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This past year, I was accepted into Carnegie Mellon's [cmu.edu] School of Computer Science [cmu.edu]. It has been a remarkable experience that I would lik e to share with the Slashdot 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 tw o 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. Tom orrow, 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 f ind that the hostname and address assigned to me were colliding with another system. I'll just increm ent 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 configu re their systems?

Week 1, Friday: I finally found a free IP! It's mine! You sons of bitches can't have i t, I found it, I keep it, it's mine! To hell with all of you! Head hurts really bad. I've slowly be en 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 fi les titled "J00AR30WN3DBITCH-phj33r-" and then some random hacker's name. Don't these people have liv es? 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 Window s!" Suddenly, two dozen other guys (all of them possibly homosexuals) appeared at the door, each tout ing an operating system called Linux. Half of them got into a fight over which was better, Debian, Re dHat, Slackware, and a bunch of others I couldn't recognize. Some kid who appeared to not have shower ed 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 s o I can do my assignments.

Week 3, Friday: People are still trying to get Linux to work on my system. They keep telling m y 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 o n 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 do n'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 no t 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 "PHJ3 3R" whoever and how "L4MEX0R" I am for having an insecure box. A kid suggests we reinstall Linux afte r discovering about 17 rootkits.

Week 5, Friday: Someone got BSD working on my computer. I wonder if this will last. The stres s has been building and I forgot to take a shower this morning.

Week 6, Tuesday: Seems I have been "0WNX0R3D" again. Took longer this time. Minutes later, so meone comes in with a "Bastile Linux" install CD. He gets started installing. I am feeling very susp icious of these guys.

Week 6, Thursday: Everyone seems to know more about my system than I do. It's a bit unnerving. I guess anyone could feel upset from this sort of treatment. They hack my box, trash it, then reins tall everything. I guess they think they're being funny. My dirty clothes are piling up and I am out of clean ones. I don't have time to do laundry, I'll have to wear something out of the pile.

Week 6, Friday: I got up this morning, sat at my machine, and stared at it blankly. An icon ap peared on my desktop for Quake III. I suppose it couldn't hurt to play some. I have been very stress ed lately.

Week 6, Sunday: I lost track of time! I started playing Quake III on the network with some oth er CMU students (who killed me hundreds of times in the course of 10 minutes) and completely lost myse lf. There's a bag of chips that has been sitting here for a few weeks. I think I'll finish those off for breakfast and then go to sleep.

Week 7, Wednesday: I masturbate every day now. Not a single girl comes near me. This is so de pressing. Do I really smell? Oh well, I have the task of learning how to secure my Linux box to keep me busy. Who has time for the opposite sex after all?

Week 8, Tuesday: I got into a fight with this little shit who kept telling me RedHat was great. What a fucking moron! Anybody who knows Linux knows that Debian kicks its sorry little ass. I'll b e getting my judiciary papers for the incident in the mail. Doesn't this school get it? I can't let someone go around converting people to RedHat! WtF!?

Week 8, Friday: My roommate squeezed my ass today! At first I was shocked and appauled, and I told him off for it. Thinking about it later though, there was just something that seemed too strong about my reaction. I'll talk to him later and appologize for getting so upset, it wasn't really so ba d.

Usability Engineer is actually quite an interesting position, IMHO. It focuses not so much on the raw, technical nuts-and-bolts, but on how people work with machines. You'll often find jobs (in the real world, I suppose) like this going to people who've graduated in Human Computer Interaction at places like CMU or Stanford.

My own opinion is that it's a very important field. I think everyone knows we're not going to win Grandma back from Microsoft with the current state of Linux on the Desktop, even if it is getting better. Apple isn't going to win, because it's-- what, 3x as expensive? Even if I love them!

So it's up to the Open Source movement to generate something that doesn't provide what coders THINK the users would like to work with, but something that they can demonstrably interact with well, and understand enough to use.

A further opinion is that all we need is a little more handholding... It's not a bad thing! Don't you want Microsoft to start losing?

The LoC already contains at least 6000 hours of movie just from the National Film Registry project, which is by no means the only video in their catalog. Did you mean the textual content of the LoC?

How much of a role do you think peer review plays in software quality?
In proprietary source systems, there is generally formal peer review, as per CMMI. But I have seen this done rarely (almost exclusively for CMMI level 3+ projects). There seems to be a disincentive to do formal peer review. There seem to be various reasons for this, cost, workplace environment, and group dynamics. Which do you think are most significant?

Whereas in open source projects, there is not the formal peer review, but rather seems like a mass informal peer review. This seems to foster an enviroment of besting each other, trying to find the most and most obscure bugs.
What do you say?

Shameless plug: See also my page about an alternative concept which avoids the problem with skyhooks that they are incompatible with satellites.

I prefer Dr. Rush!

then you and everyone else on your team are doing AOP in a bad way.

You'd think my team uses it? We're CMM SEI Level 5, man. We don't touch a new paradigm until it's got 12 years of proven applications under it's belt!

You can increase your throughput by taking advantage of the drive heads' positions en route to do something else (seek-wise, rotational latency-wise too, apparently). It's called freeblock scheduling. An introduction is online, and other papers are around; this one makes reference to a 300% speedup when there is no idle time on a drive.

How about the Metrobots that are Sony AIBO robots used as embodied multi-agent systems that play robotic soccer too.

They are planning to enter the RoboCup American Open at CMU in Spring of 2003 and hoping to participate in RoboCup 2003 in Padua Italy.

Suhit

Carnegie Mellon University has had its own Red Hat-based distro for at least 5 years now, called Andrew Linux.

Carnegie Mellon University has had its own Red Hat-based distro for at least 5 years now, called Andrew Linux.

Here is a semi-detailed page describing what I did, with a list of pics here. The voltage regulator caps were blown, but I replaced them for a super-ghetto motherboard ;)

Here is a semi-detailed page describing what I did, with a list of pics here. The voltage regulator caps were blown, but I replaced them for a super-ghetto motherboard ;)

Especially if you're doing policy analysis (i.e., you're not data mining a 10 million record database) R is a great environment to work in. Hmm, it might be possible to process 10 million record databases with R, I just haven't tried it.

R has more or less equivalent functionality to Octave, but the programming language (S) is more interesting, and plotting functions are more sophisticated. For matrix operations, both R and Octave use BLAS.

My advice is to stay away from SAS and SPSS. These two were invented back when "everybody knows using a computer is hard". Both have GUI interfaces now, but that's just an attempt to hide the essential ugliness of their command languages. If you must use a commercial product then S+ is my recommendation.

Good luck & have fun!

/*
* Copyright (c) 1989 Paul S. Heckbert
* This source may be used for peaceful, nonprofit purposes only, unless
* under licence from the author. This notice should remain in the source.
*/

It is ironic that water in space exhibits properties similiar to what was speculated to derive from the delusional Soviet discovery of polywater in the late 60's. See here and here.

I wonder if there were any Russians scientists on board the ISS who said, "I told you so, comrade, I told you so."

Here MAC addresses must be entered as part of registering a computer for access to the network - each registration consists of a user's login/pass, their location on the network, the computer's name, and the MAC address. Makes things fairly straightforward when they need to track something down, or assign blame or whatnot.

I read some people here say there isn't such thing YET, but as a matter of fact, there WAS. Unfortunatelly, no more.

In ye good ol' DOS times, there was DESQview/X, that allowed you to run Win 3.1 in a X-Window, and display it on any X-Server. It could also turn any 386 w/ DOS in a X-terminal.

Pretty cool stuff, but probably little market share. You can see screenshots here. More info here. If you don't care for 95/2000/XP support, as it doesn't have it, you can download DESQview/X here (I didn't test it, though.

You mean this bill ?

I'm a geek; I go to an admittedly geek-heavy university. But I played football for a year and a half as well, until I decided schoolwork was more important, and I still don't have any trouble mixing with kids my age. I do still play soccer. I wonder where this theory places us, the folks of supposedly well-above-average intelligence who can still fit in well enough with the rest.

-- shayborg

It is illegal to circumvent a technological method for protecting access to a copyrighted work.

Right. I don't seem to see what part of that sentence makes what I suggested legal.

Read the actual DMCA, and you'll see that there is no mention of an exemption from the law for the copyright holder, since again, this is about protecting the container, not the copyrighted material.

Oh, and by the way DMCA threats have been used for exactly this: DMCA vs. changing the "embed" font bit. There was a post here a while back about it.

JFS, other journalled file systems, and Softupdates have the same goal -- keeping file metadata structures consistent on the disk. JFS does not attempt to maintain file data integrity in the event of a crash -- that is the job of a DBMS. Go and read the web page on JFS from IBM that is linked to in the original posting.

Granted, journalled FS's and softupdates go about things in different ways. Softupdates trades off potentially increased disk space usage and higher disk and CPU activity after a crash (performing the background, reduced set of checks in fsck) against a smaller relative performance penalty vs. a non-journalled FS in normal usage as compared to a journalled file system.

My own $0.02 is that this is a nice scratch-the-itch, check-the-box-for-PHB's addition, but for most normal usage softupdates is a better choice. See the papers by Ganger and Patt and McKusick for more details. (Links copied from the OpenBSD FAQ pages.)

--Paul

The one I found interesting was the register allocator based on graph fusion. I hadn't noticed it until it was mentioned in that article, but it seems to have been out awhile now (1996) and came out of research funded by DARPA.

Haven't seen any mention of the idea on the gcc lists. Would be interesting to see what the back-end folks think of it.

haha, omniweb, the browser that doesn't do iframes (try it in ANY real browser to see what it should look like)

Moral: spammers hoover slashdot, so don't post your email here, ever.

Screw that. I refuse to hide or obfuscate my email address. I've been using the Internet for 15 years. I remember the time when the Internet was mostly spam-free, and people rarely forged email addresses even though everyone knew how to.

My real email address is deven@ties.org -- this is my primary personal email address, not a spam-trap address. I know that the spammers are harvesting address from Slashdot and everywhere else. I don't care. Let them have the address. I've never hidden it, and I never will. I'm stubborn that way. (It's akin to refusing to change your lifestyle in response to terrorism, even when you know you're at risk...)

Of course, since I don't hide my email address, I get tons of spam, along with "Joe job" bounces/replies for spams forged in my name, plus more bounces copied to postmaster, since I receive postmaster mail for several domains. Bring it on! It just provides me with a larger corpus of bogus email to use for Bayesian filtering, or whatever other technique I may experiment with...

I firmly believe that a technical solution will be required to solve the spam problem. Legislation won't prevent the virtually-untraceable international spams, and may not even prevent local ones if it's not zealously enforced. Social controls haven't been effective. We need to prevent the spam from being delivered in the first place, or at least mark it as suspicious so legitimate mail doesn't drown in the noise so easily.

Beyond basic filtering like SpamAssassin and Bayesian filtering, there are other technical solutions worth exploring. Human validation techniques like TMDA might help. Finding a way to punish spammers and drive up their costs, such as E-Stamps or selling interrupt rights (original paper: HTML or PDF), might be effective. (But likely a higher barrier to legitimate mail.) Some sort of PGP-style Web of Trust might be very effective if done well, but it would be difficult to build. Perhaps some "soundness" principles could be borrowed from Usenet II to create a similar system for email...

Let's cross our fingers and hope to find a truly effective solution (or combination of solutions) in the near future!

The "unwashed masses" is the general public. They are not corporate citizens, but owe no allegiance
to anyone but themselves. Who better to decide what software should be, then the people who use it.

Your point that extreme polarization that seems to permeate these debates is only the result of extreme views of the closed source shops.(read on before answering) A closed source shop will have by definition the view that only "they" can change the binaries. As Dr. David S. Touretzky, so nicely pointed out in his post trial memoradum Binaries are only a representation of speech. There is no such thing in nature as copyright protection or patent protection. It is an unnatural system. And has only been around for a couple of hundred years, so it really hasn't been given the test of time, as compared with something like money, or land ownership.

On the other hand there is the opensource people who say (more or less), once you buy the software it's yours to modify as you will. Like buying a car.

Obviously selling software that can be resold without recompense would put people out of business which isn't a good thing. On the other hand selling software that people can only use by your say so (upgrades, hardware dependancies, Per seat licensing) isn't a good solution either.

I don't pretend to know what the best solution is.

My point is that close software is an extreme even though it is the norm in many peoples minds. Polorization occurs because everything else appears so different from that extreme.

"There are three kinds of people in the world. Those who believe in the excluded middle, those who don't believe in the excluded middle, and those who don't not believe in the excluded middle."

(Needs knowledge of constructive logic .)

The short answer is "yes and no". Of course.

In fact, it's worse than that because the common mythology is that you shouldn't consider any non-functional requirements until you're finished with the code -- as expressed in the common idea that you should defer optimizing for performance until the very last step in development.

Everyone with more than about 20 minutes of experience knows this isn't the way it's really done -- if it were, then every web system would be built first as one big honkin' monolithic program, and refined from there. Instead, we make lots of decisions (like use J2EE or not, distribute the servers or not, use an in-memory DBMS or MySQL, and so on) very early, in order to get somewhere close (we hope) to a system that does what we need.

We call this "architecture" and in general we don't teach it in school. This is in part because it's not very well understood as a discipline, IMAO because research in architecture has concentrated on representations rather than methods. (This is not to say that it's bad, don't mistake my point. People like Dave Garlan, Mary Shaw, and Paul Clements are doing good useful work; it's just not directed to figuring out what architects do rather than what their work products should be.) Len Bass has started doing something along these lines, and I have a paper in preparation. (You can read some good stuff about architecture here.)

The problem isn't that people program to "black boxes" though: in fact, you have to manage designs with abstraction at any time, and in an embedded system you invariably end up working with black boxes as well. For example, do you do an FFT in a DSP chip, do you implement it in a general-purpose processor? ... not to mention really weird things, like using an FFT in a DSP to implement a matrix multiply for graphics. (Sounds weird, works good.) The problem is that people are being trained to think that they can choose any kind of black box and expect non-functional issues to be handled by Someone Else.

Like the DECSS Haiku?

Funtional and poetic.

This is a PPT, but hits the main points: Challenger Disaster. An ugly page that has an actual paragraph is this. But I finally found a real page here.

I'm a CMU CS freshman, and while there are weirdos here (as there are everywhere), you greatly exaggerate. Also note that most people here don't use Linux. Of 132 CS freshmen, there probably aren't more than 10 or 15 who use linux. There are several with those new Apple laptops, which look slick.

If you really want to know how to mock something you should try going there first. People here enjoy mocking it anyway-- check out readme, the campus satirical publication.

The Pittsburgh weather is easy to mock too.

This past year, I was accepted into Carnegie Mellon's [cmu.edu] School of Computer Science [cmu.edu]. It has been a remarkable experience that I would lik e to share with the Slashdot 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 tw o 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. Tom orrow, 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 f ind that the hostname and address assigned to me were colliding with another system. I'll just increm ent 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 configu re their systems?

Week 1, Friday: I finally found a free IP! It's mine! You sons of bitches can't have i t, I found it, I keep it, it's mine! To hell with all of you! Head hurts really bad. I've slowly be en 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 fi les titled "J00AR30WN3DBITCH-phj33r-" and then some random hacker's name. Don't these people have liv es? 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 Window s!" Suddenly, two dozen other guys (all of them possibly homosexuals) appeared at the door, each tout ing an operating system called Linux. Half of them got into a fight over which was better, Debian, Re dHat, Slackware, and a bunch of others I couldn't recognize. Some kid who appeared to not have shower ed 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 s o I can do my assignments.

Week 3, Friday: People are still trying to get Linux to work on my system. They keep telling m y 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 o n 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 do n'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 no t 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 "PHJ3 3R" whoever and how "L4MEX0R" I am for having an insecure box. A kid suggests we reinstall Linux afte r discovering about 17 rootkits.

Week 5, Friday: Someone got BSD working on my computer. I wonder if this will last. The stres s has been building and I forgot to take a shower this morning.

Week 6, Tuesday: Seems I have been "0WNX0R3D" again. Took longer this time. Minutes later, so meone comes in with a "Bastile Linux" install CD. He gets started installing. I am feeling very susp icious of these guys.

Week 6, Thursday: Everyone seems to know more about my system than I do. It's a bit unnerving. I guess anyone could feel upset from this sort of treatment. They hack my box, trash it, then reins tall everything. I guess they think they're being funny. My dirty clothes are piling up and I am out of clean ones. I don't have time to do laundry, I'll have to wear something out of the pile.

Week 6, Friday: I got up this morning, sat at my machine, and stared at it blankly. An icon ap peared on my desktop for Quake III. I suppose it couldn't hurt to play some. I have been very stress ed lately.

Week 6, Sunday: I lost track of time! I started playing Quake III on the network with some oth er CMU students (who killed me hundreds of times in the course of 10 minutes) and completely lost myse lf. There's a bag of chips that has been sitting here for a few weeks. I think I'll finish those off for breakfast and then go to sleep.

Week 7, Wednesday: I masturbate every day now. Not a single girl comes near me. This is so de pressing. Do I really smell? Oh well, I have the task of learning how to secure my Linux box to keep me busy. Who has time for the opposite sex after all?

Week 8, Tuesday: I got into a fight with this little shit who kept telling me RedHat was great. What a fucking moron! Anybody who knows Linux knows that Debian kicks its sorry little ass. I'll b e getting my judiciary papers for the incident in the mail. Doesn't this school get it? I can't let someone go around converting people to RedHat! WtF!?

Week 8, Friday: My roommate squeezed my ass today! At first I was shocked and appauled, and I told him off for it. Thinking about it later though, there was just something that seemed too strong about my reaction. I'll talk to him later and appologize for getting so upset, it wasn't really so ba d.

This past year, I was accepted into Carnegie Mellon's [cmu.edu] School of Computer Science [cmu.edu]. It has been a remarkable experience that I would lik e to share with the Slashdot 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 tw o 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. Tom orrow, 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 f ind that the hostname and address assigned to me were colliding with another system. I'll just increm ent 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 configu re their systems?

Week 1, Friday: I finally found a free IP! It's mine! You sons of bitches can't have i t, I found it, I keep it, it's mine! To hell with all of you! Head hurts really bad. I've slowly be en 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 fi les titled "J00AR30WN3DBITCH-phj33r-" and then some random hacker's name. Don't these people have liv es? 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 Window s!" Suddenly, two dozen other guys (all of them possibly homosexuals) appeared at the door, each tout ing an operating system called Linux. Half of them got into a fight over which was better, Debian, Re dHat, Slackware, and a bunch of others I couldn't recognize. Some kid who appeared to not have shower ed 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 s o I can do my assignments.

Week 3, Friday: People are still trying to get Linux to work on my system. They keep telling m y 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 o n 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 do n'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 no t 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 "PHJ3 3R" whoever and how "L4MEX0R" I am for having an insecure box. A kid suggests we reinstall Linux afte r discovering about 17 rootkits.

Week 5, Friday: Someone got BSD working on my computer. I wonder if this will last. The stres s has been building and I forgot to take a shower this morning.

Week 6, Tuesday: Seems I have been "0WNX0R3D" again. Took longer this time. Minutes later, so meone comes in with a "Bastile Linux" install CD. He gets started installing. I am feeling very susp icious of these guys.

Week 6, Thursday: Everyone seems to know more about my system than I do. It's a bit unnerving. I guess anyone could feel upset from this sort of treatment. They hack my box, trash it, then reins tall everything. I guess they think they're being funny. My dirty clothes are piling up and I am out of clean ones. I don't have time to do laundry, I'll have to wear something out of the pile.

Week 6, Friday: I got up this morning, sat at my machine, and stared at it blankly. An icon ap peared on my desktop for Quake III. I suppose it couldn't hurt to play some. I have been very stress ed lately.

Week 6, Sunday: I lost track of time! I started playing Quake III on the network with some oth er CMU students (who killed me hundreds of times in the course of 10 minutes) and completely lost myse lf. There's a bag of chips that has been sitting here for a few weeks. I think I'll finish those off for breakfast and then go to sleep.

Week 7, Wednesday: I masturbate every day now. Not a single girl comes near me. This is so de pressing. Do I really smell? Oh well, I have the task of learning how to secure my Linux box to keep me busy. Who has time for the opposite sex after all?

Week 8, Tuesday: I got into a fight with this little shit who kept telling me RedHat was great. What a fucking moron! Anybody who knows Linux knows that Debian kicks its sorry little ass. I'll b e getting my judiciary papers for the incident in the mail. Doesn't this school get it? I can't let someone go around converting people to RedHat! WtF!?

Week 8, Friday: My roommate squeezed my ass today! At first I was shocked and appauled, and I told him off for it. Thinking about it later though, there was just something that seemed too strong about my reaction. I'll talk to him later and appologize for getting so upset, it wasn't really so ba d.

All said and done, I think the developers of BeOS did a really great job. I recent got the chance to go over the Be File System (BeFS) for class and was amazed by what they did in a short amount of time (less than a year). If you want to look at a short presentation on the file system, you can grab it (in ppt) from here.

Here's an amusing rendering of the DeCSS source by Robert DeFusco (linked from the Gallery of CSS Descramblers).

Here's an amusing rendering of the DeCSS source by Robert DeFusco (linked from the Gallery of CSS Descramblers).

I prefer: "Applied Software Engineering is a project-related discipline which employs systematic and quantifiable processes and techniques for creating cost-effective solutions to practical problems, with the purpose of optimising the development, delivery and maintenance of software which is reliable and meets user expectations when operating in the real world."

This is a synthesis of definitions from professional SE groups and organisations around the world, including the Software Engineering Institute at CMU and the Software Engineering Body of Knowledge (SWEBOK), that embodies the goals, responsibilities and practices of SE.

To begin with, I am shocked that only one poster so far has mentioned the SWEBOK. This is the codex for anyone who wants to call themselves a Software Engineer, and in time will become the foundation of an international standard for SE skills.

It is important to realise that the goal of SE is not repeatable and predictable development. It is the creation of quality software (inherent in that meeting user, reliability and maintainability requirements), on time and on budget.

Achieving this goal has (at least) two aspects: a disciplined approach based on sound theory, and managing risk. Together these equate to reliability and predictability (both influencing and being influenced by discipline and risk management), making these a means to an end.

Unfortunately too many engineers lose sight of the real goal and instead target the means to achieve that goal. A perfectly predictable, perfectly reliable project is a failure if it can't delivery what the customer wants, on time and on budget.

So what is SE really? The SWEBOK answers the adequately. It identifies the areas of expertise in which a Software Engineer must be profficient:

• Managing resources (budget, time, people / expertise)
• Understanding user requirements
• Designing a solution using Best Practices
• Have the technical knowledge to evaluate possible technologies for the solution
• Have technical knowledge of design and implementation principles (algorithms, data structures, methodologies, patterns)
• Introducing predictability and risk management into the development process (software process management)
• Implementing the solution, or overseeing the implementation
• Communicating

Management (including risk management, project management and Best Practices) is a more important skill for an engineer than development.

He imagined a system, described in his book Mind Children, called the Moravec Transfer, which is a form of mind uploading.

Now, I realize this isn't the same as what you are worried about here with teleportation - but the ideas behind the Moravec Transfer really causes one to think about what is MIND and the "I" of an individual - where does it begin, and where does it end. I think the way it is spelled out and discussed in the above link on the Singularity makes the case clear that it *is* possible (not with today's tech, of course) to transfer the mind to a computer, and there would be no difference in the experience - you wouldn't "die" with the method.

Interesting ideas, at the very least...

Corrected link free of karmic charge!

"Beware the bearers of FALSE gifts & their BROKEN PROMISES. Much PAIN but still time. BELIEvE. There is GOOD out there. We OPpose DECEPTION. Conduit CLOSING. Acknowledge."

Typical vehicles:

Jacked up pickup trucks: (Ford)
http://www-2.cs.cmu.edu/~kimberly/images/Antarctic a/ben_truck.jpg
http://www-2.cs.cmu.edu/~kimberly/images/Antarctic a/ben_sib_truck.jpg
http://tiger.gsfc.nasa.gov/images/truck_tracks_sm. jpg

Deltas: (built by Canadian Foremost)
http://astro.uchicago.edu/cara/vtour/mcmurdo/delta .gif
http://www.theice.org/gifs/delta.gif
http://www.gmra.org/n0nhp/antarctica/mendelta.jpg

Ivan the Terra Bus: (Foremost)
http://images.google.com/images?q=ivan+terra+bus&i e=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&hl=en

Other odd specialized vehicles:
Haagelund
http://www-2.cs.cmu.edu/~kimberly/images/Antarctic a/SnowSchool.jpg
Sprite: (Thiokal)
http://tiger.gsfc.nasa.gov/images/sprite.jpg
Nodwell: (Tracked Delta)
http://tiger.gsfc.nasa.gov/images/nodwell.jpg
Tracked Crash/Fire vehicle:
http://www.theice.org/gifs/1frtrax.gif

Typical vehicles:

Jacked up pickup trucks: (Ford)
http://www-2.cs.cmu.edu/~kimberly/images/Antarctic a/ben_truck.jpg
http://www-2.cs.cmu.edu/~kimberly/images/Antarctic a/ben_sib_truck.jpg
http://tiger.gsfc.nasa.gov/images/truck_tracks_sm. jpg

Deltas: (built by Canadian Foremost)
http://astro.uchicago.edu/cara/vtour/mcmurdo/delta .gif
http://www.theice.org/gifs/delta.gif
http://www.gmra.org/n0nhp/antarctica/mendelta.jpg

Ivan the Terra Bus: (Foremost)
http://images.google.com/images?q=ivan+terra+bus&i e=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&hl=en

Other odd specialized vehicles:
Haagelund
http://www-2.cs.cmu.edu/~kimberly/images/Antarctic a/SnowSchool.jpg
Sprite: (Thiokal)
http://tiger.gsfc.nasa.gov/images/sprite.jpg
Nodwell: (Tracked Delta)
http://tiger.gsfc.nasa.gov/images/nodwell.jpg
Tracked Crash/Fire vehicle:
http://www.theice.org/gifs/1frtrax.gif

Typical vehicles:

Jacked up pickup trucks: (Ford)
http://www-2.cs.cmu.edu/~kimberly/images/Antarctic a/ben_truck.jpg
http://www-2.cs.cmu.edu/~kimberly/images/Antarctic a/ben_sib_truck.jpg
http://tiger.gsfc.nasa.gov/images/truck_tracks_sm. jpg

Deltas: (built by Canadian Foremost)
http://astro.uchicago.edu/cara/vtour/mcmurdo/delta .gif
http://www.theice.org/gifs/delta.gif
http://www.gmra.org/n0nhp/antarctica/mendelta.jpg

Ivan the Terra Bus: (Foremost)
http://images.google.com/images?q=ivan+terra+bus&i e=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&hl=en

Other odd specialized vehicles:
Haagelund
http://www-2.cs.cmu.edu/~kimberly/images/Antarctic a/SnowSchool.jpg
Sprite: (Thiokal)
http://tiger.gsfc.nasa.gov/images/sprite.jpg
Nodwell: (Tracked Delta)
http://tiger.gsfc.nasa.gov/images/nodwell.jpg
Tracked Crash/Fire vehicle:
http://www.theice.org/gifs/1frtrax.gif

The Fox project at CMU is studying the use of advanced programming languages, such as ML, for the construction of system software. They already have a web server written in ML.

I work for a large software development company that is trying to implement "Six Sigma" and it is a joke.

There are several replies to the article mentioning that Six Sigma is for manufacturing processes, and other replies mentioning Six Sigma in the context of software development. If the software project managers are really hungry for a formalized process, why not implement the CMM-SW or CMMI? They are designed from the ground up for software and not for manufacturing.

Back in the mid-90's, I worked for Computer Sciences Corp. (CSC) on a project that used the very-cool Rational R1000 platform for development and source-code control. In summary, the R1000 was a custom Ada-oriented development platform (even the hardware was custom-made, I believe). The operating system was fully implemented in Ada and featured a "command prompt" that required you to write snippets of Ada code (expressed as anonymous blocks) instead of shell commands. All errors were thrown as Ada exceptions. The "command prompt" editor even featured code completion and had a built-in debugger. It was even possible to auto-generate custom DOD-STD-2167A design documents (SDDs, IDDs, etc.) by embedding specialized comments in your Ada code (ala Javadoc) and using the built-in document generation modules. It was definitely cool for its time!

PCI SIG Official PCI Vendor ID Database Search Engine

Linux PCI Device ID Repository

Craig's PCI Pages

Ralf Brown (old)

• Google's cache of the vendors.txt file (last updated 2002-10-28)
• Another list by Ralph Brown (of Interrupt List fame) (last updated 2002-12-29)

Hi, there's a bit on the web about it, check out this link, it seems the DMCA can "outlaw" numbers :)
http://www-2.cs.cmu.edu/~dst/DeCSS/Gallery/Stego/i llegal-primes.html
RJ

Just how partonising and ill-informed can you get! Just because it's not from the US doesn't make it 'a fly-by-night software house'. There are plenty of US companies that fit this image. Credit where it's due; Indian companies are capable of churning out excellent software & guess what - they can even peer-audit and maintain it themselves! Who'd a thunk, eh?

That's why they have so many SEI Level 5 compliant organisations. Take a look at this report & count the Indian companies (and, hey, this was compiled in 1999. What's it like now??). Oh, look - Wipro is on the list. Surpriiise!