Slashdot Mirror

Well, you can write a deterministic quick sort that runs worse-case O(n^2). However, There is a completely deterministic Quick Sort that runs in O(n log n) time based on median-of-medians.

Note that you can take up to O(n) to select your pivot of a set of n elements and not change the analysis of quick sort (since it takes O(n) to divide the elements into greater-than-pivot, equal-to-pivot, and less-than-pivot). Consider the slightly simpler quickselect problem of finding the median in O(n) time. Clearly, if you can find the median in O(n) time, then there is a quicksort algorithm that runs in O(n log n) that uses that median algorithm to select its pivot.

Eppstein's lecture notes on O(n) quickselect.

Avrim Blum's lecture notes for cross-check.

Phil Gibbons has notes split across two days: Day 1 and Day 1

Well, you can write a deterministic quick sort that runs worse-case O(n^2). However, There is a completely deterministic Quick Sort that runs in O(n log n) time based on median-of-medians.

Note that you can take up to O(n) to select your pivot of a set of n elements and not change the analysis of quick sort (since it takes O(n) to divide the elements into greater-than-pivot, equal-to-pivot, and less-than-pivot). Consider the slightly simpler quickselect problem of finding the median in O(n) time. Clearly, if you can find the median in O(n) time, then there is a quicksort algorithm that runs in O(n log n) that uses that median algorithm to select its pivot.

Eppstein's lecture notes on O(n) quickselect.

Avrim Blum's lecture notes for cross-check.

Phil Gibbons has notes split across two days: Day 1 and Day 1

Well, you can write a deterministic quick sort that runs worse-case O(n^2). However, There is a completely deterministic Quick Sort that runs in O(n log n) time based on median-of-medians.

Note that you can take up to O(n) to select your pivot of a set of n elements and not change the analysis of quick sort (since it takes O(n) to divide the elements into greater-than-pivot, equal-to-pivot, and less-than-pivot). Consider the slightly simpler quickselect problem of finding the median in O(n) time. Clearly, if you can find the median in O(n) time, then there is a quicksort algorithm that runs in O(n log n) that uses that median algorithm to select its pivot.

Eppstein's lecture notes on O(n) quickselect.

Avrim Blum's lecture notes for cross-check.

Phil Gibbons has notes split across two days: Day 1 and Day 1

Don't forget that, over the next month, NASA is launching two Mars Exploration Rovers, with one of the primary goals looking for evidence of life. Specifically, they hope to find evidence of liquid water sometime in Mars' past:
http://mars.jpl.nasa.gov/mer/science/

The Personal Rover Project

As others pointed out, BitTorrent isn't for streaming. Check out YOID or End System Multicast.

Here you go.

First off, computer security is much like many other forms of security, at the concept level. The particulars of implementation are very different, but the underlying motives of the players and the interactions aren't. The infamous 419 scam was originally done in person, then by phone, and then by fax before it was possible to do it via email, for example, and lesser variants of it (the pigeon scam, for example) have existed in the offline world.

If you're looking to grasp home user or end user security, the first thing I'd do is buy The Gift of Fear by Gavin de Becker. Right off, that will give you a good understanding of intuitive threat modeling for everyday life. Unfortunately, I can't find a book out there that does home-user security for the average joe, nor can I find a class...but I am writing a book myself.

If you're interested in security from a more admin-oriented perspective, I would go to SecurityFocus and check out some of their mailing lists. At first, the material may be over your head, but you'll find that that only pulls you up a bit. Also, get yourself a linux box and learn linux (if you don't already know it). Set up a honeynet and see what's going to happen to an unpatched, exposed box. Or just set up snort with ACID as the front-end console to observe the attacks that are taking place. Once you understand the threat, it becomes a lot easier to decide what to study to defend against it.

Yep there was, you can find a copy of it here. There's also another one that you could literally print out on a business card here.

Cool stuff, I remember hearing about this in my raytracing class in college a while back.

(disclaimer: I work for a company that made a proposal for TIA and lost)

I'm glad to see TIA making a comeback, because in my opinion it would be a shame to see it killed. Why? Because it's a program with some damn good ideas, hampered by technically savvy but politically-challenged leadership (Poindexter). He had NO CLUE that the logo would scare people, or that the wording of its mission statement would terrify a populace already weary from assaults on their civil liberties. And his difficulty grasping why some folks have privacy concerns about TIA may very well cripple the program.

TIA aims to create for databases what ARPANet did for computers -- develop common platforms and protocols for establishing relationships between disparate sources of information. It aims to enable queries and searches that make Google look like a random URL generator -- you'll be able to find bus schedules that'll take you to the bookstore where your favorite author is giving a reading, B&Bs in Amsterdam that have nonsmoking rooms with TVs that will be showing your favorite football team's game at 3pm next Tuesday, companies incorporated in Singapore whose CEOs went to U.Missouri with Kenneth Lay . . . all in a few clicks or keystrokes.

Yes, it's something that could be abused by the US government. However, that doesn't mean we should give in to blind Luddism and reject such a promising technology outright. Rather, TIA should address security and privacy concerns from the get-go (I'm particularly fond of Latanya Sweeney's research in this regard), as a layer of recommendations and best-practices atop the fundamental architecture that TIA aims to produce.

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

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

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

• David Rokeby
• Christa Sommerer & Laurent Mignonneau
• Simon Penny

--Tom

--Tom

Your spamguard decoding skills are commendable. I'm guessing you are a product of one of the fine trade schools found outside the Northeast Corridor.

The largest requirement for a robot able to recognize objects would be memory/storage. Kind of like those 20 questions programs, it is very simple processing to compare input with a matrix of possibilities.

I'm sorry but that's a gross simplification. Computer recognition of images, especially images of the real 3D world, is a very hard and computationally intense process. This problem is still at the cutting edge of research. Describing it as "simple processing to compare the input with a matrix of possibilities" is on the same level as describing Doom III as "adds a couple of numbers together and displays some colored dots on the screen". It may be at some level accurate but it misses out the hard parts entirely.

To learn more, you could start at CMU's computer vision page. There's a whole world of interesting techniques out there, jump in and try some.

This one also has a commercial off-the-shelf computer in the heart of the design:

It uses a Palm Pilot

The submitter said "some" projects.

What on earth makes you think they'd use linux or other OSS to develop the space shuttle software? First of all, the development process for space shuttle software is quite possibly the most rigorous software development process in the world (it is , BTW). There isn't a chance in hell open-source software would be allowed into a level 5 process, because it's not controlled properly. They would essentially have to rewrite any OSS software they used from scratch, just to meet CMM level 5 requirements.

Second, suppose despite point #1, they decide to use the linux kernel on the space shuttle. Obviously, they'd have to adapt the kernel to suit their needs, since most of the hardware on the shuttle is custom designed and built for it. Under the GPL they would have to release any changes they make to the kernel back into the public domain. This would be equivalent to providing a very detailed blueprint of how all the critical systems on the space shuttle function. Especially given the current political environment, do you really think the administration is going to divulge this kind of information to the public?

Feel free to grab it here.

There's also a perl script in there (which I didn't write, just found somewhere else) which does more nice analysis of X memory usage.

Grab it ASAP, as the server is going down permanently within a couple of days. Matter of fact, if you want to make it available yourself for anyone interested, I'd appreciate it.

I use the XRes extension, which is relatively new...you can't be using an ancient copy of XFree86.

WARNING: You can see I write crappy perl / shell script. I make no guarantees about this code.

NOTE: replace all instances of "ABC" with "|".

parse.sh:
#!/bin/bash
#Copyright CTho9305 2003. You are given permission to redistribute this file provided this copyright notice is left intact. You may modify it as you want. Please share any modifications (you are not required to).
#barton
lynx -dump http://www.pricewatch.com/menus/m3.htm ABC egrep 'upABCdnABC - ' ABC cut -b5- ABC perl -pe 's/\s+/ /' ABC cut -f1,3- -d ' ' ABC perl -pe 's/\[.*\]//' ABC perl -pe 's/\s+/ /' ABC grep -i xp ABC grep 333 ABC cut -f1,4 -d ' ' > XP333.dat
#XP
lynx -dump http://www.pricewatch.com/menus/m3.htm ABC egrep 'upABCdnABC - ' ABC cut -b5- ABC perl -pe 's/\s+/ /' ABC cut -f1,3- -d ' ' ABC perl -pe 's/\[.*\]//' ABC perl -pe 's/\s+/ /' ABC grep -i xp ABC grep -v 333 ABC cut -f1,4 -d ' ' > XP.dat
#Apparently I have too many junk characters
#MP
lynx -dump http://www.pricewatch.com/menus/m3.htm ABC egrep 'upABCdnABC - ' ABC cut -b5- ABC perl -pe 's/\s+/ /' ABC cut -f1,3- -d ' ' ABC perl -pe 's/\[.*\]//' ABC perl -pe 's/\s+/ /' ABC grep -i mp ABC perl -pe 's/\.//' ABC perl -pe 's/GHz/00/' ABC cut -f1,4 -d ' ' > MP.dat
# Celeron
lynx -dump http://www.pricewatch.com/menus/m3.htm ABC egrep 'upABCdnABC - ' ABC cut -b5- ABC perl -pe 's/\s+/ /' ABC cut -f1,3- -d ' ' ABC perl -pe 's/\[.*\]//' ABC perl -pe 's/\s+/ /' ABC grep -i celeron ABC cut -f 1,3 -d ' ' ABC perl -pe 's/ 1GHz/ 1.0GHz/;s/\.//;s/GHz/00/' > celeron.dat
#P4
lynx -dump http://www.pricewatch.com/menus/m3.htm ABC egrep 'upABCdnABC - ' ABC cut -b5- ABC perl -pe 's/\s+/ /' ABC cut -f1,3- -d ' ' ABC perl -pe 's/\[.*\]//;s/\s+/ /' ABC grep -i 'pentium 4' ABC egrep -i "sockABC2\.ABC3\." ABC grep -v -i 400MHz ABC perl -pe 's/ 533MHz//;s/GHz/00/;s/ Sock 478//;s/\.//' ABC cut -f1,4 -d ' ' ABC cut -b -8 > pentium4.dat
gnuplot gnuplot.script > ~/www/out.png

Anyway, I wrote this because I was bored and wanted to see what a good price point was for current Athlons. If you examine the graphs carefully you might note that the XP's are not properly differentiated. Some are 333s and marked as that, others aren't marked properly, etc. With the new 400s, it gets worse. For the P4s, I got a little luckier because the speed ranges don't overlap as much. I think I'm going to not differnetiate between the various FSBs of Athlon XPs because the prices are close enough anyway.

Anyway, it has served its purpose by helping me find a point where the processors are reasonably fast, and the bang for the buck is decent.

gnuplot.script

#Copyright CTho9305 2003. You are given permission to redistribute this file provided this copyright notice is left intact. You may modify it as you want. Please share any modifications (you are not required to).set terminal png color
set xlabel "Speed (MHz or rating)"
set ylabel "Cost ($USD)"
set title "Speed vs. Cost"
set grid
set time
set linestyle 1 lw 3
plot "XP.dat" using 2:1 title "XP" with linespoints, \
"XP333.dat" using 2:1 title "XP333" with linespoints, \
"celeron.dat" using 2:1 title "celeron" with linespoints, \
"MP.dat" using 2:1 title "MP" with linespoints, \
"pentium4.dat" using 2:1 title "P4" with linespoints

Anyone know how to change the text font, or the thickness of the lines?

Sample output

I'm attending Carnegie Mellon University right now. The campus network stores all the user /home's, course webpages, homework submission folders, etc., on OpenAFS servers running some ancient, completely reworked version of Redhat. The servers are rock solid, 99.999% uptime as far as I've seen. I can only recall two one hour incidents the last two years when they went down for a bit. Tells you a bit about how stable OpenAFS is. That, and I've come to admire the usefulness of ACLs. The documentation could be better though.

Maybe the knowledge at this page is transferrable, somewhat, to other people trying to set up OpenAFS. At the least, it gives you an idea of what you'll be needing.

Hmph, I guess because there is continual talk of re-implementing Coda, the codebase must not be too hot.

Every time I want to switch to a better network file system, I read about problems with corrupted files or mysterious crashes and get scared.

Then I come slinking back to NFS, which hasn't done something like that to me in at least 5 years or more. The only real problems I've had are when so-and-so's V3 implementation doesn't want to talk to this other V3 implementation, or read/write sizes. Been rock-solid when it is actually moving bits.

Of course, now that I think about it, NFS has been rock-solid because the fileservers have been rock-solid. If they crash, then everybody's sorry.

Wish I was using a DFS that supported disconnected operation...

In that list only two "information management" or "intrusion management" applications are listed. GFI Languard (actually mentions lanscan but calls it Languard) and possibly etherape. There is no mention of any commercial products (Contego NetIQ Tivoli Risk Manager ArcSight NeuSecure) or free (ACID SnortSAM) products.

What is your opinion of this class of products in their ability to allow a network admin to be knowledgable about the security of their own network and respond to threats?

From the site: The Pebbles project is exploring how Personal Digital Assistants (PDAs), such as a device running PalmOS, or a device running the Microsoft Windows CE or Pocket PC operating systems, can be used when they are communicating with a "regular" personal computer (PC), with other PDAs, and with computerized devices such as telephones, radios, microwave ovens and factory equipment.

But they won't read the code. I still have to do that myself...

Personally I like the tradeoff of verbose source files and automated code gen versus hidden magic ala CLOS accessors or unchecked access via publics. Sometimes you have to just ride the wave so it doesn't crush you.

-- Jack

Thanks, but you're a bit late. I just searched for "cyclomatic complexity" and followed the first link.

Your link looks pretty interesting, too.

Which brings up another question:

Are there any Open Source programs which measure cyclomatic complexity?

(off to google again...)

Paul Graham is a well-known Lisp programmer. He didn't beat us over the head with it in his article, but I'm pretty sure that he considers Lisp (Common Lisp, in particular) to be that good language, for yesterday and today at least.

I suppose that it's an acquired taste, but I'm convinced that it's a taste well worth acquiring. Here is a little screed I wrote to explain why I hold that conviction. Graham wrote several articles which tell his reasons. Some which pop to mind are: Beating the averages, Lisp in web based applications and What made Lisp different

By the way, Lisp doesn't have to be very slow. Here is a pointer to a paper which might get you started.

>But, what *will* last 20 years?

MPEG-1 on video CD seems to be a good bet. It's 11 years later, and I don't know any computers that won't play it, and various standalone players have existed for years, not to mention the proliferation of VCD supporting DVD players.

That'd be my choice. Oh, and the ATI AIW cards will record MPEG-1 on the fly.

I agree, I first used Free software in 1987, at least Emacs, GCC, and a pile of BSD software. GCC was already considered one of the leading compilers out there, and the BSD software considered the way to go when it came to networking computers. It was at Carnegie Mellon, and they were just finishing up phasing out a TOPS network for a predominately BSD-licensed Unix network with a lot of home grown bells and whistles called Andrew.

In 1987, Sun Microsystems, the "young upstart" company of the data center, was shipping all of their Unix servers and workstations with SunOS, their own take on BSD Unix. They were beating established companies by strategic use of heavy cost cuts both in hardware and in software, partially by co-opting large amounts of Free Software code for their commercial ends (mostly BSD software).

By 1995, Fortune 500 companies were already seeing Linux in their companies. 1994 also was the year that the Free/Open/NetBSD codebases were truly freed of all the prior legal complications, increasing the freedom and popularity of those systems.

Free Software was certainly a very real and growing part of the American computer industry in the 80's and 90's, and the author does his readers a disservice by ignoring this.

Open Source? That was a marketing term invented in 1998, not particluarly relevant for a book that stops in 1995.

For those interested, I'm on the CMU Simulation league team, and I have about 30 photos from the American Open:

Photos

And as an update to the original post, the American Open concluded about an hour ago, with the CMU AIBO team winning the finals in competition against Cornell.

After watching the first video on this site, there is definite footage of two aibo's on the same team (same color) with one aibo's head directly under the "tail" of the other aibo. I don't know if they were going for realism and trying to have the dogs sniff each other, or if it was just a coincidence, but the effect is hilarious.

There are a bunch of videos here, they appear to be of varying sizes...though the first one I started downloading is still going strong and just passed the 42 meg mark...actually, right as I was writing this it stopped, so it is 43 megs...so the videos are big and long (hopefully). Enjoy.

Let us see here, CMU has a robotics department that thus far has produced a mini-van that can drive itself around, a winning Robocup team, and a sun-synchronous navigation. Oh, and they are competing in the Grand Challenge with the Red Team.

To me, that is like the Detroit Red Wings launching a hockey hall of fame.

Let us see here, CMU has a robotics department that thus far has produced a mini-van that can drive itself around, a winning Robocup team, and a sun-synchronous navigation. Oh, and they are competing in the Grand Challenge with the Red Team.

To me, that is like the Detroit Red Wings launching a hockey hall of fame.

Let us see here, CMU has a robotics department that thus far has produced a mini-van that can drive itself around, a winning Robocup team, and a sun-synchronous navigation. Oh, and they are competing in the Grand Challenge with the Red Team.

To me, that is like the Detroit Red Wings launching a hockey hall of fame.

The title of the press release is wrong. It is referencing the first RoboCup American Open which is happening this weekend.

You have already missed Neal Stephenson, but not the ASIMO demonstrations tomorrow.

last year's philadelphia Inquirer story talks about fMRI research as replacing the polygraph, and Cognitive Liberty has the best set of links if you want more info. Frankly, i advise you to check it out, because this is not new, and This will be checking you out soon.

Also, the functional programming language which made my university existence sheer hell, Standard ML already exists as is widely (within long beardy circles at least) known as SML.

This past year, I was accepted into Carnegie Mellon's School of Computer Science. It has been a remarkable experience that I would like to share with the community. Here's an account of my experience.

Week 1, Sunday: I moved in today. My roommate, a sophomore CS student, had already moved in two days before me. The floor is already completely covered with garbage. He also smells. I think he might be gay too. He's already asked me if I like the color he painted his toenails. This should be interesting. I am almost completely settled in. Techno music is playing in every room in every floor of my dorm. There are computers and other types of trash out in the common areas. What a mess. Tomorrow, I am going to go sign up to get my network connection.

Week 1, Monday: I got hooked up to the CMU network today! I jacked into the network, only to find that the hostname and address assigned to me were colliding with another system. I'll just increment the network numbers a few times. I am really eager to get on.

Week 1, Tuesday: I am still looking for a free IP address. Can't anybody here properly configure their systems?

Week 1, Friday: I finally found a free IP! It's mine! You sons of bitches can't have it, I found it, I keep it, it's mine! To hell with all of you! Head hurts really bad. I've slowly been developing a headache since I first arrived. Everywhere I look there are these Lucent Technologies wireless access points. I wonder if that's the problem.

Week 1, Saturday: I sat down at my computer today. My desktop wall paper is now the goatse.cx guy. Pleasant. Scattered over every directory on my C: drive are thousands, possibly millions, of files titled "J00AR30WN3DBITCH-phj33r-" and then some random hacker's name. Don't these people have lives? Maybe they need laid or something. It'd take days to clean this out. I mentioned to my roommate that I needed to reinstall Windows, and immediately he jumped up and shouted: "NO! Do NOT use Windows!" Suddenly, two dozen other guys (all of them possibly homosexuals) appeared at the door, each touting an operating system called Linux. Half of them got into a fight over which was better, Debian, RedHat, Slackware, and a bunch of others I couldn't recognize. Some kid who appeared to not have showered since he was born was touting "Linux From Scratch," saying that only losers used pre-made distros. A crowd of people in the back kept quiet about how I'd be sorry if I used Linux instead of BSD on the network. Who the fuck are these people? Classes start next week. Hope I have my computer working so I can do my assignments.

Week 3, Friday: People are still trying to get Linux to work on my system. They keep telling my that my hardware sucks. We go through about four or five distributions a day. Every now and then, I notice a little devil on my screen. Stickers for every of these distributions have been plastered on my case. Suddenly, my room stinks a lot more with these people in here. I ask them why they never shower, and the usual response is something along the lines of "showering is like rebooting" and "I don't want to lose my uptime."

Week 3, Saturday: There's a troop of men running naked in a circle around McGill Hall. I am not even going to ask.

Week 4, Wednesday: Linux is FINALLY working on my computer! I have a pretty slick desktop too. I think I might like this. I can finally work in my room instead of the labs, although considering the every increasing layer of garbage on the floor...

Week 4, Thursday: My computer flashes messages about how I am "0WNX0RED" and how I should "PHJ33R" whoever and how "L4MEX0R" I am for having an insecure box. A kid suggests we reinstall Linux after discovering about 17 rootkits.

Week 5, Friday: Someone got BSD working on my computer. I wonder if this will last. The s

This past year, I was accepted into Carnegie Mellon's School of Computer Science. It has been a remarkable experience that I would like to share with the community. Here's an account of my experience.

Week 1, Sunday: I moved in today. My roommate, a sophomore CS student, had already moved in two days before me. The floor is already completely covered with garbage. He also smells. I think he might be gay too. He's already asked me if I like the color he painted his toenails. This should be interesting. I am almost completely settled in. Techno music is playing in every room in every floor of my dorm. There are computers and other types of trash out in the common areas. What a mess. Tomorrow, I am going to go sign up to get my network connection.

Week 1, Monday: I got hooked up to the CMU network today! I jacked into the network, only to find that the hostname and address assigned to me were colliding with another system. I'll just increment the network numbers a few times. I am really eager to get on.

Week 1, Tuesday: I am still looking for a free IP address. Can't anybody here properly configure their systems?

Week 1, Friday: I finally found a free IP! It's mine! You sons of bitches can't have it, I found it, I keep it, it's mine! To hell with all of you! Head hurts really bad. I've slowly been developing a headache since I first arrived. Everywhere I look there are these Lucent Technologies wireless access points. I wonder if that's the problem.

Week 1, Saturday: I sat down at my computer today. My desktop wall paper is now the goatse.cx guy. Pleasant. Scattered over every directory on my C: drive are thousands, possibly millions, of files titled "J00AR30WN3DBITCH-phj33r-" and then some random hacker's name. Don't these people have lives? Maybe they need laid or something. It'd take days to clean this out. I mentioned to my roommate that I needed to reinstall Windows, and immediately he jumped up and shouted: "NO! Do NOT use Windows!" Suddenly, two dozen other guys (all of them possibly homosexuals) appeared at the door, each touting an operating system called Linux. Half of them got into a fight over which was better, Debian, RedHat, Slackware, and a bunch of others I couldn't recognize. Some kid who appeared to not have showered since he was born was touting "Linux From Scratch," saying that only losers used pre-made distros. A crowd of people in the back kept quiet about how I'd be sorry if I used Linux instead of BSD on the network. Who the fuck are these people? Classes start next week. Hope I have my computer working so I can do my assignments.

Week 3, Friday: People are still trying to get Linux to work on my system. They keep telling my that my hardware sucks. We go through about four or five distributions a day. Every now and then, I notice a little devil on my screen. Stickers for every of these distributions have been plastered on my case. Suddenly, my room stinks a lot more with these people in here. I ask them why they never shower, and the usual response is something along the lines of "showering is like rebooting" and "I don't want to lose my uptime."

Week 3, Saturday: There's a troop of men running naked in a circle around McGill Hall. I am not even going to ask.

Week 4, Wednesday: Linux is FINALLY working on my computer! I have a pretty slick desktop too. I think I might like this. I can finally work in my room instead of the labs, although considering the every increasing layer of garbage on the floor...

Week 4, Thursday: My computer flashes messages about how I am "0WNX0RED" and how I should "PHJ33R" whoever and how "L4MEX0R" I am for having an insecure box. A kid suggests we reinstall Linux after discovering about 17 rootkits.

Week 5, Friday: Someone got BSD working on my computer. I wonder if this will last. The s

It's been done at Carnegie Mellon as well.

CMU has one called HELI. Supposedly, it was being considered to fly over the Somerset crash site on 9/11 to map out the area, but the authorities decided that if it crashed also, it would just complicate the crash site more. Lots of other places have similar creatures. There's also the Aerial Robotics Competition

This is true for mission-critical systems, as you say, where no risk is tolerable.

But in general, software should be resilient in the face of unexpected conditions, including user modifications.

This is called robustness, and it generally revolves around checking your inputs for validity before acting on them, so that unexpected results don't have a chance to occur.

Robustness is not the same as reliability or availability. Those things are hard; robustness is both easy to implement and easy to verify, and there is no excuse for doing it any other way.

It's worth noting that Microsoft policy is (or was?) to disable all such checks before shipping, "for performance reasons."

--
Dum de dum.

Scott McNealy said that, but the vision was implemented by others. CMU's Mach (1985), Andrew Tanenbaum's Amoeba (1986), and Plan 9 (1987) were OSes that made a network into a computer.

To be fair, Sun does have ChorusOS , but that seems to have died the death (i.e. gone Sun Public Source) despite Scott's best intentions.

If you check, a lot of people who write open source software are with .edu domain.
The reality of the US Universities can be seen here - my university (very bad - you get at most 30% of anything that you develop), or here - across the street from us (a bit better - 50%).

The bottom line is that it absolutely doesn't pay off to be innovative and creative for profit there.

Is this covered by the DMCA?

Here's some creative computer code art.

I don't understand, open source development is not breaking the law. IANAL but the questionable area is where the intent of your code is to contravene security mechanisms. Even then, it's not illegal to publish that source code in the US. Even DeCSS itself (which I'm sure is what you're alluding to) is not illegal in source code form. The kicker of the DMCA is when you distribute DeCSS-like code with the express INTENT of bypassing CSS, such as a ready to compile file or more specifically as a binary. If you want a real answer, explain what your "Open Source development" is and maybe somebody with a legal background can give you more info. Otherwise, I, and others, will be tempted to think that your post has that distinctive M$ aroma to it.

Across three of the measures (trial time, travel height and pointing error), females benefited more than males from wider fields of view...

You can also find the paper that is referenced by the origical article at Carnegie Mellon Women Go With the (Optical) Flow where they summarize some of the research findings to date and then show the results of further testing around the effect of smooth visual presentation of movement within a 3D landscape.

Doc

Have you considering using python? researchers at DIKU have created a benchmark tool for . It seems usefull. Python is also excellent for gluing modules together.
A wellthought example on how to setup your code for experimental work is the lemur toolkit from CMU. This toolkit has a concept of "parameter" files that is very handy :) Generally I would recommend against exporting directly to spreadsheet formats - I tend to export to flat files (with field separators). Postgres' COPY command is extremely handy from scripts. I also find gnu-plot handy. Remember .. these tools might seem un-intuitive at first .. but when you have used them for earlier experiments you can re-use code between experiements :) I hope this helps

Have you considering using python? researchers at DIKU have created a benchmark tool for . It seems usefull. Python is also excellent for gluing modules together.
A wellthought example on how to setup your code for experimental work is the lemur toolkit from CMU. This toolkit has a concept of "parameter" files that is very handy :) Generally I would recommend against exporting directly to spreadsheet formats - I tend to export to flat files (with field separators). Postgres' COPY command is extremely handy from scripts. I also find gnu-plot handy. Remember .. these tools might seem un-intuitive at first .. but when you have used them for earlier experiments you can re-use code between experiements :) I hope this helps