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Keep your eye out for who? CMU's Redteam recently traveled 200 miles in 7 hours with their vehicle...

http://www.cmu.edu/cmnews/extra/050712_sandstorm.h tml

funny because my car can't travel 2 miles with a driver...

But seriously, come on, we all know the DARPA challange is just a warmup for next years buggy race.

To bad PiKA will still beat the robotics department, an unmanned buggy just cant compete againt frat boys and 5 foot tall female drivers.

http://www.andrew.cmu.edu/user/buggy/

A) stop being insulted by jokes, its why some women piss me off so much, they can't take things at face value they HAVE to see some deep down inner shit or something and get all defensive and stupid about stuff. And his joke was pretty funny! and very hard to take as women "bashing?"

That's hardly a female-specific or even -associated characteristic, in my experience.

B) its DANGLEY bits, women have the jiggly bits, men don't. ours DANGLE.

This is the strongest point in the email.

C) MCP exams don't have much to do with programming, and i dare to say most thigns to do with MS now a days isn't programming. unless its win32 or drivers that is;)

Uh, the girl had written (at least) two apps in C# -- a calculator and a sorting application. Not exactly senior developer material yet, perhaps, but she is most definitely coding.

D) If you were trying to be funny you failed. maybe women just arn't funny? ^_^

I'd say that your item (D) isn't particularly funny either.

O)And from personal experiance i've yet to meet any good women programmers, but then i've met very few good male programmers, most way old, so it might be that there are very few good programmers period. So the simple fact its 80-100% male in CS and ENSC classes at university means i'll probably never get to meet a good female programmer. But then with 60% females at my university you wonder why so few ladies in the sciences.

I do know a few good female coders. There were several at CMU: there was the girl that TA'd my vision class at Carnegie Mellon. She knew her stuff very well. There was the PhD student that TAed my systems class there and taught a recitation. She was good too. There were two female professors that I had, a database prof (Anastassia Ailamaki, don't know much about her research) and a networks prof (Mor Harchol-Balter), both of whom were quite knowledgeable (I believe Mor, at least, has some significant network scheduling research under her belt, though she toned the content of her class down a *lot* in difficulty, and FWIW has written the single best document ever to hand to a student thinking about a PhD). There was another female professor, Jessica Hodgins (whose class I did not take, but heard a good deal about from fellow students) who is decidedly hot shit in the graphics world. And I've seen her research, and it's some seriously amazing-looking stuff (through graphics researchers kinda have it easy to make their research look good). I knew one definite Unix geek girl student at Carnegie Mellon. I am currently writing software in a department that contains a number of competent female programmers.

I agree that, in general, the software development (somewhat) and the computer science (overwhelmingly) fields are male. Also, possibly simply due to the proportions, I have generally found that at the very, *very* tippy-top of areas in CS and programming, the people are male. Finally, I have been very disappointed with some people who have clearly been hired/enrolled because they were female, and simply did not have the fascination necessary with the field to really excel.

I do have some things to say about women that aren't immediately covered in the above:

This may be just because I am male, but my sheerly anecdotal evidence is that women tend to get along with people slightly better. This is nice, even if not directly skill-relevant, when deadlines near and tensions fray.

I think that motherhood is a significant hinderance that women need to deal with -- first simply because of maternity leave, but also because we still have a strong correlation with the classic social structure of women staying home and taking care of kids, and men working in an office. Two-working-parent families hav

A) stop being insulted by jokes, its why some women piss me off so much, they can't take things at face value they HAVE to see some deep down inner shit or something and get all defensive and stupid about stuff. And his joke was pretty funny! and very hard to take as women "bashing?"

That's hardly a female-specific or even -associated characteristic, in my experience.

B) its DANGLEY bits, women have the jiggly bits, men don't. ours DANGLE.

This is the strongest point in the email.

C) MCP exams don't have much to do with programming, and i dare to say most thigns to do with MS now a days isn't programming. unless its win32 or drivers that is;)

Uh, the girl had written (at least) two apps in C# -- a calculator and a sorting application. Not exactly senior developer material yet, perhaps, but she is most definitely coding.

D) If you were trying to be funny you failed. maybe women just arn't funny? ^_^

I'd say that your item (D) isn't particularly funny either.

O)And from personal experiance i've yet to meet any good women programmers, but then i've met very few good male programmers, most way old, so it might be that there are very few good programmers period. So the simple fact its 80-100% male in CS and ENSC classes at university means i'll probably never get to meet a good female programmer. But then with 60% females at my university you wonder why so few ladies in the sciences.

I do know a few good female coders. There were several at CMU: there was the girl that TA'd my vision class at Carnegie Mellon. She knew her stuff very well. There was the PhD student that TAed my systems class there and taught a recitation. She was good too. There were two female professors that I had, a database prof (Anastassia Ailamaki, don't know much about her research) and a networks prof (Mor Harchol-Balter), both of whom were quite knowledgeable (I believe Mor, at least, has some significant network scheduling research under her belt, though she toned the content of her class down a *lot* in difficulty, and FWIW has written the single best document ever to hand to a student thinking about a PhD). There was another female professor, Jessica Hodgins (whose class I did not take, but heard a good deal about from fellow students) who is decidedly hot shit in the graphics world. And I've seen her research, and it's some seriously amazing-looking stuff (through graphics researchers kinda have it easy to make their research look good). I knew one definite Unix geek girl student at Carnegie Mellon. I am currently writing software in a department that contains a number of competent female programmers.

I agree that, in general, the software development (somewhat) and the computer science (overwhelmingly) fields are male. Also, possibly simply due to the proportions, I have generally found that at the very, *very* tippy-top of areas in CS and programming, the people are male. Finally, I have been very disappointed with some people who have clearly been hired/enrolled because they were female, and simply did not have the fascination necessary with the field to really excel.

I do have some things to say about women that aren't immediately covered in the above:

This may be just because I am male, but my sheerly anecdotal evidence is that women tend to get along with people slightly better. This is nice, even if not directly skill-relevant, when deadlines near and tensions fray.

I think that motherhood is a significant hinderance that women need to deal with -- first simply because of maternity leave, but also because we still have a strong correlation with the classic social structure of women staying home and taking care of kids, and men working in an office. Two-working-parent families hav

A) stop being insulted by jokes, its why some women piss me off so much, they can't take things at face value they HAVE to see some deep down inner shit or something and get all defensive and stupid about stuff. And his joke was pretty funny! and very hard to take as women "bashing?"

That's hardly a female-specific or even -associated characteristic, in my experience.

B) its DANGLEY bits, women have the jiggly bits, men don't. ours DANGLE.

This is the strongest point in the email.

C) MCP exams don't have much to do with programming, and i dare to say most thigns to do with MS now a days isn't programming. unless its win32 or drivers that is;)

Uh, the girl had written (at least) two apps in C# -- a calculator and a sorting application. Not exactly senior developer material yet, perhaps, but she is most definitely coding.

D) If you were trying to be funny you failed. maybe women just arn't funny? ^_^

I'd say that your item (D) isn't particularly funny either.

O)And from personal experiance i've yet to meet any good women programmers, but then i've met very few good male programmers, most way old, so it might be that there are very few good programmers period. So the simple fact its 80-100% male in CS and ENSC classes at university means i'll probably never get to meet a good female programmer. But then with 60% females at my university you wonder why so few ladies in the sciences.

I do know a few good female coders. There were several at CMU: there was the girl that TA'd my vision class at Carnegie Mellon. She knew her stuff very well. There was the PhD student that TAed my systems class there and taught a recitation. She was good too. There were two female professors that I had, a database prof (Anastassia Ailamaki, don't know much about her research) and a networks prof (Mor Harchol-Balter), both of whom were quite knowledgeable (I believe Mor, at least, has some significant network scheduling research under her belt, though she toned the content of her class down a *lot* in difficulty, and FWIW has written the single best document ever to hand to a student thinking about a PhD). There was another female professor, Jessica Hodgins (whose class I did not take, but heard a good deal about from fellow students) who is decidedly hot shit in the graphics world. And I've seen her research, and it's some seriously amazing-looking stuff (through graphics researchers kinda have it easy to make their research look good). I knew one definite Unix geek girl student at Carnegie Mellon. I am currently writing software in a department that contains a number of competent female programmers.

I agree that, in general, the software development (somewhat) and the computer science (overwhelmingly) fields are male. Also, possibly simply due to the proportions, I have generally found that at the very, *very* tippy-top of areas in CS and programming, the people are male. Finally, I have been very disappointed with some people who have clearly been hired/enrolled because they were female, and simply did not have the fascination necessary with the field to really excel.

I do have some things to say about women that aren't immediately covered in the above:

This may be just because I am male, but my sheerly anecdotal evidence is that women tend to get along with people slightly better. This is nice, even if not directly skill-relevant, when deadlines near and tensions fray.

I think that motherhood is a significant hinderance that women need to deal with -- first simply because of maternity leave, but also because we still have a strong correlation with the classic social structure of women staying home and taking care of kids, and men working in an office. Two-working-parent families hav

A) stop being insulted by jokes, its why some women piss me off so much, they can't take things at face value they HAVE to see some deep down inner shit or something and get all defensive and stupid about stuff. And his joke was pretty funny! and very hard to take as women "bashing?"

That's hardly a female-specific or even -associated characteristic, in my experience.

B) its DANGLEY bits, women have the jiggly bits, men don't. ours DANGLE.

This is the strongest point in the email.

C) MCP exams don't have much to do with programming, and i dare to say most thigns to do with MS now a days isn't programming. unless its win32 or drivers that is;)

Uh, the girl had written (at least) two apps in C# -- a calculator and a sorting application. Not exactly senior developer material yet, perhaps, but she is most definitely coding.

D) If you were trying to be funny you failed. maybe women just arn't funny? ^_^

I'd say that your item (D) isn't particularly funny either.

O)And from personal experiance i've yet to meet any good women programmers, but then i've met very few good male programmers, most way old, so it might be that there are very few good programmers period. So the simple fact its 80-100% male in CS and ENSC classes at university means i'll probably never get to meet a good female programmer. But then with 60% females at my university you wonder why so few ladies in the sciences.

I do know a few good female coders. There were several at CMU: there was the girl that TA'd my vision class at Carnegie Mellon. She knew her stuff very well. There was the PhD student that TAed my systems class there and taught a recitation. She was good too. There were two female professors that I had, a database prof (Anastassia Ailamaki, don't know much about her research) and a networks prof (Mor Harchol-Balter), both of whom were quite knowledgeable (I believe Mor, at least, has some significant network scheduling research under her belt, though she toned the content of her class down a *lot* in difficulty, and FWIW has written the single best document ever to hand to a student thinking about a PhD). There was another female professor, Jessica Hodgins (whose class I did not take, but heard a good deal about from fellow students) who is decidedly hot shit in the graphics world. And I've seen her research, and it's some seriously amazing-looking stuff (through graphics researchers kinda have it easy to make their research look good). I knew one definite Unix geek girl student at Carnegie Mellon. I am currently writing software in a department that contains a number of competent female programmers.

I agree that, in general, the software development (somewhat) and the computer science (overwhelmingly) fields are male. Also, possibly simply due to the proportions, I have generally found that at the very, *very* tippy-top of areas in CS and programming, the people are male. Finally, I have been very disappointed with some people who have clearly been hired/enrolled because they were female, and simply did not have the fascination necessary with the field to really excel.

I do have some things to say about women that aren't immediately covered in the above:

This may be just because I am male, but my sheerly anecdotal evidence is that women tend to get along with people slightly better. This is nice, even if not directly skill-relevant, when deadlines near and tensions fray.

I think that motherhood is a significant hinderance that women need to deal with -- first simply because of maternity leave, but also because we still have a strong correlation with the classic social structure of women staying home and taking care of kids, and men working in an office. Two-working-parent families hav

It will eventually evolve into "consumer-side" DRM protection. Instead of having to deal with DRM for each media file/disk/etc or on each machine, the DRM screening is done with hardware worn by the consumer to filter anything going in or out. Looks something like this

Uh, huh? Local to me, it's one of two major universities. SO, since I'm in Pittsburgh, that would be either the University of Pittsburgh, or Carnegie Mellon University. Which one do you think it could be?

Yeah, I cannot wait to get on our club's TS2000, and see if we can hear anything from them. Plus, I have always wanted to transmit music...
73, KG4QXK/AG

> You cannot know the success:failure ratio of closed-source projects.
No. You can estimate it. I've worked in industry in three countries, and after a decade you get a good idea about the success/failure ratio. Also, there is a lot of published work available.

I'd say the success:failure ratio is around 1:1, perhaps better. Of course, it depends on how "successful enough" is defined, but I'm assuming commonly accepted definitions.

I don't have as-firm figures for open source (and yes, they do "fail", by similar commonly accepted definitions) - but I think it's ratio would be worse. But this is _fine_ I say... for one thing, failure is an acceptable result for many more open-source projects than closed source ones.

A couple of interesting URLs I just googled:
IT Failure Rates--70% or 10-15%? (don't have a subscription to view the article, but the title and abstract are interesting... )

Data Mining Project History in Open Source Software Communities where the author states: "But we can also find that this method can predict the 'failed' projects by the project history with good confidence". His paper does not appear to carry the actual data on number of open-source SF projects that he classifies as 'FAIL' - a bit frustrating for our discussion :)

I don't want my computer to clique me into a particular "community".

I want it to be a toolbox that allows me to be a part of many communities I choose to join.

And if you don't like the software available, it is, you know, possible to write your own, to your - or the world's[1][2][3][4][5][6] - standards of function, style, consistency, robustness, and hipness.

So is it Windows's fault that it's too broad and not restrictive enough on new tools, or is it Mac's fault that it's provincial and overweaning?

In A Piece Of Blue Sky by Jon Atack, one of the most authoritative sources on Scientology. He states:

Lafayette Ronald Hubbard was born in Tilden, Nebraska, on March 13, 1911.

This quote can be found in Part 2, Chapter 1.

In A Piece Of Blue Sky by Jon Atack, one of the most authoritative sources on Scientology. He states:

Lafayette Ronald Hubbard was born in Tilden, Nebraska, on March 13, 1911.

This quote can be found in Part 2, Chapter 1.

Another way to get free cell calls

*ducks*

Lena!

No matter what your final test image, you'll have to work that one in for the inevitable conversation with your wife.

"Who the hell is this hussy you keep printing nude pictures of and throwing them away?"

It's easy to write code for an AIBO... there's a number of open source software frameworks for this great hardware platform -- although of course my favorite would be my own: Tekkotsu

And it's all supported by Sony -- no hacking required!

There's a variety of levels you can code at as well -- there's several high-level scripting languages like URBI, R-Code, and even a couple upcoming Python interfaces, as well as a number of low-level C/C++ interfaces (e.g. Tekkotsu) which can run onboard and directly process every bit and byte, or remote control from your PC for maximum horsepower.

Carnegie Mellon already did this, but our engineers don't talk to our business majors...

http://cmusky.net.cmu.edu/about.html

Theo, define quality!

Something tells me Theo wouldn't recognize quality if it hit him in the face. Quality is not directly about nice, structured and documented code. It's about setting up a system that predictabily nice, structured and documented code.

For software development there is one true quality measurement system: CMM. I have worked for many large to huge SW companies. Even il large companies, only the very bright people contemplate assessing the SW development process using CMM. And then hit the wall called costs.

Quality in SW development is horribly expensive and does not produce a direct revenue or return on investment.

Now, getting back to the definition of quality. In short, quality is about setting and documenting standards, living up to them, having an independent authoritative body audit the process periodically and defining corrective tasks.

If you don't have such a system you should plainly shut up about quality.

Besides that, who would want to work with a cocky bastard that has a hard time respecting other people's efforts? Theo clearly does not realize how much effortgoes into organizing huge groups of people.

And then there's the GPL. Using the GPL I don't feel raped without lubricant.

Is this new picture different?

No. This "new" picture is the same one you used, just possibly a different crop of the original.
You probably should have followed the other link in the article summary before posting.

Actually that's not necessarily true. It's definitely true right now though. Most developers haven't really been tought to think in terms of parallelism when designing software, but that's starting to change.

It's all about the algorithms. Once multi-core chips have been mainstream for a while, all the algorithms out there will start to get converted to take advantage of parallel processing. And there are already algorithms out there that do this... this page has a small repository of parallel implementations of common algorithms including QuickSort, hashing techniques (for super fast searching), string operations (which every application in existence uses), and more.

Now I know this isn't always possible, but in many cases it is. Almost every program out there uses search and sort algorithms. Your address book does it, your web browser does it. These algorithms can be implemented to take advantage of having multiple processors.

A lot of operations can actually be modified to take advantage of this stuff. See the pbzip2 project that achieves a near linear speed up per processor!

Almost every algorithm out there can be modified to take advantage of muliple cores. Things like video/audio decoding are prime candidates (a lot of research is currently happening in this area).

It may take a generation of programmers and then another generation or two of applications to start really taking advantage of parallelism, but mark my works: once this stuff is mainstream, you'll start to really see some performance like never before.

Actually from what I've heard, the entire industry is moving in this direction. The whole idea of out of order processors (OOP) has become outdated. OOP was great. Enabled massive single threaded performance, however the costs (in terms of area and heat dissipation) is enormous.

I just came back from the DaMoN workshop where the keynote was delivered by one of the lead P4 developers. He explained the future of microprocessors and said that the 10-15% extra performance that OOP enables just isn't worth it. The Pentium 4 has 3 issue units, but the way things are rarely issues more than 1 instruction per cycle.

We can squeeze more performance out of them, but not much. The easiest method is to go dual core. However if an application must be multithreaded to enable the best performance, what would you rather have . . . 2 highly advanced cores, or 8-10 simple cores that can issue half as many instructions per cycle as the dual core design. Than consider the fact that each core enables 4 threads to run (switch on cache miss/access). It doesn't take a rocket scientist to see that overall performance is improved with this.

The other option is the hybrid core. A single really fast x86 core combined with multiple simpler x86 cores. That way single threaded apps can run fast (until they're converted) and you can get overall throughput from the system without blowing away your power budget on OOP optimizations.

Granted most of this is in the future (within the next 5 years), but IBM's going that way (ala Cell), its within Intels roadmap, Sun is pushing that route etc. I assume AMD has plans to create a supercomputer on a chip . . . unless they wish to be obsoleted.

Phil

Its all fun and games, until nanotech technologies like claytronics are used to make a shape-shifting cyborg, and someone gets an eye poked out.

The most incredible wirewrap project I ever saw was CMU's original Warp computer, a 10 CPU array computer, all wirewrapped and running at 10 MHz. Each cell had 255 chips and drew 136 watts peak. The whole array delivered 100 MFLOPS peak and about 30 MFLOPS on real problems. Apparently the price/performance was quite good by the standards of the day (1986).

The boards themselves were an incredibly dense thicket of wire wrap. You could barely see the board for the layers and layers of wiring. I looked for a photo on the web but couldn't find one. Here's a paper describing the project:

http://www.ri.cmu.edu/pub_files/pub3/annaratone_m_ 1987_1/annaratone_m_1987_1.pdf

Martin

you can describe a method with no issue

Not if describing the method is ruled to constitute an "offer" or "provid[ing] to the public" a technology that circumvents the copyright protection. See sections 1201.2(a) and (c) of the DMCA, where it's illegal to

manufacture, import, offer to the public, provide, or otherwise traffic in any technology, product, service, device, component, or part thereof.

2600 was thought to have been providing deCSS simply by linking to it, even without describing the method of its operation. The balance of freedom of speech vs. the clauses in the DMCA that prohibit speech are, IMO, unclear, and HAS been used to quell even spoken descriptions of circumvention techniques.

Dave Touretzky demonstrates in his DeCSS gallery how retarded and incoherant this law's gag on free speech is.

W

Statistical MT methods are old hat and have been even used in things like automatic image annotation years ago. Parallel text correspondence learning is not novel. Short bib.

It looks like the 800nm bot has been mixed up with this bugbot.

The article referencing the bugbot (here) shows a picture with a mini gut walking bot prototype at least 2-3cm in length.

The Nanorobotics site (here) shows a drug delivery bot that they do claim will have to be 800nm wide (here). They are saying there that it must be that thin to be injectable.

It looks like the 800nm bot has been mixed up with this bugbot.

The article referencing the bugbot (here) shows a picture with a mini gut walking bot prototype at least 2-3cm in length.

The Nanorobotics site (here) shows a drug delivery bot that they do claim will have to be 800nm wide (here). They are saying there that it must be that thin to be injectable.

Take Pound, a few web server machines, a database server and a NFS server (no Coda, AFS or GFS needed in most cases) and you should be set. This is a setup that I installed for a high traffic website and it is very stable.

I've actually been spending the past few weeks trying to figure out how to apply Dantzig-Wolfe decomposition to one of my optimization problems. I usually feel pretty smart, but once I start reading papers about this stuff, I get the distinct feeling that I may actually be very,very stupid.

RAID (Redundant Array of Inexpensive Disks)

"RAID was first patented by IBM in 1978. In 1988, RAID levels 1 through 5 were formally defined by David A. Patterson, Garth A. Gibson and Randy H. Katz in the paper, "A Case for Redundant Arrays of Inexpensive Disks (RAID)" (http://www-2.cs.cmu.edu/~garth/RAIDpaper/Patterso n88.pdf). This was published in the SIGMOD Conference 1988: pp 109-116. The term "RAID" started with this paper." - From wikipedia.

http:///http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Redundant_arr ay_of_independent_disks>

As a computational linguist, I was wondering whether what has been turned over [so far] is available, e.g., the Enron email corpus has thus far been very useful.
I'm not sure how this legally works, but does evidence like email automatically become 'public domain' in such cases?

I disagree with you. I think universities are a shelter for free speech.

Just have a look at Dave Touretzky's Page
http://www-2.cs.cmu.edu/~dst/

I don't see anyone outside of academia with the bravery to publish those things.

Surprised the autonomous mining vehicle companies aren't involved.

These things can handle strip-mining entire landscapes in quite hostile environments - chaning terrain, etc. and have been doing so since the early '90s.

http://www.google.com/search?num=100&hl=en&lr=&saf e=off&client=firefox-a&rls=org.mozilla%3Aen-US%3Ao fficial&q=autonomous+mining+vehicles&btnG=Search
http://www.robominer.com/laser.html
http://www.robominer.com/guidance.html
http://www.frc.ri.cmu.edu/~ssingh/fastnav.html

Yea, but I wish somebody had shown them the $14 steadicam site first...

Actually, the grandparent IS correct. I spent the last week studying the Mach and OS X designs, and I found the following things:

1. Mach is not a complete kernel. It requires someone to implement the areas which the Mach group were not researching. This has traditionally been done by compiling against BSD 4.3.

2. Mac OS X updated to the FreeBSD kernel instead of BSD 4.3 to gain a more modern kernel design with better hardware support.

3. OS 9 "Classic" is not a microkernel server, but rather a technology that Apple calls "Blue Box". Blue Box is a hardware virtualizer like VMWare that is capable of communicating directly with the OS X desktop. Using this communication, the OS 9 desktop is made to disappear, making the application appear to run on the OS X desktop.

4. The combination of Mach and FreeBSD is called "XNU" by Apple. The complete os is called Darwin, and the commercial variety with the Next and Mac APIs is called "Mac OS X".

More Info:
Mach Kernel
Wikipedia: Mach
Wikipedia: XNU
Blue Box info

Here here and here

Yes there is. Lots of it. Enough so that they've catalogued the three types of genetic alteration that can confer resistance.

point source, mosaic, and transposon

Read up on it here. http://info.bio.cmu.edu/Courses/03441/TermPapers/2 000TermPapers/group2/evol-mech.html#fig4ref

Lots of references to examples of each in the article, if you want them.

Gene duplication, polyploidy, insertions, etc., do not help explain evolution.

No, they only are mechanisms that allow natural selection to take place.

With only one copy of the your genetic code, get a point source mutation in the wrong spot and you die. Progress is slow. With gene duplication nature gets to play around with new things and still keep the old ones funtional. Mix in a couple of billion years and you have what you see around you.

Worse comes to worse, we'll always have games like Deanimator from people who aren't only about money... so chill.

Well, I did watch the final German vs. CMU exhibition match on ESM ( http://esm.cs.cmu.edu/ ), and that game was 2-0 for the germans, so I bet the robocup article was posted without having been proofed.

In addition, if the GP says (s)he's from UT Austin and didn't play the Germans [implying "at all"], then I would tend to believe that this means the original article screwed up the names.

Yup, High School is like that; but don't think that all of American society is like that. For college, I ended up going to a very good high tech university and the problem switched to "What sucks is the lack of women"

Zonk posts a story from a submitter that wrote the page being submitted for the story, who, as it turns out, blatantly plagarized the content from Bryant and O'Hallaron's Computer Systems book.

As a matter of fact, on the webpage itself, the very first response to the post calls Adam out about this, but apparently, it is still suffficiently 'news' to merit posting here.

Way to go, Zonk...once again, you've lowered the standard.

"How the hell can you calculate risk if your only input is the chronological age of a software system?"

I do this for a living for out company and here's how you do it:

1) First do an assessment of the impact of the software failing

2) Then make a determination of the amount of support you have for the program to fix it in the event of a failure

3) Do you have the source code? Do you have people who can understand it? Do you have people who routinely update and fix the code?

4) Is the business logic in the program well understood and documented?

5) Do you routinely run load and stress analysis on the system to determine its limits?

That tells you a ton. The most important question is #1. Will the business fail if the program breaks? This is partly IT's job, but its really the business owner's job to give you that information.

If the business owner feels the business will stop without it, then its up to IT to recommend a course of action to mitigate the risk, and ultimately its up to the CEO/Board to concur or reject the recommendation (or come up with their own).

http://www.sei.cmu.edu/products/services/sw.risk.e val-service.html

The Dormouse had closed its eyes by this time, and was going off into a doze; but, on being pinched by the Hatter, it woke up again with a little shriek, and went on: `--that begins with an M, such as mouse-traps, and the moon, and memory, and muchness-- you know you say things are "much of a muchness"--did you ever see such a thing as a drawing of a muchness?'

I'd like a system library that would modify the rename(2), truncate(2), unlink(2), and write(2) calls to move the deleted stuff to some private directory (/.Trash, /.Recycler, whatever). Obviously the underlying routine would have to do its own garhage collection, deleting trash files by some FIFO or largest-older-first algorithm.

Why modify the system calls? Keep the system calls simple and orthogonal, so the kernel codebase stays small(er). Write this functionality in userland, starting wherever you are most likely to use it; if that is in programming tasks, write wrappers to the C calls to do this. If it is at the prompt, write a shell script. (Or an alias...) If multiple places, write it in the way that keeps it the most centralized. IMHO, this should have been standard 30 years ago, but there's no reason not to do it now. :)

As for the block-level mirroring matter, clearly if you need this sort of mirroring it should be done wherever block-level disk access is done. Still, I would object much less if the driver could live in userland. And I agree that my data-loss problems are minimally related to hard drive failure, and far less likely to fail than my home DSL connection.

There are FIRST ... TENTH and REST. See http://www-2.cs.cmu.edu/Groups/AI/html/cltl/clm/no de149.html

This is his personal/political website: http://www.andrew.cmu.edu/user/dpapasia/

http://www.andrew.cmu.edu/user/dpapasia/

\. got played; You can't buy this sort of publicity. At least not as an undergrad @ CMU.

He might have lost the election worse than his battle w/ wall-mart... but there's always next year.

Yeah, this is one of the most common problems with devices that have plugs, and you can usually fix it with soldering. Generally, your solder joints won't last as long as the original bad joints did in the first place, so this "repair" won't be particularly permanent unless you do something like mount the connector to the chassis and connect it to the PCB with flexible wires instead. Soldering is not too hard, but for something that costs $600, you might not want this to be your first attempt.

I did a laughably sloppy job of this with my MP3 player a year or so ago and posted the steps and pictures . You probably don't want to be this sloppy.

I don't have a scanner, but I can sing it to you on the phone if you like.

In reality, almost no one does this. Because of the nature of AOP, it requires IDE support--see the AJDT (http://www.eclipse.org/ajdt/) for one example of what this looks like.

With IDE support, you can see exactly where aspects might affect your code, and you can easily navigate to the definition of these aspects. Tool support essentially gives you the desired scoping back, even though it's missing in the language.

Gregor Kiczales and Mira Mezini have a nice paper on this (http://www.cs.ubc.ca/~gregor/papers/kiczales-icse 05-aopmr.pdf), and I've done some more theoretical work validating the claim that modular reasoning is possible in AOP, given the proper module system and tool support (http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~aldrich/papers/open-module s.pdf).