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Here is basic description of the process.

For more detail minded folks, here is a feasibility report and a technical report on a prototype field test.

The tracking didn't do much to restrain P2P usage though, as the network would constantly hit the peak of 40 Mbps, and everything would slow to a crawl. Most of the time, web pages downloaded at about the speed of a 56K modem. The only time I could get decent speeds was early in the morning, or around winter/spring break when many people left for home early.

Connections within the campus and to other campuses were still fast, though. And, the network connection for the rest of the non-residential buildings on campus is always fast with a much higher cap.

And what about the people crunching SETI@home or folding@home or distributed.net's challenges? Sure, 3 or 4K may not seem like much, but it adds up, and I imagine there will be a small decrease in the participation in these projects if users feel the need to conserve bandwidth.

Of course, we could start a distributed.net-style company, and try to get ISPs in on it... Have always-on connections offer reduced rates for use of your computer's extra time. That way people could get high-speed connections for less without really sacrificing anything.

That same theory might also make ISPs more lenient about multiple computers on a home connection. (don't know about your cable provider, but mine doesn't like that).

seeing a show many years ago about XPARC

I was about to say, "I think you mean AT&T", and in searching for links, I found this interesting page. I had never heard about any such efforts at PARC and was surprised to see that you were in fact correct.

Not everyone who uses the GPL have in mind RMS's software commons. Some use it as a business method, and strategically choose to release some GPL code and some proprietary code, or sell rights to use GPL code in a proprietary way. The argument, by Russell Nelson, was "When I write proprietary software I expect to get paid"; his company, Crynwr, follows this model, as does Aladdin, the company that brought you Ghostscript.

The BSD model is more communist than the GPL model. "From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs", as Marx said. It is the BSD model that asks people to give away their work without restriction: with the GPL, it's a trade: I'll give you mine if you give me yours. I respect people who release their own work under BSD-like licensing (that's the license used for the largest free software project I was part of, Ptolemy), but I have no respect for those who demand that others use BSD-style licensing: these are just people who want a free lunch.

Brian brought a UNIX system in to the school, back when UNIX was a pretty rare beast, geeks only, and he did some pretty amazing things. One thing he did was give the students root access. What he discovered is that if you give students responsibility, they will act responsibly. There's a wonderful writeup on his web page at Berkeley.

Many important things came out of that project, though the one that will probably have the most click with this crowd is that JOVE, Jonathan's Own Version of Emacs, was written by one of Harvey's students.

So, in addition to games, there are several other interesting models for getting kids engaged. I like to think that Harvey's model encompasses the ones that encourage kids to play games on the computers.

O(100000) is also O(1).

O does not mean order of magnitude.

After seeing the interest in for example the RC5-56 challenge and others, it is a fact that there is a huge amount of people interested in participating in things like this. Maybe a distributed computing project, willing and open to take any (non criminal) tasks would not be that bad idea afterall. If there would be volunteers for building the crunching code using API provided, it would be possible to run projects with quite short lifecycle. I don't see SETI and RC5-56 and similar projects very interesting anymore. The task should be clear, reasonable and the estimated brute forcing time should be reasonable (like in 3 months maximum.) A dozen of little tasks per year, might prove more interesting.

Anyway, in this particular case, and 99% of others, the password is "IAmGod" :) and in this case probably no distributed brute forcing is needed - just the plain old crackerjack should do. :) .

This isn't a really novel project as it has allready been done by David Wagner and Tal Garfinkel. I highly recommend people read the Janus paper located at the bottom of this page. They did something very similar although it uses some funny Solaris /proc interface hack. Notice that the paper presents the exact same idea for isolating web browsers. This Systrace mechanism seems a bit more complete though.

Maybe we can extend this problem and start an OpenSource effort to develop a high quality implementation of the OceanStore concept.

Securely access your data from anywhere. fault tolerant, secure, replicated, synchronized, pervasive.

I recommend you to take a look at the page and read their papers/presentations. An interesting idea.

I am in no way associated with the OceanStore project. Just an interesting research project I came across.

I haven't tried that, but tuning a scanner radio to my computer's CPU frequency while crunching Seti@Home sounds rather interesting...

7. The sound of my moniter while listening to winamp, and watching various visualizations.

...whereas this thingy needs nothing but an ordinary AM-radio! :)

We already have several graphical softsynths available:

Pd: http://www-crca.ucsd.edu/~msp/software.html

jMax http://www.ircam.fr/equipes/temps-reel/jmax/en/res ources.html

Also, there are also several well-respected text-oriented softsynths available:

Csound: http://www.csounds.com

sfront: http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~lazzaro/sa/sfman/user/ install/

Not really, since it was named SunOS back in those days. See the SunOS & Solaris Version History . Also, x86 support dropped out for a long time between SunOS 4.0.2 and Solaris 2.1. -- David.

http://gold.cchem.berkeley.edu/~heidi/

I'm capped, and yet I still whore.

DNA, as I'm sure we all know, is double stranded. One strand is a complement of the other. A complements T and C complements G. So, if one strand is:
5' ATTTC 3'

then the other strand is:
3' TAAAG 5'

The DNA is "read" from 5' to 3'. 5' and 3' refer to particular atoms on the sugar backbone that are attached to one another via a phosphate.

When DNA is replicated, you split it into two strands:
5' ATTTC 3' and 5' GAAAT 3'

(notice that the two complements read in opposite directions)

and each strand has it's complement added.

5' ATTTC 3' and 5' GAAAT 3'
3' TAAAG 3' and 3' CTTTA 5'

The problem with this is, in order for this happen to DNA, you need an RNA "primer." This primer is a complement to the beggining of what you want to replicate. So, for example, if you have (RNA bases I'm putting in bold. U is the same as T:)

UAA

floating around in solution, which compliments ATT, then any sequence beggining with ATT will be replicated, but other sequences will NOT be replicated, because no RNA primer is available to get them started.

So, if you have a whole mess of DNA, including a piece that you're interested in, which reads:

5' ATTTG (long space........) TCGTC 3'
3' TAAAC (long space........) AGGAG 5'

and you add:
TAAAC and TCGTC

You get a chain reaction; the sequence flanked by the complements of the two things you add (the sequence printed above) is replicated, and then the replication product is replicated, and so on and so on. Other sequences, which are flanked by only one compliment (only ATTTG, say) will be replicated occasionally, but there replication products cannot in turn replicate, so you get no chain reaction.

More history here.

A thermophile (heat loving organism), thermus aquaticus, provided a polymerase (an enzyme which polymerises, that is to say replicates sequences of, nucleic acids like DNA and RNA) that works extremely fast at high temperatures. In general, the higher the temperature you run a reaction at, the faster it goes. However, most biological enzymes (from, say, a person) cease to function when temperatures rise (this is one of the ways heat kills you.) Thermophiles, bacteria that live in geysers and in volcanic ocean vents, have evolved enzymes that continue to function at higher temperatures.

There's an angle Cringely missed on adding intelligence to vehicles. There's work going on at UC Berkeley that involves cars talking to each other and sensing where the road is. The idea is if the driver's reaction time is eliminated from driving decisions, you can pack more cars on over-burdened freeways and speed them up as well.

The way it works is there are magnets embedded in the freeway that tell a car where the road is. The cars have transmitters that communicate with the cars in the immediate vicinity so when a car speeds up or slow down, the other cars know it immediately and can react accordingly. You drive onto a freeway and pull in behind a convoy of PATH-enabled cars. The car takes over from there and drives itself until you tell it you want out of the convoy.

Instead of discouraging tailgating, the technology can use tailgating to improve overall fuel efficiency by having the trailing cars draft the leader - much like race car drivers do now except you're not relying on human reactions to make it viable. Human factors come into play as people who have ridden in a car doing 60 mph that's 4 inches behind the car in front find the experience uncomfortable.

The technology has been tested on a section of I-5 near San Diego and actually works. There are of course, reasons why it isn't going to show up in next year's models. Some are technical such as magnetizing enough freeways and dealing with magnets that go bad but a key obstacle is the need to revise liablitiy laws and draft legislation that specifies maintenance schedules and such. Without tort revision, the first accident that involved PATH-enabled cars would kill the technology. People will ignore the fact that we've had non-PATH pileups in the past and focus on "the computer did it..."

David Reed's open spectrum site links a paper showing that if you're willing to put up with some latency, having mobile nodes can make your total wireless network capacity scale up linearly with the number of nodes. (pdf ps). It's a simple store-and-forward scheme. Put this in every car, with a big hard disk, and say goodbye to wireless bandwidth congestion.

at the close of what is known as the Miocene era, when Ice Age conditions cooled the planet

U.C. Berkeley has been working on implementing a wireless network around campus. You can read up on the project here. It mentions some of the technical issues they face like 2.4GHz cordless phones and even interference from old microwave ovens.

mac addresses are fairly easy to spoof (at least in OpenBSD), and any two-bit prism based sniffer can tell the mac addresses of other nodes on the network. It would probably be better to go with a different scheme, such as login/passphrase authentication, rather than MAC address. I know UC berkeley is using some sort of program like that check out Calnet

"like the French government's purchase and placing in the public domain of the first photographic patents in the early nineteenth century... The work of Harvard economist Michael Kremer ( 1998, 2000), both with respect to the possibility of public purchase of patents at auction and of shifting some public research and development funding from effort-oriented to result-oriented processes (that is, holding contests for private companies to develop vaccines instead of funding research directly), is especially intriguing in its attempts to develop institutions that have all the advantages of market competition, natural monopoly, and public provision."

Some very scary research has been aimed at discovering just how fast a worm could infect the entire Internet. This is the so-called Warhol worm, so named because instead of getting 15 minutes of fame, it would only take 15 minutes to infect the entire internet. If some nut combines a Warhol worm with a Kazza worm, we are in deep trouble.

You'd put it in the middle, of course. Or, you could design your own chips with say 64 MB of memory per chip and both the processor and the memory are on one chip! Then, all you'd have to do is stick them all together and watch your SETI@home units crunch!
Speaking of SETI@home, you could create fast fourier transform chips out of those transmeta chips, right? Just something to ponder, but a dedicated fast fourier transform chip would be übercool to have in a cluster. Also, you'd have to rewrite/recompile seti@home to use the chip, but if they really wanted those work units then they'd write one.

Unlikely.

Migration of a running process, even when going between identical processors, is expensive. Going even to a similar processor would be more so. (And going from, say, a Sparc to a m68k is totally out of the question, not that you're suggesting that.)

It's *really* hard to justify a policy of process migration in a cluster except with extremely long-running, massivley-parallel jobs. For most stuff, you'll waste less time just letting it finish. (GLUnix does do process migration. Note that when you come back to a workstation that's been horfed by GLUnix, you'll be waiting about two minutes before you get your UI back.)

As for *starting* IA32 binaries on an IA64 processor, that's doable, but most cross-platform clustering systems function by keeping binaries for all their constituent processor types and having a hacked shell to convert PATH to the architecture-dependent path. (And by "most cross-platform clustering systems", I mean most that have been designed, since I know of none that work.)

I am an experienced software deveoper that is fairly competant in what I do. I am presently living in Southern California, but i am willing to relocate to most places (especially moving back to the San Francisco Bay Area). A full resume can be found at http://xcf.berkeley.edu/~nordwick/resume.pdf or you can just go the homepage to find other formats.

Yes! I am using my +1 bonus, because I need a job badly.

I am an experienced software deveoper that is fairly competant in what I do. I am presently living in Southern California, but i am willing to relocate to most places (especially moving back to the San Francisco Bay Area). A full resume can be found at http://xcf.berkeley.edu/~nordwick/resume.pdf or you can just go the homepage to find other formats.

Yes! I am using my +1 bonus, because I need a job badly.

Network hotsync is slow, but adequate. PalmVNC and Top Gun ssh both work, but they're not usable enough to be more than curiosities on that tiny screen. The only browser I've found that works at all is the one that comes with AvantGo's mobile Internet service. I've never managed to get a static IP address to work, but that's a minor problem; the DHCP client works fine. More serious: the MultiMail email client built into the 802.11b module won't talk to a recent UW IMAP server; it doesn't grok the server's CAPABILITY response.

First, I don't think the parent is flamebait. I think the author is truely and honestly lost.

because it has a truly horrific history

Before talking about history, I suggest you learn some. Pretty much all religions had a horrific history.

Other religions like Christianity, Judaism, [more religions] allow for secular coexistance and equal rights.

They do TODAY. Christians slaughtered Jews and Muslims during the Inquisition. Jews slaughtered the Cananites in the early history of Isreal.

Now, read This essay. One of the author's points is that the Protestant Reformation brought Christianity into the modern age. Perhaps Islam, a much younger religion, is going through the same phase now. They key point is: don't compare Islam today against Christianity or Judaism today and extrapolate backwards. If you want to know what happened in the past, actually read about what happened in the past.

They may shake their fists in anger, but they don't kill you for insulting or denegrating their religion.

Almost all other religions have done this in the past. Read the essay and find out how different sects of Christians did this to one another. Read your history.

Now, get outside the West and do that in Saudi Arabia...Before you die, try to take a bet on where the AK-47 rounds are flying from that kill you.

You have an extremely perverted world view. Once you're done reading the history books, TRAVEL a bit. Geez. Most of the planet's population is peaceful and friendly. Only the violent bits get reported on CNN. That doesn't mean the rest of the planet is like it is on CNN. If you actually TRAVELLED to some Muslim countries, you might be able to think more coherently!

The winner of the 500 millionth result, Milada had the odds stacked against her. First, she is a she and we all know what the rates are there in the geek world. Next, she's not from the US (41.5% of SETI contributers are US residents), she's listed as Czech (only about 0.6% of the SETI contributers are Czech residents). And last she's only returned (as of this post) 92 results!

Such a combination is so astronomically unlikely, I think we've found our ET people!

But seriously I'm glad the prize went to someone who's got this unlikely profile, it just proves how truly global and widespread the SETI appeal is. Congratulations to SETI and Milada!

The winner of the 500 millionth result, Milada had the odds stacked against her. First, she is a she and we all know what the rates are there in the geek world. Next, she's not from the US (41.5% of SETI contributers are US residents), she's listed as Czech (only about 0.6% of the SETI contributers are Czech residents). And last she's only returned (as of this post) 92 results!

Such a combination is so astronomically unlikely, I think we've found our ET people!

But seriously I'm glad the prize went to someone who's got this unlikely profile, it just proves how truly global and widespread the SETI appeal is. Congratulations to SETI and Milada!

Free speech vs. Copyright:

Freedom Of Speech And Injunctions In Intellectual Property Cases (Mark A. Lemley, Eugene Volokh)

Fair Use in terms of First Amendment:

Universal City Studios, Inc. V. Corley: The Constitutional Underpinnings Of Fair Use Remain An Open Question

General Digital Copyright:

Selected Papers by Pamela Samuelson

These are good background to understand the concepts. Don't believe everything you read on Slashdot (though this sentence is one of the things you should believe :-) ).

Sig: What Happened To The Censorware Project (censorware.org)

1. "The Wichita State University team has offered a $500 prize to whoever returns the 500 millionth result!"

Why buy something you already own. I think he's saving up to buy congress.

Instructions

Secondly, Newton's demonstration that white light was composed of many colours of light using two prisms. Very neat, and very simple.

Hrrm... Hate to bite on an AC, but according to the Seti@Home literature,

"An average, current model home home computer should take between 10 and 50 hours to complete one work-unit. This assumes that the computer ONLY works on SETI@home." [About Seti@Home]

Granted, this was written in a past incarnation of the client, but few people dedicate enough CPU time to the client to return stats as quickly as you. Don't forget the average is CPU time, not real time.

I'm posting this to ensure that everyone here is aware that there's a "Team Slashdot" group on SETI@home. Click here to see the latest team results. This team is actually not far away from reaching the one-millionth result.

By the way, I'm ranked #174. Kewl. :)

Besides, scientists have always had a history of experimenting on themselves: Newton died of mercury poisoning from his experiments, Kevin Warwick has been having chips implanted in his body, and where do you think Antony van Leeuwenhoek got the sperm he observed under his microscope?

There's an interesting paper on "Warhol Worms" here.

Basically the author predicts that, by using efficient algorithms to search the space of potential victims a worm could infect most of the vulnerable computers in 15 minutes to an hour. Pretty scary when you think of how much damage Code Red variants were doing 3 weeks after the initial hit.

Uh, you were kidding, right? Check Google.

Protocols to mention besides OpenLDAP and OAI are Whois++ and Z39.50. OAI actually is transported over HTTP. You could do the same with EAD or others.

Projects which implemented Z39.50 for the purposes of interoperability are ONE and ONE-2, EUROPAGATE, Desire and Desire II, DECOMATE and DECOMATE II, and Renardus just to touch the surface. Don't forget OHIOLINK...

Another other older, but interesting, metadata activity have been SGML MARC, and the corresponding XML MARC.

The BYTE article was exciting to see again and could have benefited further from pointing out the relative ease of use of Dublic Core. OAI uses unqualified Dublic Core, SAFARI uses qualified Dublin Core to create an up to date index over academic research in Sweden. Shoot, since it already uses some META tags, you could even tweak htdig to use Dublic Core on your own site for those high precision searches.

With the interest in structured data (XML?) maybe well see some sites serving up not just HTML with Dublic Core, but maybe even Docbook or even TEI / TEI Lite. There are great tools for converting from Docbook to HTML, PDF, RTF, etc. and AbiWord and Kword already have partial support for docbook. If there were more, then we could see some real changes on searching the web. Coding for SGML is more difficult, so the obvious choice would be to start from Docbook XML.

Sheesh.

But if you insist: here it is . Somebody else with real bandwidth grab this; this is one of our research group computers and I'll be truly smitten by my advisor if it gets slashdotted.

Well, if you look at the number of processor of this supercomputer it's 5104 * 640 = 3.2 Trillion processors.

Just for comparison, the whole SETI@home network had a performance of 17.6 TeraFLOPS during the last 24 hours.

This is faster than the SETI network.
SETI operates at 17 teraflops, but at a cost of only $500000.

Why does the repository need to be public? In an era of very powerful client machines, why must we have a centralized database

Why do you assume that public implies centralized? The article author certainly didn't; that was actually one of the questions s/he was asking? If you look at systems like OceanStore or SFS, or even Microsoft's own Farsite, you'll quickly realize that your assumption is false.

The Oceanstore project at Berkeley is aiming to do just that: create a distributed storage model to provide a global, distributed, persistant storage resource.

Afterall, there's always Extraterrestrial life to search for, encryption to break, or maybe even a cure for cancer. Do we all really need to re-compile rsync?

Actually, they still run on Digital Unix. They just renamed it, like they did when they renamed OSF/1 to Digital Unix. DEC was the only company from the OSF consortium to stick with the project, which was designed to make all the vendors' unices compatible -- O(pen) S(ystems) F(oundation (or was it federation?)). It was originally kind of created by DEC, IBM, and I think HP and maybe some others. Before that, they were mostly using Ultrix.

from The setiathome platforms list:
47) alpha-compaq-T64Uv4.0d/EV67 87171 9.952 years 1 hr 00 min 00.4 sec
from the setiathome cpus list
15) Alpha EV67 31882 3.701 years 1 hr 01 min 00.5 sec

The format is platform/cpu, number of units completed, total cpu time contributed, average cpu time/unit completed. It's mor readable in setiathome,s tables.
All the best performers on that list are Alphas, running Tru64. Those suckers have been in the Ghz range for many years, long before Intel or AMD. Are Sun, IBM, or HP there even yet? I know they're getting close.

Actually, they still run on Digital Unix. They just renamed it, like they did when they renamed OSF/1 to Digital Unix. DEC was the only company from the OSF consortium to stick with the project, which was designed to make all the vendors' unices compatible -- O(pen) S(ystems) F(oundation (or was it federation?)). It was originally kind of created by DEC, IBM, and I think HP and maybe some others. Before that, they were mostly using Ultrix.

from The setiathome platforms list:
47) alpha-compaq-T64Uv4.0d/EV67 87171 9.952 years 1 hr 00 min 00.4 sec
from the setiathome cpus list
15) Alpha EV67 31882 3.701 years 1 hr 01 min 00.5 sec

The format is platform/cpu, number of units completed, total cpu time contributed, average cpu time/unit completed. It's mor readable in setiathome,s tables.
All the best performers on that list are Alphas, running Tru64. Those suckers have been in the Ghz range for many years, long before Intel or AMD. Are Sun, IBM, or HP there even yet? I know they're getting close.

According to their site, Seti@Home clocked in at 96.79 TeraFLOPs over the last 24 hours.