese culture. And a female Japanese friend of mine made it very clear that there is still very serious gender-based and class-based discrimination in Japan today. As a society, they have been successful anyways. Japanese aren't eagerly adopting Western culture. They are to some extent eagerly adopting Western fashions, and learning English, but that is the extent of it. The English is for business, and fashion has never been rational, much less constant.

Anyways, a few books that I would suggest, if you're interested in the relation between Western culture and the rest of the world are Jared Diamond's Guns Germs and Steel, and John L. Esposito's The Islamic Threat: Myth or Reality (published before the 11 of September, and only becoming more relevant). Before reading these books, I also read William P. Alston's Perceiving God, the ideas in which are very related, but don't actually touch on the culture question.

I'll just leave the education question alone, as it was only tangential to my original point. Suffice it to say I don't agree, but maybe we can pick up that discussion some other time.

In fact it was the Seattle Times of August 24, 1995 (the same day as Win95 launch):

C:\ONGRTLNS.W95

There was a small Apple logo at the bottom-center of the ad, as if to say "do you get it?" What the ad meant was:

Congradulations Windows 95

You have to remember that Windows 95 brought support for long file names... except on floppies, which were still very common at the time.

Have a look here.

Why not stick with NFS for the time being?

I went through the "is coda right for me?" phase, and also "is intermezzo right for me?" and also spent tens of hours researching distributed filesystems and cluster filesystems online ... my conclusion is that the area is still immature, I will let the pot simmer for a few more years (hopefully not many), and use NFS in the meantime.

My situation: desire for scalable and fault-tolerant distributed filesystem for home use with minimal maintenance or balancing effort. Emphasis on scalable, I want to be able to grow the filesystem essentially without limit. I also don't want to spend much time moving data between partitions. And last but not least, the bigger the filesystem grows, the less able I will be to back it up properly. I want redundancy so that if a disk dies the data is mirrored onto another disk, or if a server dies then the clients can continue to access the filesystem through another server.

All that seems to be quite a tall order. I checked out coda, afs, PVCS, sgi's xfs, frangipani, petal, nfs, intermezzo, berkeley's xfs, jfs, Sistina's gfs and some project Microsoft is doing to build a serverless filesystem based on a no-trust paradigm (that's quite unusual for Microsoft!).

Berkeley's xFS (now.cs.berkeley.edu) sounded the most promising but it appears to be a defunct project, as their website has been dead ever since I learned of it, and I expect the team never took it beyond the "research" stage into "let's GPL this and transform it into a robust production environment". Frangipani sounds interesting also, and maybe a little more alive than xFS.

On the other hand coda, afs and intermezzo are all in active development. afs IMHO suffered from kerberitis, i.e. once you start using kerberos it invades everything and it has lots of problems (which I read about on the openAFS list every day). AFS doesn't support live replication (replication is done in a batch sense) either.

CODA doesn't scale and doesn't have expected filesystem functionality: for 80 gigs of server space I would require 3.2 gigs of virtual memory, and there's a limit to the size of a CODA directory (256k) which isn't seen in ordinary filesystems. There's also the full-file-download "feature". CODA is good for serving small filesystems to frequently disconnected clients but it is not good for serving the gigabyte AVIs which I want to share with my family.

Intermezzo is a lot more lightweight than CODA and will scale a lot better, but it's still a mirroring system rather than a network filesystem. I might use that to mirror my remote server where I just want to keep the data replicated and have write access on both the server and the client, but it's again not a solution for my situation.

The best thing about intermezzo is that it sits on top of a regular filesystem, so if you lose intermezzo the data is still safe in the underlying filesystem. CODA creates its own filesystem within files on a regular filesystem, and if you lose CODA then the data is trapped.

Frangipani is based on sharing data blocks, so like NFS it should be suitable for distributing files of arbitrary size. I need to look at it in a lot more detail; this is probably the right way to build a cluster filesystem for the long haul. For the short term, Intermezzo is probably the right way for a lot of people: it copies files from place to place on top of existing filesystems.

What I did in the end:

• new server (Celeron 1.3 GHz, 512 meg RAM)
• 2 x 80 gig IDE disks
• Each IDE drive has 2 partitions (one small, one huge)
• Each partition is RAID-1 mirrored with its partner on the other disk
• The huge RAID partition is defined to Linux LVM (logical volume manager)
• Logical volumes are created within that for root, /home, etc...
• All logical volumes are of type ext3 for recoverability.

The way it works is tha

Take a look at the paper "Graphical Modeling and Animation of Brittle Fracture". This technique is pretty much state-of-the-art, and runs at several thousand times slower than real-time. CPUs are going to have to get a lot faster for real-time physics, although the GPU companies will probably set their sights on hardware accelerated ODE solvers.

Indeed, GOFAI and the computational model of human intelligence is where Minsky and his ilk have been stuck for decades. As many of the other replies in this topic show, the traditional idea that the brain is a sort of fleshy collection of logic gates is still the most common belief. There are many authors that have written and demonstrated that the brain probably doesn't function as a mass of context-free predicate logic rules -- including my favorite, Hubert Dreyfus.

The progress of AI is uncertain, but it is certain that there's no future for symbolic logic AI.

Of course, during his time, he had no idea that technology would ever develop at the pace that it did in the 20th century and that it will in the 21st century. On the other hand, even if he could imagine such unimaginable technological growth rates as we have seen in the last hundred years, no one from his time could imagine such prohibitive measures being taken to prevent technological advancement in today's world.

The popular opinion regarding Malthusian theory of economic growth is that Malthus had it backwards -- his prediction that man's consumption would strip the earth of its resources failed to consider (1) technological growth and (2) that man's wants and needs evolve as well as anything else. In other words, as our resources change, our wants and needs are at least partially shaped by what we can possibly provide. We adjust to the environment in which we live. (Agent Smith says, "There is another organism on this planet...")

The question I would like to pose to Slashdot's readership is this: To what degree was Malthus right considering man's habits of mass consumption and self-imposed barriers to innovation such as copyright laws, and to what degree was Malthus wrong considering technological and other innovations? (Hmm. Ask Slashdot?)

I haven't read the long and dense article

Yet you feel qualified to comment....

requiring a whole plethora of yet unwritten code

You do realize they have running code for (for example) an email server (actually a proxy) which uses these principals? NB this was based on proxying sendmail, so they didn't "re-architect/redesign whole systems from ground up". This isn't the only work they've done either.

As for 'will it be worth it', if you'd read the article you'd find their economic justifications. This has a good explanation of the figures. Note in particular that a large proportion of the failure they are concerned about is operator error, hence why they emphasise system rollback as a recovery technique, as opposed to software robustness.

I haven't read the long and dense article

Yet you feel qualified to comment....

requiring a whole plethora of yet unwritten code

You do realize they have running code for (for example) an email server (actually a proxy) which uses these principals? NB this was based on proxying sendmail, so they didn't "re-architect/redesign whole systems from ground up". This isn't the only work they've done either.

As for 'will it be worth it', if you'd read the article you'd find their economic justifications. This has a good explanation of the figures. Note in particular that a large proportion of the failure they are concerned about is operator error, hence why they emphasise system rollback as a recovery technique, as opposed to software robustness.

For a much better, and more detailed, discussion of Recovery Oriented Computing, you're better off visiting the ROC group at Berkeley, specifically David Paterson's writings.

For a much better, and more detailed, discussion of Recovery Oriented Computing, you're better off visiting the ROC group at Berkeley, specifically David Paterson's writings.

The projects that the grid is best at are pretty much the areas that already have 'grid' projects, biochemistry, genetics, SETI and some maths problems. In which I include one of the most appropriate maths problems for the grid, is brute force password attack. How long before the US Gov. starts a Patriot@home grid to brute force any encrypted files it wants to see, in the name of homeland security...of course.

According to Wilensky in this University press release, he claims to have been misquoted here.

any time it's imaginable that a system might need another gig of storage, it's probably worth going to the store and spending the hundred dollars.

A gig is nothing in the enterprise space. What happens when a terabyte is the unit you allocate between applications or departments, and a petabyte is still big but no longer guaranteed to be the biggest on the block? Gonna walk down to the store and buy a terabyte of RAM, plus a CPU and chipset and OS capable of addressing it? This whole discussion is based on a faulty concept of what "big" is nowadays. For a truly big database, RAM isn't going to cut it. RAM and disk sizes have grown rapidly, but database sizes have (at least) kept pace. That will probably always be the case. If something came along that was even bigger than disks, but even more cumbersome to access, databases would interface to it anyway. General-purpose OS access won't be far behind, either. VM is far from dead; if anything, the change that's needed is to get rid of bogus 2x/4x physical-to-virtual ratios in broken operating systems like Linux and Windows so they can address even more virtual memory.

we can either a) use other machines as our "VM" failover, or more interestingly, b) Directly treat remote RAM as a local resource

I worked at a company several years ago (Dolphin) that allowed just this sort of remote memory access at the hardware level. Even then, there were so many issues around consistency, varying latency (this is NUMA where access is *really* non-uniform), and system isolation (it sucks taking a bus fault because something outside your box hiccuped) that the market resisted. InfiniBand HCAs don't even do that; access to remote memory is explicit via a library, not just simple memory accesses. RDMA over Ethernet is even less transparent, and has a host of other problems to solve before it's even where IB is today; it's a step backwards functionally from software DSM, which has been around for at least a decade without overcoming the same sort of acceptance issues mentioned above.

What I'm convinced we're going to start seeing is some capacity for distributed computation in the RAM logic itself

You could start with IRAM at Berkeley. There are links to other projects as well, and some of the papers mention still more that don't seem to be in the links. A lot of what you talk about is possible, and being thought about, but a lot further off than you seem to think.

Parts of Asia aren't exactly known for following licensing agreements.

Could one of the reasons they didn't do the upgrades is the fear that the Service Pack would detect a pirated version?

Which would you be more afraid of MS shutting you down, or a possible security problem? One company wouldn't think anything of it. Get a whole bunch of these "Not Me's" companies and then you've got a big problem.

From the sounds of it, the Slammer / Sapphire Worm was a combination of flukes that caused it to grow as fast as it did, 2 orders of magnitude faster than Code Red. Very interesting reading... http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~nweaver/sapphire/

AOL revolutionary ideas Nor is the revolution an AOL keyword.

You CAN store more than 2 hours of video on a DVD, just create the videos in VCD format (MPEG-1 video), and store them on a DVD disk. This will give you around 7 and a half hours of video per DVD.

Microwaves will work only work on one frequency, which is the frequency that water likes to vibrate at. So it's not like they can change the frequency because then it would do a crappy job of heating the food. I suppose they could be very well sheilded.

That's a common misconception. The resonant frequency of water is not at 2.45 GHz (the freq of microwave ovens). There is an absorption peak around 22 GHz for liquid water. (See How a microwave oven works and the graph from Ask Mr. SETI.) Of course, the molecules of water interact more than those of a gas, so things are a bit more complicated.

2.45 GHz was chosen as a compromise that would heat water, fats/oils, etc, as well as what was easily manufacturable back then.

So, airlines could use ovens at a different frequency, but what would be the point? They need to harden their electronics agains leaky home ovens, plus any misguided "death rays" cobbled up out of surplus microwave oven parts.

It seems history, even short term history repeats itself. This was tried in the past by the BSD license and was taken out because it is way too onerous. The problems with requiring such credit are well enumerated by the Free Software Foundation in the essay entitled "The BSD License Problem".

On the surface, it sounds like a good idea until you consider what it means to give prominent credit to all the major people who are involved with a piece of software. The larger a project is the larger the number of active participants. More importantly when a project gets large enough it acquires dependencies that provide significant functionality which also are as deserving of credit as the original application developers.

For example I built a news aggregator that is an now a source code available project on GotDotNet that has 70 developers signed up with about a dozen having been active in one shape or the other. There are also dependencies on three external libraries that also provide significant functionality. If this was a commercial product exactly how feasible would it be for me to give prominence to everyone who provided significant value to the application? What metric would I use?

This article defines NUMA as

"an acronym for Non-Uniform Memory Access. As its name implies, it describes a class of multiprocessors where the memory latency to different sections of memory are visible to the programmer or operating system, and the placement of pages are controlled by software. This is in contrast to shared memory systems where the memory latency is uniform or appears to be uniform. ...may be further subdivided into subtypes. For example, local/remote and local/global/remote architectures. Local/remote machines have two types of memory: local (fast) and remote (slow). Local/global/remote machines add one more type of memory, global, which is between the local and remote memories in speed."

This was posted to slashdot last time we had a story on a similar topic, but it's worth a re-post for everyone who missed it. If you like logic puzzles and riddles, check out wu:: riddles. They have a section of Microsoft questions as well.

Here's an example riddle to get you started:

NONHOMOGENEOUS ROPE BURNING

You have two ropes, each of which takes one hour to burn completely. Both of these ropes are nonhomogeneous in thickness, meaning that some parts of the ropes are chunkier than other parts of the rope. Using these nonhomogeneous ropes and a lighter, time 45 minutes.

Note: Some clarification on what is meant by nonhomogeneous. For instance, maybe a particular section of rope that is 1/8 of the total length is really chunky, and takes 50 minutes to burn off. then it would take 10 minutes to burn off the remaning 7/8, since we know that the whole rope takes an hour to burn off. that's just an example; we don't know any such ratios beforehand. The point is, if you look at one of your ropes and cut it into pieces, you have no clue how long any individual piece will take to burn off.

I go to this site every once in a while. There are various riddles on it of increasing difficulty incl math and science ones. There happens to be riddles Microsoft uses during interviews. Enjoy!

Microsoft Interview Questions

some more questions.

No, you need CCured for that.

Already robotic warfare is emerging. I wonder if WMD will include robots soon.

Already robotic warfare is emerging. I wonder if WMD will include robots soon.

Already robotic warfare is emerging. I wonder if WMD will include robots soon.

Just download version 3.08 to fix it.

KidsClick! was created by a group of librarians at the Ramapo Catskill Library System, as a logical step in addressing concerns about the role of public libraries in guiding their young users to valuable and age appropriate web sites.

RCLS's first effort to address this need was to compile a single page of search input boxes from the handful of existing databases of selected or screened sites. This page has undergone several revisions, and is still being maintained at http://www.rcls.org/ksearch.htm

In the Summer of 1997, RCLS wrote an Library Services and Technology Act (LSTA) grant application that proposed the idea of creating a search engine/web guide for children. We were dissatisfied with the quality, scope, functionality, size, and attention to maintenance of the handful of existing databases.