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Comeon, havn't you seem KDE3.1 or Gnome Or OS X , Nice big fat ICONS with frilly bits on the side, even though there an inch and a half square you still can't work out what there ment to represent.

Think I'm joking?
KDE 3.1
Gnome
Mac OS X (couldn't find non-quicktime screen shorts!

ohh and this mac[dot]com possibly the worst designed website in the world.... Nothing's hot so you have to move the mouse randomly around the screen looking for an address poping up in the status bar....
Backup == Umbrella?
Well done, top marks.

Prof. Rojstaczer's webpage can be found

I can't understand why science and engineering majors are held to one standard for grades and academics versus humanities majors even in the same school

Actually, the guy who wrote this peice is an Associate Professor of Geology and of Civil and Environmental Engineering. So, while this piece might not be from a "technical" point of view, it refers to the sciences rather than the humanities.

As a PhD student in English Lit, grade inflation has *not* been my expierence at all, but rather the opposite--professors who don't give out simple A's on principle.

Excuse me, but I'm one of those "frat boys... you see partying hard 4 or 5 nights a week," and I take offense to that comment. Some people happen to be capable of partying a lot while at the same time getting their work done, learning, and being quite successful. That happens to be the way it worked out for me. The fact that I party and hang out with your so-called "sororitutes" in the free time that I DO have after I'm done TA'ing/studying/working has no bearing on my quality as a student as you suggest. A large number of the guys in my fraternity are engineers as well, and I'd say that most of them are in the same boat that I am. I came to Duke to learn - if I can do that, succeed, and have fun at the same time, what's wrong with it?

I agree with you in that Pratt (Duke's engineering school) is quite difficult. Many Trinity (Duke's arts & sciences school) students give engineers shit about how much work they get. However, most engineers will tell you that they aren't the ones with the most work - computer science majors are. In fact, last semester a Pratt student wrote an article in the Chronicle in which he said, "The entire 'You're an engineer? I'm sorry' bit has grown old. We don't need your pity. Save it for the computer science majors.'" Perhaps you didn't notice it, but at Duke, the computer science major is in Trinity, NOT Pratt. Pratt may have EE/ECE, and offer a few computer science courses (EGR53, etc), but Trinity is where computer science resides.

Last semester in CPS108 (with Duvall, not Astrachan) my class was 45 students. I think about 5 of them got A's. All of my computer science classes have been like this, and so I'd agree with you that grade inflation is not a problem there at all. However, I'd have to disagree with you with respect to the humanities. You rightly point out that Sociology is a bit of a joke major (read: all the basketball, football, etc players), but I really don't think grade inflation in the rest of the departments is nearly as bad as you, or Rojstaczer state. If you ask students what the "easy" classes are, I'd say that ALL of them are in either the sociology department, or they are something like "Intro to Jazz."

I'll concede that you've graduated, and have taken more classes than I have (I'm a sopohmore) and have better insight into the issue. However, in the classes that I've taken thus far, I really have not seen a whole lot of grade inflation. Perhaps your experience was different that mine.

However, here's some empirical data for you. Dean's list requires you to place within the top 1/3rd of all undergraduates in your college. Dean's List With Distiniction requires you to place within the top 10% of all undergraduates in your college. To achieve Summa Cum Laude, you GPA needs to be in the top 5% of last year's graduating class, Magna Cum Laude is the next 10%, and Cum Laude is the next 10% after that. (BTW: If you look at the link above, the GPA's for Dean's List in Pratt lists 4 separate numbers. I'm not sure why there are 4, instead of 1, so I went ahead and averaged them)....

Dean's List (Fall 2002):
Trinity - 3.6
Pratt - 3.625

Dean's List With Distinction (Fall 2002):
Trinity - 3.925
Pratt - 3.929

Latin Honors (For students graduating this year):
Summa Cum Laude: 3.881
Manga Cum Laude: 3.751
Cum Laude: 3.663

From the data, you can see that the difference between the top 3rd of Pratt and the top 3rd of Trinity is only .025 grade points. The difference between the top decile of Pratt and that for Trinity is only .004. You can interpet the data how you like, but as far as I'm concerned there is NO difference between Arts & Science students and Engineering students. Furthermore, 75% of last year's graduating class had GPA's below 3.663. With this in mind, I find it REALLY hard to buy the whole grade inflation story at Duke...

If an English major answers a test question on an interpretation of some poem, it's going to get a high grade because it's based on opinion and ther eis no "right" or "wrong" answer.

No, that's not right (speaking as someone who has taught college level English). An interpretation must be 1. based upon a close reading of the work in question and 2. follow some established, or at least comprehensible, mechanism of interpretation. Opinions are not good answers in a humanities exam, any more than they would be in a CS exam. There's more room for ambiguity in the humnaities, true, but that ambiguity is always within what Eco has right called (in his book of this title) "the limits of interpretation." The job of the humanist is to invent within those limits, as is the job of the engineer.

For example, if a civil engineering student tells me that he's designed a brilliant new concept for a highway bridge using nothing but cheese doodles, I'm going to ask "do you realize that cheese doodles won't be able to hold much more than their own weight?" Bzzzt! Wrong answer! If a humanist says, "well I think The Tempest is about the search for the telluric currents in 16th century Italy," I'm going to ask "and what makes you think that Shakespeare KNEW anything about the so-called telluric currents, or anything about Italian alchemists? And what in your reading of The Tempest suggests telluric currents as a subtext to the play?" Bzzzt! Just as wrong as the engineering student.

Maybe CS is different because programming languages are just that languages and so many of the same issues are present as in the humanities, just with a technical bent but I doubt it.

Unfortunately, natural languages have almost nothing in common with computer languages. Computer languages are for the most part 1:1 codes - the same command means the same thing in whatever context it appears in a particular language. Natural languages are not codes; an idiom means different things in different contexts. That's part of the problem comparing the two.

At any rate, there is plenty of grade inflation in the sciences in the US: it should be noted that the author of the piece, Stuart Rojstaczer is Professor of Geology, Environment and Engineering at Duke. And he says:

The last time I gave a C was more than two years ago. That was about the time I came to realize that my grading had become anachronistic. The C, once commonly accepted, is now the equivalent of the mark of Cain on a college transcript. I have forsworn C's ever since.

So Prof. Booty's comments in the posting are unjustified by the evidence presented (see also the data linked from the article; Stanford, a darling of the technical education world, shows a good deal of grade inflation, too); and they are probably unjustified, period. I suspect that if you were to track grade inflation on both sides of Snow's Two Culture rift, you'd see the same steep slope.

Just because you don't understand the humanities doesn't mean it's not academically rigorous. I know plenty of humanists who would stupidly assume that programming doesn't require any brains; after all, "it's just writing down instructions for machines. What's so hard about that.")

He is a professor in engineering: Professor of Geology, Environment & Engineering. His homepage

Why isn't this a violation of his contract? He explicitly states he gave B's instead of C's to students. That's acidemic fraud.

Here is his home page. Wait - he wrote a paper about it so he can mark it up to acidemic freedom in research.

What a crock.

Talk about abuse of karma...

You're right. I should have used that karma to feed a kitten. Although as people on fark will attest, I'm probably much better at killing kittens.

Wrong. Said software or hardware takes two green pixels, a red pixel, and a blue pixel and recreates four RGB pixels. It conjures two thirds of its information out of thin air. (I've written software to do this for the Color Quickcam.) The worst two effects of this hack are color moire and blurring. Color moire is when detailed B&W objects (detail above the Nyquist frequency) gets colorful edges. Blurring is the loss of detail that occurs when cameras use an anti-alias filter to reduce color moire.

dpreview.com has an excellent review of the Sigma SD9 in which they examine the pros and cons of the Foveon image sensor. It really does eliminate both color moire and blurring, but there new artifacts to be fixed.

This list is great if for no other reason than it gives me a chance to say "Superkamiokande!" in a superhero-like voice.

Say it with me. It'll make you feel better. "Superkamiokande!"

Of course, having research I worked on mentioned in passing ("Researchers also reported on the unusual expansion characteristics in an ultra-cold Fermi gas this month") was cool too.

What this means is that the ramifications will never be known. We cannot measure the weather precisely enough to make meaningful long term predictions nor can we control our actions precisely enough such that their effects can be known.

See this or this for more information on chaos.

using ephpod and WINE. this uses a GUI. here's a site with step by step instructions.

You can find more instructions (a non-slashdotted copy) here

Looking at the package list...

On the surface it seems good that they're upgrading to Mozilla 1.2.1, but I've had several problems with it compared to 1.0.1. It doesn't display updates to some XUL properties correctly after they update with JavaScript (Yes, I filed it... Bugzilla #185432). Also, it's not caching anything. If I press the BACK button or View Source, it always reloads the page. That's bad news.

OpenOffice.org -- fine now at 1.0.1, but I think the OOo folks are planning a bugfix release soon. Hopefully that will make it in the final release. OOo in RH8 has, for me, crashed the whole X server several times when scrolling around in certain Word and Excel documents. The development branch 643C fixes that problem. Has that happened to anyone else?

Anyone know what "musicbrainz" and "redland" are?

PHP: still at 4.2.2. Apache: still at 2.0.40. PHP 4.3 sounds like it will have a boatload of improvements. They're including beta versions of KDE, Gnome, and X (which will probably be finalized by release date), so why not PHP? And Apache has had several updates since then.

PostgreSQL 7.3. Nice, but upgrading requires a dump and restore. Is that a wise thing to do inside the 8.x series?

Why don't they include SDL_ttf??? Several programs require it. For 8.0, I couldn't find a binary RPM and had to build a source RPM. That worked, except that it conflicted with a /usr/bin/showfont that was already installed. That's not too cool.

Overall, it looks like it will definitely be better than 8.0, but not a revolutionary upgrade.

up2date does this for you in a couple of clicks. You then administrate all your server updates at their site.

If cost is an issue and you have an administrator to set it up, you can use Current or NRH-up2date.

With up2date, in a few clicks you can easily apply three patches to 100 servers before Close of Business

-mel

This article is IMHO, ridiculus. How did they assume that that many scientists just copied w/o reading? Of course some do, but I think a great amount also at least glance over it to see if it is relevant. As for the controversy surrounding academia, it is totally possible for these things to happen, as people are very greedy as a rule, especially in the US. The problem stems from funding, I think. The number and "quality" of papers published has an impact on whether that researcher receives funding. If it gets bad enough, some professors could even steal credit from their graduate students! The case mentioned above is where this actually occured. I imagine many professors do want their advisees to succeed, but some are just too greedy.

I don't use Mozilla. I'm quite happy with Opera and a little annoyed that it doesn't get more press.

I use Opera, too (paid for it, even). And if it weren't for several really annoying bug/features, I'd quit using Mozilla altogether:

1. Opera doesn't work with the often-used <a href="Javascript:void()" onclick="the-real-url.html"> construct.
2. On Linux, Opera still won't load some java pages, such as jigsaws and the MindTerm SSH applet
3. Cut-and-paste doesn't work consistently between Opera and other X-apps.

But the main reason that Opera doesn't get as much press is because, heck, they're making money. If the Mozilla programmers build a better browser, kudos from the open-source press are likely the only payment they'll see for their efforts. But if Opera builds a better browser (and in a lot of ways, they have -- witness their domination of the embedded market) they'll get paid in cash.

My two favorite endangered animals donation sites are the Bat Conservation International and Duke University Primate Center's Adopt-A-Lemur program.

It is interesting that I JUST did a project on this subject for a Ubiquitous Computing class... My project was called "Distributed Speech Recognition." Here is a link:

I also have heard it through the grapevine that the big voice recognition companies are working on exactly this technology... I wouldn't be surprised if Speech .NET includes support for something like this in the near future. I believe I read on some website that support for Speech API on PocketPC was coming soon...

No they haven't! Miller and Urey made amino acids. That's a very long way from creating even the simplest entity anyone would consider alive.

You are thinking of the Miller-Urey Experiment.

In the '50s they put some simple chemicals (methane, ammonia, hydrogen and water) in a sealed vessel and added energy (as electrical discharges). They found about 2% of the material formed amino acids.

dUd3 th4tZ 0K H3r3Z th4 0-D4y pDFx0rZ!!!!!1!1!11

For those who can't get at the main site, here's a mirror of all the documents

In my reading of these documents, it seems that while there significant positive elements to the decision, there are many loopholes for microsoft to slither though. I'm just waiting for every license agreement to be re-characterized as a joint venture.

--CTH

Check out this HOWTO for using a Win-iPod under linux:

http://www.cs.duke.edu/~geha/ipod/

Executive summary:

1. Build a kernel to support IEEE1394
2. Mount the iPod as a vfat filesystem
3. Use Wine to run EphPod.

This is how I update my iPod, and it works, but it has some problems:

* The linux ieee1394 drives sometimes don't recognize the iPod, and sometimes generate kernel Oopsies.

* Some functions of EphPod don't work, must notably the "Add Directory" function. This is probably a Wine limitation, but it's still irritating. EphPod doesn't check the id3v2 Composer tags, so your iPod's Browse->Composer menu is empty. EphPod has the feel of an app with a lot of maturing left to do -- but it's better than nothing.

* In general, the process is pretty klunky and needs lots of by-hand coaxing and prodding. I expect this to improve as the ieee1394 drives and Wine both improve.

That said, it's really cool to see that someone's making native linux support for the iPod. If you check around, you can find that there are several efforts to do this underway, some more half-assed than others... a guy here who's written a perl script to dump the database, a guy there who's got a python script for the same. But it's pretty obvious that there's a lot of interest in seeing real linux support for the iPod, so I expect to see those disparate efforts coalesce pretty quickly. It'll be nice to have.

By the way, I just love my 20GB iPod. 150 albums downloaded so far, and still 8.5GB left. You've just gotta get one of these things!

--Jim

Too bad Linux doesn't have applications like iTunes, Dreamweaver, or Microsoft Word. Hell, Linux programmers can't do anything without ripping ideas off other companies. Take a look at this screenshot and wonder... Do those blue blobs look familiar? They looks so identical to the iDisk icons! Hmmm....

No worries, I'm sure Linux will be ready for the desktop "any day now."

BTW, DOS was pretty damn fast also, too bad you can't do anything productive with it.

Would you like an nice cup of "Shut the Fuck Up" now?

Here at Duke, the school newspaper The Chronicle ran a recent story about the effect of the Patriot act on librarians. I hope that word becomes more widespread about the effect of this passed-in-the-heat-of-the-moment legislation, so that we can get it off the books as soon as possible.

Here at Duke, the school newspaper The Chronicle ran a recent story about the effect of the Patriot act on librarians. I hope that word becomes more widespread about the effect of this passed-in-the-heat-of-the-moment legislation, so that we can get it off the books as soon as possible.

Here at Duke, the school newspaper The Chronicle ran a recent story about the effect of the Patriot act on librarians. I hope that word becomes more widespread about the effect of this passed-in-the-heat-of-the-moment legislation, so that we can get it off the books as soon as possible.

Most scientists nowadays agree that the atmosphere was not reducing. Take a read of the following: - For a long time it was thought that the early Earth had a reducing atmosphere. A reducing atmosphere contains reductants, or molecules saturated with hydrogen atoms, which are able to reduce other molecules. Many scientists believed that the atmosphere consisted of CH4, NH3, and H2. This is the mixture of gases Miller and Urey used in 1953 to mimic the conditions of the early earth. Their experiment showed that abiotic molecules could be used to create important biotic compounds thought to be necessary for the origin of life. from http://www.chem.duke.edu/~jds/cruise_chem/Exobiolo gy/PBearth.html

This game, written in JavaScript, using DOM, UNICODE, CSS, etc. Works in Mozilla only (AFAIK). I feel that it's probably pretty close to all being valid code; it was written using the W3C specifications and "just works" in Mozilla.

nah... when they donate to us they don't do it anonymously =)

Melinda Gates is a Duke graduate (computer science/economics '86 and MBA '87) and also serves on the Board of Trustees. In 1998 they donated $20 million to Duke and then again, last May, they donated $35 million to us.

I'd highly doubt they'd donate again anonymously, with a much smaller sum than in the past, and to a center whose primary goal goes against the core principals of Billy Boy's business model =)

nah... when they donate to us they don't do it anonymously =)

Melinda Gates is a Duke graduate (computer science/economics '86 and MBA '87) and also serves on the Board of Trustees. In 1998 they donated $20 million to Duke and then again, last May, they donated $35 million to us.

I'd highly doubt they'd donate again anonymously, with a much smaller sum than in the past, and to a center whose primary goal goes against the core principals of Billy Boy's business model =)

Given that Duke's IP department is heavily interested in patent law as well as copyright, I'd guess that a lot of this money will be spent on research that is relevant to both copyright and patent. See, for example, some of the papers from their conference on the public domain, including the ones on biopharmaceutical patents. They are not dumb people, in other words- they're just as well aware of the dangers of patents as you are. :)

For anyone who's interested, the law school's website has a press release with a little bit more information than was mentioned in the C|Net article. It is great to see that some people (esp. the lawyers!) can see the harm that is being done by our outdated system of intellectual property laws.

Even at the undergrad level, it seems that Duke has taken an interest in the subject. This year, for the first time ever, the CS department is offering a course that I'm currently enrolled in whose primary focus is intellectual property issues. It's panning out to be a pretty cool course, and is actually the only CS course I've taken thus far that doesn't involve any coding.

I think more CS departments should offer curriculum like this, since we (the techies) have a unique perspective on the issues, because we are the ones opening the public's eyes to the fact that our system of intellectual property law needs to be completely revamped.

If anyone out there has an interest in the topic, I'd highly reccommend reading John Barlow's The Economy of Ideas as a starting point.

For anyone who's interested, the law school's website has a press release with a little bit more information than was mentioned in the C|Net article. It is great to see that some people (esp. the lawyers!) can see the harm that is being done by our outdated system of intellectual property laws.

Even at the undergrad level, it seems that Duke has taken an interest in the subject. This year, for the first time ever, the CS department is offering a course that I'm currently enrolled in whose primary focus is intellectual property issues. It's panning out to be a pretty cool course, and is actually the only CS course I've taken thus far that doesn't involve any coding.

I think more CS departments should offer curriculum like this, since we (the techies) have a unique perspective on the issues, because we are the ones opening the public's eyes to the fact that our system of intellectual property law needs to be completely revamped.

If anyone out there has an interest in the topic, I'd highly reccommend reading John Barlow's The Economy of Ideas as a starting point.

The course mainly focusses on solving machine numbers, solving linear systems (direct and iterative methods), solving non-linear systems (mostly Newton-type methods), and solving eigenvalue/vector problems. The codes that students wrote last year started from scratch with early assignments. Then, I allowed them to incorporate Basic Linear Algebra Subprograms (BLAS) into their codes. Then they were allowed to use LAPACK for the rest of the semester. They were free to use the C interface, but most chose to use the FORTRAN examples, probably because of the skeleton code that I provided.

Given the tremendous amount of code that is already out there, I agree that knowing FORTRAN is an asset. And since it's not hard to learn, why the heck not, right?

On a side note, they had to use Makefiles, LaTeX their assignments, and send everything to me electronically in a gzipped tarball. They got quite a workout in console tools. For reference, I had some that were quite familiar with the system and some that had had BASIC at some level and that's it. Lots of help was needed as the semester reached the final weeks.

Matlab was used for visualization and graph creation, but I am considering using GNUPlot this year, if it is up to the task. (I think it probably is.) I may also encourage the use of Octave, where possible.

For reference, the class website (which will soon be updated for the new semester) is here: Math 224.

the webpage got slashdotted, but a mirror can be found at:

http://www.duke.edu/~pyp/microfluidics/

The only important thing to know about Stuart Cheshire is that he created the the mindnumbingly addictive global internet phenomenom called Bolo.
It was the first big non-text game to be played over the internet and it was huge when I was at uni 1993-96.
He created it for his PhD and it's good to see he hasn't been idle since then!

wow ! I didn't know that stuart works at Apple now !

He's the famous author of the ancient bolo game and corresponding cult. Probably died out by now, but I wasted a good part of my eyes and brain on bolo many years ago

It's totally the same FUD - they've just figured out how to say it differently.

Look at the reasons windows is 'better' (from their page:

Linux does not deliver comparable heterogeneous interoperability.

Riiight - that's why I've been running Samba between my systems for the last two years.

Windows 2000-based server appliances deliver industry-leading robustness and scalability with Symmetrical Multiprocessing (SMP) support for up to eight processors

Linux has support for up to 16 processors.

Linux offers both free and commercially available add-on clustering and load balancing solutions. However, these add-on clustering solutions come from various sources, do not conform to any set standards, and are often implemented on a particular Linux distribution.

Umm - yeah - isn't that the whole point?

This can tie the OEM to a particular, potentially financially unstable Linux vendor and its support programs, or force the OEM to maintain specific and expensive expertise in-house for self-support.

How is that different from Windows? Microsoft is a company that had been threatened to be broken up by the government - isn't that an unstable company? Have they forgotten that already?

Server appliances built on Windows 2000 perform better versus Linux on similar equipment in SPECweb tests

Wasn't this a dirty test? Didn't microsoft cheat? (can't find a link).

Linux offers support for ASP but it is non-native and requires an add-on program to Apache or some other Web server deployed on Linux.

This is such a stupid argument. It's not the operating system that gives ASP support - it's the webserver. If I put apache on Windows I won't have ASP support without some tweaking. This is like saying Windows doesn't have native BASH support.

There's more FUD in there - I just don't have the pateince to go through it all. I'm going to pet my linux box.

* The components file has been heavily reworked, mostly because of the inclusion of GNOME 2.

Kazaa weighs in as a heavy weight of spyware/adware installing applications. It installs two pieces of spyware without consent.

New.net Domains

Filters all web address requests through the DNS servers of New.net.

This program can cause your internet connectivity stop altogether.

The New.Net plugin is known to cause compatability problems with some other products. Leaves a new.net .dll file on your computer which may interfere with your Internet connection after removing the program

Your question is mostly answered on a realy cool article about chaos theory linked on the site, on the reference section

Your question is mostly answered on a realy cool article about chaos theory linked on the site, on the reference section :-) One finds simelar probability graphs on most new scientific stuff now: physiscs, chemestry and so on :)

Apparently, this guy also thinks he's Fox Mulder. "The Truth is Out There," asshole.

One of the most important things our schools can offer to their students is applied learning, and computer games make that happen. Bravo!

He was referring to the simpsons episode where Ralph says "Me fail english? That's unpossible!"

• By using the corner, you can rest both your elbos on the desk.

I'm not Mr. OSHA or anything, I do a lot of things wrong with my workstation and posture habits, but... Read this page , for example, where it says:

Avoid resting any part of your arms on a surface for an extended period of time. Constant pressure on an area such as your elbow can lead to nerve damage. Your elbows should be at your sides, free to move, if needed.

You should never rest your elbows for any extended length of time on a surface. It can result in irreversable nerve damage. These ergnomic arm rests avoid putting any pressure on your elbow.

I used to always rest my elbows, particularly my right elbow, on the chair arms and I think I caused a bit of a problem. I have some numbness and tingling of my pinky finger on my right hand, running down the outside of my right hand. I've stopped resting my elbows, but I still have a bit of numbness.

I have been working with javascript, DOM, CSS2 for fun in the evenings, and so far Opera doesn't do enough of what I want it to do. Mozilla seems to be the only browser that supports the DOM as outlined by the W3C, and for that reason, I won't be using it, regardless of how fast it is.

See an example of what I've been doing with Mozilla here. It's a card game that I enjoy on my Handspring Visor and "ported". Works great in Mozilla, but dies in every other browser I've tried.

Ah well. Go Moz!

Certainly now, but not as the term was first used -- There are references to Listerine ads from the 1920s that feature halitosis. The earliest article in your link runs back to 1965. The first AMA publications I could find on the topic are from ~1931. (here, here, and here)

All three of these question the claims of Listerine to do anything to kill bacteria and germs. (It should be noted that at the same time, the AMA's 'popular' magazine included some more positive appraisals of Listerine.) Listerine's advertising efforts under the name of science appear to go back before 1910 or 1905, although I could not find the term 'halitosis' much before the above links from 1931.

So the point is that I can not say who created the term, not having done enough research, and not really caring to...

heh. After these posts I do want to go buy Listerine, though.

BTW, there is a whole other mess regarding Listerine: IP and trade secrets. Interesting to read about if... well, never, actually.