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A friend of mine recently discovered that Clemson University has made all of our student personal information available to the world after a simple Google search. The information can be found directly also. What recourse does a student have when his or her personal information is published like this? And how can we make sure that this will never be done again?

Call me stupid, but AFAIK x86 chips have full segmentation support (in protected mode obviously) - ability to define different segment types (read only, r/w, execute only, etc)... For those of you not familiar with it, it allows the programmer to define different types of memory segments, which would allow you to do some pretty interesting things such as defining read-only code segments (so the machine instructions can't be modified in memory), and non-executing data segments (to prevent OS from trying to run code stored in program data/buffers). This would solve the problem, at least how they addressed it in the article.

If current operating systems actually used this in addition to paging (which is what most of them only use now), why would they need to create a new chip? Linux does not fully utilize segmention, mostly only paging. I don't have any resources on MS OS design right now so I can't comment on it... (although maybe looking at the recent source would help some ;)

Urban Legends Beta vs VHS
Now this article does state that there was little, if any, difference between the two in available features (other than tape length) or output quality. It does state that the arms race was led by Sony (Betamax) and that VHS caught up usually in less than a year. So at any point during the (early) life of Betamax, VHS was a up to a half-year behind technologically. Obviously, comparison after (or at!) the demise of Betamax would be stupid.
So from the case for the prosecution I find evidence for the defence.
Your witness I think ...

The Guardian's Why VHS was better than Betamax
Now this article is trying to make a point about how perception colours (or colors for you Yanks) people's views. Because people say Betmax was better everyone believes it, but the article suggests this was an Urban Myth and links to the first article debunked above.
Interestingly, the article actually says ... and maybe it was, in a lab. This is what most people are talking about when they state that (they believe) Betamax was better. Obviously, if you wanted to watch a taped film or TV program, you purchased a VHS machine, because VHS won the battle! So this article proves a different point.
Let it also be Stricken!

I guess the point is that just because something wins a business battle it's not necessarily the best techonology (Mac vs Windows)

now I just had a bit of a google-fest and found the following, some of which simply reinforce the supposition that Betamax was better than VHS, such as ...

Chapter 5 of Beyond Engineering by Luke Rumsey and Rhonda Fetner.

The lustre project (www.lustre.org) is supposedly going to be the end all/be all of distributed parallel file systems, but I believe it is still fairly unstable and not ready for production use. In the meanwhile, the best one out there is PVFS(www.parl.clemson.edu/pvfs/). Fat chance trying to find Windows clients, but you can always re-export it with Samba.

I can't quite tell from a quick reading of the paper, but this seems to be a user-mode file system. That is, if you call the regular POSIX "open" call, you probably can't open a file in the GoogleFS. It appears that some library code linked directly into the application handles all file system operations. A number of distributed file systems take that approach--it can be more efficient.

I wonder how it compares to PVFS. It seems like GoogleFS deals more aggressively with component failure. Any ideas?

The only chip design methodology that still has its original meaning is VLIW. That original meaning is "bankruptcy."

No, it's Intel / HP's EPIC (.pdf) now. I imagine IA-64 will be around for a while :)

Here's a nice page with some history and links. Even lists the real backrupt VLIWs

Oh, you mean like the Parallel Virtual File System, right?

...in WINDOWS.

Oh, sorry.

While the joke may be funny. :-P

There's actually a huge difference between a Beowulf cluster and what openMosix is doing. In a Beowulf cluster, the tasks are actually parallelized, where as in openMosix it sounds like the process is simply moved to the node that will complete it the fastest dynamically on the fly. For more info on Beowulf Clusters visit the Parallel Architecture Laboratory.

Adam

We use PVFS at work to give us a high-performance network filesystem for use with our clusters.

http://parlweb.parl.clemson.edu/pvfs/

I come here every fucking week, but I still don't know what a "Radio Picture" is!!!

It's a picture of a radio, duh.

Templates programming is great if you want to avoid dynamic memory allocations, as for example in real-time applications where dynamic memory allocations cause non-deterministic performance.

At clemson university robotics group, we created a generic robot control platform based on exactly such advanced C++ concepts. Take a look:
Robotic Platform]

Now, maybe someone will be able to make this go. But this company doesn't look like it. If you manage to get to their web site and look at the programming language "Viva" they have designed, it looks like you are drawing circuit diagrams. Imagine programming a complex algorithm with that.

There are already better approaches to programming FPGAs (here, here, here). Look for "reconfigurable computing" on Google and browse around.

I agree with a lot of the Paper Tiger attackers, except in this case. Programs that are extended over long periods of time prove to be better for a students long-term understanding. This is where the problem stems from, these one-week courses; people forget as quickly as they learned. My University finally started a Unix Admin course a couple semesters back and it is filled only after a couple of hours from opening registration. If you go to Clemson and am reading this, email Wayne Madison and beg him for this class.

I used to be a student admin for Clemson's College of Engr. and Science. We had several CAD tools that the Engr. students would use. There was this one tool that you could specify a duration the simulation was supposed to last, otherwise if the field was blank it would run forever. Besides that little bit of badness the field was blank by default, so many an unsuspecting student would run their simulations and they would run forever creating these huge output files, which the students also didn't know about.

The killer here, is that if you quit the program the wrong way ( something like Close instead of Quit ) the program would keep going, even after the student would log out.

So now you have N students who are all generating infinite files. However, the files would hit the 2GB limit and stop eating up space. ( Thank You )

The only other nasty ness of this is that once we found the file, if you simply removed it, the program (still running after log out) is just able to finally add more data. So you had to track down where the program was runnging and kill it first.

I was in charge of backups, and man of man was this annoying for them.

"Which Americans do you think invented the computer?"

Eckert and Mauchly.

ENIAC was not a stored program machine, and was inferior to COLOSSUS, which preceded it. EDVAC was Eckert and Mauchly's first stored program machine, but was not completed until significantly after Baby had first run. All these machines depended crucially on Turing's 'On Computable Numbers'.

So if you think ENIAC was a computer, COLOSSUS beat them to it. If you think that ENIAC wasn't a computer, Baby beat them to it. COLOSSUS, Baby and, of course, Turing, were all British.

How about Joel Rosenberg?

His first book (The Sleeping Dragon) is now available at the Baen free library!

Another favourite is Sherry S. Tepper. In particular, Grass, Raising the Stones, and Sideshow - they form a (very loose) trilogy, but aren't sold as such. Although set in the future, with space travel, etc, these books are more social than science fiction. They tend to have a bit of a "feminist" bent, but are riveting nonetheless.

The computer itself is incapable of sexism, racism, or any other form of discrimination.

So why are there fewer girls in CS?

At my school, the percentage of freshman CS/CIS/CS(BA) majors was fairly high. However, many dropped out of the program before junior year. (So did many men, but a lower percentage)

I think there are two reasons for this. First, many women simply don't like programming. I don't know why, they just don't. They have good grades, but they leave CS anyway. Another reason is that I have noticed that the guys are more likely to stick with their major than girls. If guys do poorly in a major course, they will often retake it. If girls do poorly, they will often look for a new major.

Pi is represented usually by a fraction or relatively simple equation, it's just the division that makes the number go on for ever.

Nope. If pi was rational (a fraction), it wouldn't go on for ever without repeating. (reference)

In fact pi is irrational, i.e. there are no integers p, q such that pi = p / q. (proof)

You can approximate pi as a fraction, which is what projects like this do. (pi is approximately equal to 31/10, or 314/100, or 31416/1000, or ... but these are just approximations; 22/7 is a good enough approximation a lot of the time, but that's just an approximation too)

Bullshit, the costs will be shared by the producer and the consumer. See here, my handy graph. Note that raising the costs artifcially through a tax or fee does not affect demand directly, only supply.

The first thing to do is expose all of your drives in the "same format". On Windows machines, share the extra disks as normal. In linux, use NBD (network block device) or iSCSI to expose the disks as raw partitions accessable over ethernet to the other linux boxen.

Now, on a special linux machine (the sucka, or Serialization and Uniformity Cache Kludge Administrator) mount all these exposed drives via "mount.smbfs" for the windows boxen. Use loopback filesystems the size of each Windows disk to create virtual devices accessable on said remote winboxen. Use md or LVM to stitch the exported linux box disks and loopbackfs-over-smbfs together into a software RAID disk.

Finally, format this UBER meta disk via your favorite filesystem. Expose it to windows via samba, and linux via NFS.

Of course, this whole setup serializations all the operations through one machine. Everything takes one round trip over the network. And unless you use RAID striping, if a machine goes down, so does the whole disk!

Other method, more complex:

Check out the Parallel Virtual Filesystem. What you do is for each spare linux box that has a disk, you run both the IO server and a client. One machine also has to pick up the slack of the metadata manager (no big deal...) Of course, for each linux machine, you have to pick and mount certain the Windows disks (via mount.smb) and run IO server procs for each mounted volume. Finally, you have to run samba on at least one of the linux machines running PVFS to expose those files back to the Windows machines. If you can tweak the samba source to use larger than normal block transfers, do so, because PVFS suffers when you transfer data between nodes that are too small.

Or you can use OpenAFS. Someone else mentioned it here. But it's not as much fun, and it is a big deal to set up if you haven't done it before.

He fought for the Confederacy, correct?

Why does everybody pick on Bob when you have Strom Thurmond? Dole at least still looks human. I mean, Strom looked older than Dole when Eisenhower was president.

Oh, and YEARRRGHH!

I'll be sad when the guy finally dies and it's politically incorrect to comment on how how much better he looks enbalmed.

Why does everybody pick on Bob when you have Strom Thurmond? Dole at least still looks human. I mean, Strom looked older than Dole when Eisenhower was president.

Oh, and YEARRRGHH!

I'll be sad when the guy finally dies and it's politically incorrect to comment on how how much better he looks enbalmed.

That's right children, remember the REAL USC is in California!

There is some other fake institution that uses those letters, but they are a sad, pathetic school that is barely a shadow of the REAL USC!*

*This post written by a thru-and-thru Clemson student, and all those that know that USC is a school in California!

According to this document utility patents last 20 years and design patents last 15. If as the article indicates this letigation is after two decades of usage in JPEG, then either JPEG existed before the patent or the patent is about to expire, if it hasn't yet done so.

As many people here, I am a huge Linux fan, but I am so much so that I am trying to figure out how to get into the professional Linux world when I graduate.

I attend Clemson University and am in the Computer Information System (CS + business) program (and doubled in Political Science). My goal is to become a Linux sys admin, or perhaps some other Linux guru type job. The work that IBM is doing with Linux is also very appealing to me.

So, how did you get your job, and what would you recommend as the path to follow for us geeks just getting started in the professional world as to how to get into Linux? How can I become as entrenched with Linux as the professionals at IBM? I have had two internships (not with IBM, nor with Linux, but with other CS stuff), but how can I get an entry-level job in a Linux intensive environment like IBM? How can said job lead me into a career where I can be deeply involved in the Linux world?

As many people here, I am a huge Linux fan, but I am so much so that I am trying to figure out how to get into the professional Linux world when I graduate.

I attend Clemson University and am in the Computer Information System (CS + business) program (and doubled in Political Science). My goal is to become a Linux sys admin, or perhaps some other Linux guru type job. The work that IBM is doing with Linux is also very appealing to me.

So, how did you get your job, and what would you recommend as the path to follow for us geeks just getting started in the professional world as to how to get into Linux? How can I become as entrenched with Linux as the professionals at IBM? I have had two internships (not with IBM, nor with Linux, but with other CS stuff), but how can I get an entry-level job in a Linux intensive environment like IBM? How can said job lead me into a career where I can be deeply involved in the Linux world?

As many people here, I am a huge Linux fan, but I am so much so that I am trying to figure out how to get into the professional Linux world when I graduate.

I attend Clemson University and am in the Computer Information System (CS + business) program (and doubled in Political Science). My goal is to become a Linux sys admin, or perhaps some other Linux guru type job. The work that IBM is doing with Linux is also very appealing to me.

So, how did you get your job, and what would you recommend as the path to follow for us geeks just getting started in the professional world as to how to get into Linux? How can I become as entrenched with Linux as the professionals at IBM? I have had two internships (not with IBM, nor with Linux, but with other CS stuff), but how can I get an entry-level job in a Linux intensive environment like IBM? How can said job lead me into a career where I can be deeply involved in the Linux world?

Actually, the IA-64 instruction set is based off of PA-RISC, as it is the next generation of that architecture. Various projects designing processors with high levels of ILP were conducted at HP, blooming into the partnership between HP and Intel (who had been floating around an idea of a 64-bit x86 architecture, but recieved poor supportive responces) that created IA-64. HP-UX developers have stated that only minor changes must occur to port an application, and have created what equates to a shell process that converts a PA-RISC instruction directly into its IA-64 counterpart.

So, PA-RISC is native via design. The x86 instructions were tacked on, origionally supposed to be an entire processor but proved to be to costly. You have to remember that x86 is hardly needed, as its mostly important for developers porting and testing applications, and for Microsoft to run 'legacy' applications. McKinly has a newer design that should boost the x86 performance substantially. If extra is needed, I'm sure something similar to Sun's x86 PCI card will be devised.

As to heat and the rest, taking out the x86 would help of course. From what I've heard, the control logic on current IA-64 chips is actually smaller then that of the Pentium 4, which was the point of the architecture - simplify. Simplifying meant spending more time on higher level logic rather OOO techniques, etc that could be done via software. The chip is so large due to *lots* of cache.

Anyways, a few good links are:
here and here.

"Testing C++ Compilers for ISO Language Conformance" (Dr. Dobb's Journal, May 2002). This article introduces a Python framework that uses example code from the standard. Article and partial code available. Compilers include: GCC 3.0, 2.96, 2.95; Borland 5.5; VC++ 6.0.

"C++ Conformance Roundup" (C/C++ User's Journal, April 2001). This article, referenced by the previous article, analyzed results from Dinkumware, Perennial, and Plum Hall. Compilers include: IBM, Sun, Metrowerks, Intel and KAI, MS, GNU, Borland, and Comeau.

This being a geek site, we should know better. Spider silk comes out through spinneret spigots, not through the anus.

In an interesting turn of events, sex is outlawed due to its addictive properties.

see: Welcome To the Monkeyhouse - Kurt Vonnegut

He speaks the truth. Probably less than 5% of students entering college do so without any form of a computer. Lots of colleges already have laptop-for-every-student mandations, and plenty more are getting them soon (mine being an example). Most students prefer laptops.

Cheers,
levine

Because 5.5 years ago when I was a freshman at Clemson University I saw the same thing being done in the ceramics engineering department. All the freshman engineers had to tour the different departments to help them decide what path to take, and when I was on the Ceramics tour the guide showed us a science fair type piece of cardboard that had a small ceramic disc on the back of it. The disc had two little wires going to a small fm radio and when he turned the radio on I thought I was listening to one of those WaveRadio thingies. It blew me away and the first thing I thought of was I wish they could put those in cars so when the football players turned their bass up too high, if they had a disc on the trunk, at least it would rattle to the music!

Seriously though, I wonder what the Engineering college over at Clemson would have to say about this.

Clustering simply means to join several computers together in order to combine their resources. A "resource" could be bandwidth, CPU cycles, hard drive space, whatever. There is nothing "OS specific" about this definition.

As many others have pointed out, Microsoft is typically more known for doing clustering for network applications (like web servers), but they have been doing some recent advances in doing more Beowulf-style computing as well.

There is also more to the issue of price than the licensing that a lot of posters are mentioning. Most indiviual computers in a Beowulf cluster run headless (e.g., without a monitor or keyboard). I know NT 4 refused to boot when headless, and AFAIK, Win2k and XP won't either (but I'm not sure about that). The money you use buying monitors could be used to get a few extra machines in your cluster (even if you get bargin-basement monitors). Another consideration is the space for that extra stuff; could you imagine how much more space this would take up if every machine needed it's own monitor and keyboard?

I am a double major in both at Clemson University. Best of luck to you. I hope people like you and me can fight this kind of crap later.

Clemson University has already installed wireless in most parts of the campus and we will have full coverage next year. Here is a coverage list.

Clemson University has already installed wireless in most parts of the campus and we will have full coverage next year. Here is a coverage list.

There are filesystems designed for beowulfs, like PVFS, which let you take the hard drives in a bunch of computers and merge them into one big filesystem. But ext3 has nothing to do with this.

What many people think it means is often something like a parallel file system. which is not the same.

If I recall right, backups can be a pain, but that would vary and depend on the software

What many people think it means is often something like a parallel file system. which is not the same.

If I recall right, backups can be a pain, but that would vary and depend on the software

First of all I'd like to bring up an old story by Cliff on academic dishonesty that was posted by a friend of mine in a class I took in my last semester at a certain university. In this class, students were all given an assignment where they had to work seperately but could share ideas, just not code. However, when the students actually did this, they were punished (the article goes into greater detail.) The very principle of that punishment is directly contradictory to the real world, where people discuss ideas all of the time, constantly, in order to work effectively.

On a more positive note, I have to say that in my last 3 semesters of college (computer engineering curriculum) I had some rather enjoyable project classes where I worked on teams of 2 to 4 people and the experience was moderately similar to actual real world working practice. I think teamwork in education is essential and should be 50% of the curriculum. In most of my classes while in school we had labs where we worked with others, yet those projects were rather small and insignificant. I think schools should focus more on semester long or even year long projects for their computer engineers and scientists as there's only so much about those subjects you can learn from a book, the rest is really just hands on.

At my college Clemson University, this is an ongoing debate. The University is considering making the general education requirements more flexable so you can take courses more in line with your major. This is probably going to occur, but I oppose it.

I believe in the General Education requirements. Why? Because everyone that graduates from a University should have some basic skills that can help them regardless of their profession of choice. People wanting to go into non-computer related professions should still have a vauge idea of how to use a computer. People going into computer related fields should be able to appreciate literature. Everyone in every type of profession should be able to preform some of the same basic skills.

Not only does this allow any college graduate to be able to converse intelegently about any subject, but it allows people the ability to change jobs in the future without going back to school. Because prospective employers know that any college graduate has basic skills, there is potential for starting level jobs in fields unrelated to one's degree. Without general education requirements, none of this is possible.

We all should, upon graduating from college, know the basic facts about everything. Once we know the basics, we have the foundation to learn whatever our heart desires in the future. Without general education requirements, people graduating in a given field will know more about that field from the start, but the cost is the lack of the basic knowledge of other fields, which provides for a very narrow minded person.

Rogerborg said: Aw, poow wittle sowdier, is oo aww tiwed of the nasty, mean peopwe not bewieving oo?

At least with my university education, I have learned vague concepts like:

*Writing in English
*Writing in complete sentences
*Spelling and Grammar

It's pretty pathetic when you have to resort to an Circumstantial Ad Hominem, Appeal to Belief and Appeal to Ridicule logical fallacies(yet another thing my university taught me) to attempt to make a point.

I appreciate the total lack of evidence that would either implicate most universities or my specific university. (Note: That was called Sarcasm. Repeat after me: Sarcasm)

Close. The K5 was an AMD design, which absolutely stunk. The K6 design was origionally based on the K5 architecture, but the NexGen core replaced it. IMHO, AMD at that time was worse then Cyrix, and buying NexGen saved the company from another poor designed chip, and slowly built them up. Cyrix was not so lucky, and thus continued on designing slow chips and trying to compensate with their integrated solutions (which flopped).

A quick architecture page to back me up on the K5 not being NexGen: here

I can assure you our state is a little messed up sometimes. Catch this:

The state of South Carolina for years uses one-time funds for multiple years projects (not the brightest bulbs). This year the one time money didn't come in, and the state had a budget shortfall of $800M. The state decides to account for this shortfall they will cut funding to all state programs...except education...except colleges, because apparently colleges don't count as education. Tuition for instate residents at Clemson University just went up 40% this year to make up for the "we won't cut education, except for those rich colleges" decision. This is increasing ironic as last year Clemson University was named "Time Magazine's Public College of the Year" and this year we won a couple more awards. Apparently, in South Carolina, if you college wins a national award, you cut their funding. After all, we wouldn't want people to think South Carolina actually has GOOD schools! (I for the record do not mind the tuition increase. I personally support it as I feel the college had no choice. I fault the State, not the school.)

It does not suprise me in the slightest that South Carolina is having a little trouble figuring out what the law with regard to filtering should be. At least they made a decision here that tends more to the libertarian side.

I can assure you our state is a little messed up sometimes. Catch this:

The state of South Carolina for years uses one-time funds for multiple years projects (not the brightest bulbs). This year the one time money didn't come in, and the state had a budget shortfall of $800M. The state decides to account for this shortfall they will cut funding to all state programs...except education...except colleges, because apparently colleges don't count as education. Tuition for instate residents at Clemson University just went up 40% this year to make up for the "we won't cut education, except for those rich colleges" decision. This is increasing ironic as last year Clemson University was named "Time Magazine's Public College of the Year" and this year we won a couple more awards. Apparently, in South Carolina, if you college wins a national award, you cut their funding. After all, we wouldn't want people to think South Carolina actually has GOOD schools! (I for the record do not mind the tuition increase. I personally support it as I feel the college had no choice. I fault the State, not the school.)

It does not suprise me in the slightest that South Carolina is having a little trouble figuring out what the law with regard to filtering should be. At least they made a decision here that tends more to the libertarian side.

I can assure you our state is a little messed up sometimes. Catch this:

The state of South Carolina for years uses one-time funds for multiple years projects (not the brightest bulbs). This year the one time money didn't come in, and the state had a budget shortfall of $800M. The state decides to account for this shortfall they will cut funding to all state programs...except education...except colleges, because apparently colleges don't count as education. Tuition for instate residents at Clemson University just went up 40% this year to make up for the "we won't cut education, except for those rich colleges" decision. This is increasing ironic as last year Clemson University was named "Time Magazine's Public College of the Year" and this year we won a couple more awards. Apparently, in South Carolina, if you college wins a national award, you cut their funding. After all, we wouldn't want people to think South Carolina actually has GOOD schools! (I for the record do not mind the tuition increase. I personally support it as I feel the college had no choice. I fault the State, not the school.)

It does not suprise me in the slightest that South Carolina is having a little trouble figuring out what the law with regard to filtering should be. At least they made a decision here that tends more to the libertarian side.

I can assure you our state is a little messed up sometimes. Catch this:

The state of South Carolina for years uses one-time funds for multiple years projects (not the brightest bulbs). This year the one time money didn't come in, and the state had a budget shortfall of $800M. The state decides to account for this shortfall they will cut funding to all state programs...except education...except colleges, because apparently colleges don't count as education. Tuition for instate residents at Clemson University just went up 40% this year to make up for the "we won't cut education, except for those rich colleges" decision. This is increasing ironic as last year Clemson University was named "Time Magazine's Public College of the Year" and this year we won a couple more awards. Apparently, in South Carolina, if you college wins a national award, you cut their funding. After all, we wouldn't want people to think South Carolina actually has GOOD schools! (I for the record do not mind the tuition increase. I personally support it as I feel the college had no choice. I fault the State, not the school.)

It does not suprise me in the slightest that South Carolina is having a little trouble figuring out what the law with regard to filtering should be. At least they made a decision here that tends more to the libertarian side.