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I've actually considered this. You could take a $400 box, maybe double that for a multiport serial board, mix in your favorite Linux distribution and a bunch of old VT's or Mac Pluses and replace the system half of us used in college with something easier to upgrade, support and manage (and it would be faster).

If you were really strapped for cash, you could build a dozen of these and plop one down in each lab/building around the campus and only worry about networking those dozen machines. If they were networked, you could really extend their lifespan using coda and another $400 box with a couple of 20 Gb drives to handle the bulk of the storage (and, of course, centralized backup).

It's a Third World dream come true, for the price of a hot passport...

Right...I have seen Kerberos FTP at CMU ...It exists for BOTH Unix and Dos (not seen a Win version..but it must exist...and who cares ? )
Definitely lot less trouble than ssh (if kerberos is up .. that is)

thttpd is not a threaded web server. In fact, due to its design (as I understand it), the thread implementation makes no difference to thttpd. If you're running a multi-processor system, Apache will probably be better because it will take advantage of the multiple processors; thttpd, because it is only a single process, will not.
ned

Just as a side note..Linux DOES run kerberos (case in point CMU and MIT) ... So it can be almost as secure (if not equally secure)as the SP.

I served up 8gigs the day the 2nd SW Trailer came out. Can we beat that?

templestowe.res.cmu.edu

Maybe it only happens here but the Geek support structure is alive and well at this college.

I guess I had it easy, the geek population at my HS was probably well over 10%, a minority big enough not to be intimidated.

I was reading many of the posts dealing with this thread, and it got me to recall the years I served hard time in seven different 'prisons.' I was always the outcast, the loner. When I was breezing thru classes and toying with computers, others made fun of me for my size, my looks, or my intelligence. Teachers and other school personnel could have cared less about my daily plight, and quite often life at home was no easier. The only thing that saved my butt in my early years was that my family was a military family. Every few years we moved to a new locale. The torment toned down in my later years, mainly because trying to find anyone willing to picking on a s++:++ was getting hard to find. At my last school I didn't encounter as much harassment, but then, I was a senior in high school, I had just arrived there after 5 years in Germany, and I was basically unknown to most people there.

However, there is another kind of harassment that I encounter here in college. I attend Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh. My degree program, officially called Information and Decision Systems, should be called Micro$oft Wor$hip. It's tough being a Mac/SGI user when just about everybody else wants to (figuratively) perform vile sex acts with Micro$oft Bill. You would not believe the ridicule I have had to put up with because of my choice of platforms. Hopefully, when I get a job after school, I will be able to work on a platform I want to work on, not the tool of evil that is Wintel.

Hmm... I don't understand why slashdot only updated with one page with screenshots from the q3test when there are like 5+ of them up now. That server is probably going to get slashdotted and everyone will get mad, etc etc. Anyhow, here some other pages with q3test screenshots...

http://astrotek.realtime.no/quake3/

http://hope.res.cmu.edu/

http://www.columbia.edu/~gks4/

http://linux.alphacomp.com/

Get your pictures here.

I bought this book about a year ago and was very disappointed. It's mostly old Datamation and other mainstream computer trade magazine articles wrapped with meandering introductions. There are some interesting details here but basically I was unimpressed with the quality. The projects covered are mostly glass house apps and the revelance is mostly how we have moved beyond that mode.

It's too bad that Glass provided virtually no countering examples of projects that have fared well under better software engineering and management discipline. Yes, many large projects are "runaways" (more than twice over budget or time). Yes, there is *something* you can do about it.

For example, in the mega-project range, look at some of the work being done by the Automated Software Engineering group at NASA Ames. Successes in the open source field like Linux, Perl, Samba and many others demonstrate how alternative methods to software development can produce results. If you want rigorous analysis of software development, check the work of Watts Humphreys, Capers Jones, and the Software Engineering Institute at Carnegie-Mellon, developers the Capability Maturity Model, which if not exactly a template for software development in large organizations at least provides a model to aspire to.

So I guess my disappointment with this book is that it was such a slapdash, backward-looking view on a very important subject.

-------

You might want to start with the comp.speech FAQ:

http://www.speech.cs.cmu.edu/comp.speech/

In particular, take a look at:

http://www.speech.cs.cm u.edu/comp.speech/Section5/Q5.5.html


Two speech synthesis programs I have played with are:

rsynth: ftp://svr-ftp.eng.cam.ac.uk/ pub/comp.speech/synthesis/

Festival: http://www.cstr.ed.ac.uk/projects/f estival.html

You might want to start with the comp.speech FAQ:

http://www.speech.cs.cmu.edu/comp.speech/

In particular, take a look at:

http://www.speech.cs.cm u.edu/comp.speech/Section5/Q5.5.html


Two speech synthesis programs I have played with are:

rsynth: ftp://svr-ftp.eng.cam.ac.uk/ pub/comp.speech/synthesis/

Festival: http://www.cstr.ed.ac.uk/projects/f estival.html

On Yahoo, I found a mirror locator in addition to mirrors at Ohio State, Switzerland, Internet FAQ Consortium, Japan, California, and the United Kingdom. Also noted in the discussion is a Slashdot reader mirror which could get Slashdotted.

I can't imagine it's not anywhere else, but for those of you too lazy, you can grab it here.

I certainly appreciate the efforts in free software, in coding, technical writing, advocacy, feedback, and so forth.

For those of us with inadequate technical skills for even these, however, I would remind you that the information age does not refer only to computer information, but to computerized information. If you are qualified to put any sort of useful information online, do so! It can benefit all of us.

My personal preference is in putting public domain literature online. See The On-Line Book Page for information on how to get involved in this.

Alan R. Light
Monroe, North Carolina

... just not in the commercial market. This robot has it's own league in the RoboCup Soccer Tournament. The winners last year were a team from Carnegie Mellon University (go CMU!! - I go there). It's really cool. Here's the site of CMU's team leader:

Manuela Veloso's Page

(Many poisons cause hallucinations, so getting rid of stomach contents when vision does not match other senses does have evolutionary advantage)

Kereberos is also running on linux at CMU (Carnegie Mellon University for all you people who dont know :) the place where the Coda file system for linux is being developed ). So I do know that its possible to run it. However not sure how to do it. Dont know if this is of any help but at least thought should let you know.

Carnegie = steel
Rockafeller = oil

-J. Pierpont
http://dino.res.cmu.edu

choates1-bp-140.dartmouth.edu
or 129.170.46.140


The server at geodesic.res.cmu.edu
downloaded at 600 kbps; if my crappy computer doesn't work, try that one.

...didn't really want to use my computer today anyway...

http://www.cray.com
A Cray T3E, which is the fastest massively parallel Cray, runs at up to 1.2 TeraFLOPS, with 2048 DEC Alphas. I believe that there is an upgrade to get it to run 600 MHz Alphas instead of 450's, which would increase the max speed. I remember reading that they put together a machine that did over 1 TeraFLOPS on real code. So basically, the answer to "how fast is a Cray" is "Very". :)

Forest Godfrey

At least I share a sign with Obi Wan. That's kinda cool. And if you say otherwise, I'll use the Force on yo ass. Or something.

-J.Pierpont
http://dino.res.cmu.edu

I dunno about the KGB at your school, but the real KGB (the one at my school) is pretty cool.

Teachers that use social security numbers to distribute exam grades (where you look up your SSN to find your grade, and often your name's on there anyway) just suck, though.

This view of patents is a declaration of war against anybody who has worked hard to invent an idea. Under this definition, Thomas Edison would not have been allowed to patent the light bulb, Nikoli Tesla would not have been allowed to patent the transformer, and Alexander Graham Bell would not have been allowed to patent the telephone.

Incorrect. The comments, especially the suggested 2-3 year lifetime, apply specifically to software patents.

Patents are all that protect inventors from becoming slaves (to the degree that they are inventors).

Incorrect. Almost all patents are granted to inventors working for corporations, working under contracts that ensure patent ownership reverts to the corporation. In fact, the patent system as currently construed and operated is very dangerous to the independent inventor, especially in the area of software (where almost every worker is an inventor). This is because almost any "invention" (i.e. new piece of software) is likely to infringe on other patented "inventions", due to the great number and scope of patents on simple software techniques. The independent inventor lacks the means to license or cross-license these other patents, and is therefore at the mercy of the corporations with large patent portfolios.

Most people do not understand how patents work. This makes them unqualified to call for their abolition.

Perhaps. My brother is a patent attourney, and I do research in computer science. Take that for what you will.

First of all, the titles are always vague, like "a method of transferring music over computer networks." A patent with this title would NOT cover ALL such methods -- only the one which it describes. Otherwise, surely everything would have been patented by now, and even a big company like Microsoft could not but work in terror of infringing something. The actual patent is always more specific.

That may sometimes be the case, but there are certainly many examples of companies seeking license fees for patents with very broad claims --- for example, Eolas (active Web content), Sightsound (selling and delivering digital music online), and Wang (making a local copy of materials viewed online). Perhaps these claims are not justified, but the very threat of legal action has a chilling effect, especially on independent inventors with few legal resources.

The second thing to remember about patents is that they are not retroactive. You can still send WAV files over FTP. Everything you have now is either unpatented, or you have already paid to license it (unless you manufactured it yourself, in which case you should have tried to patent it or license it).

That would be ideal, but it's far from practical. For example, at CMU we have had a Coke machine attached to the Internet for more than ten years. (CMU was one of the original ARPAnet sites.) I'm sure at the time no-one would have thought it was patentable. Even if they had, the students who did it could not have afforded to acquire a patent. (At the time, it may not even have been patentable ... USPTO standards have been loosening for quite some time now.) A few months ago we were contacted by someone who had acquired a patent on Internet-attached vending machines, and who demanded licensing fees or else the shutdown of our system. Of course we could not afford the fees, did not feel morally obliged to pay them, and did not wish to be deprived of the fruits of our labour. Fortunately he did not press legal action, but if he had, we would have had to concede, since those responsible for the Coke machine have no resources to defend our case.

The third thing to remember is that ideas last forever, while patents don't. The benefit an inventor gives to "society" over the long term is incalculable, regardless of how many trillions of dollars he makes. But the needs of "society" are not the justification for the inventor's existence, or his profit. He has a right to his own life and to his own property -- and therefore he has a right to own the ideas he creates, at least for a time, and to set the terms for their use.

These rights are all enforceable through trade secrecy and non-disclosure agreements. These mechanisms do not preclude independent invention, which I think is a good and fair thing. Consider the inventor who creates an invention, and just as she is about to reap the rewards of her work, discovers that a patent has just been granted that covers the same thing. What happened to her rights?

Anyway, even I would not say that all patents are bad, just that many are and the system needs to be reformed.

Don't bother declaring that independent invention is anomalous. From personal experience and from my observations of the industry, in most cases of patent infringement the infringer was completely unaware of the existence of the patent and patented work, meaning that the infringing work was independently invented.

Robert O'Callahan

Many RA files are just G.728 files with funny headers, so you can use any G.728 decoder on them. Here is the source to one: http://www.cs.cmu.edu/afs/cs/local/mosaic/common/o mega/Web/groups/AI/areas/ speech/systems/ldcelp/

On many of the modern Unix variants, /etc/passwd is only a textual representation of a database file which holds the real user information. The getpw*(3) routines use this database file to access passwd data. This makes things way faster than they used to be, for example, on SunOS4, where ls(1) was written so stupidly that it scanned the (sequential) passwd file for every single uid lookup it needed to make. Type "ls -l /home" on a SunOS system with like a thousand registered users, sit back and relax.

Speaking of today: FreeBSD, for example, uses a Berkeley DB database to store passwd information. In fact, it uses two databases, one with and one without passwords, for "security". This speeds up lookups quite a lot, but beware: The DB files are still generated from text files, so adding users with huge user databases is a lengthy process.

The question is whether you actually want to create that many Unix user accounts. For mail servers, you can often get away better with creating mail accounts only. This requires some hackery with your friendly MTA (postfix or qmail), but it is quite doable and also has positive security side-effects.

Look into Cyrus imapd if you need a message store implementation which is able to handle mailboxes for users who don't have a unix login. Beware, Cyrus comes with a ugly^H^H^H^Hpretty tcl-based administration interface which you can replace by a bunch of home-grown perl scripts to automate administration. Cyrus makes it fairly easy to integrate your own authentication mechanisms through a seperate process, although the performance of such a mechanism would have to be determined.

In a nutshell: Unix in itself is not prepared to handle very large user populations. If you need to serve a lot of users with shell accounts, look into NIS+ or Kerberos and distribute the load onto a bunch of machines served by central (and well-hardened) user-database-servers. If you need to support only mail, you might be well off with one fast machine and a special purpose mailer configuration.

On many of the modern Unix variants, /etc/passwd is only a textual representation of a database file which holds the real user information.
getpw*(3) uses this database file to access passwd data. This makes things way faster than it used to be, for example, on SunOS4, where ls(1) was written so stupidly that it scanned the (sequential) passwd file for every single uid lookup it needed to make. Typing "ls -l /home" on a SunOS system with like a thousand registered users was an invitation to get ahold of some (some!) coffee.

Speaking of today, FreeBSD uses a DB database to store passwd information (in fact, it has two databases, one with and one without passwords, for "security"). This speeds up lookups quite a lot, but beware: The DB files are still generated text files, so adding users with such huge user databases is a real pain.

The question is whether you actually want to create that many Unix user accounts. For mail servers, you can often get away better with creating mail accounts only. This requires some hackery with your friendly MTA (postfix, qmail, sendmail, exim or even smail), but it is quite doable and also has positive security side-effects.

Look into Cyrus imapd you need message store implementation which is able to handle mailboxes for users who don't have a unix login. Beware, Cyrus comes with a pretty tcl-based administration interface which you almost certainly want to replace by a bunch of home-grown perl scripts to automate administration.