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May I ask how old you are? I'm 27. The film really speaks to me, and I think that has a lot to do with the mindset of my generation.

It has multiple levels of action. It is introspective to an extreme. It doesn't offer any pat answers. (Except maybe, "Just go crazy and everything will work out.") It is entertainingly violent, while taking violence seriously. It is riddled with quoteable lines. Great perfomances all around.

What a film!

PS: Your homepage is gone!

I bought it back in january, after first learning about AOP. At the time, it was the only book I could find directly on AOP, with a second coming in feb. Otherwise, the only other text source I could find was Generitive Programming.

So I bought it, and I was excited when I began reading. Then I found out it was just a bunch of JSP and other then the first 25 pages, very little content. Now I admit I put it down a good 25 or so pages later and skimmed through the rest, but I was extremely disapointed in it. Instead I've been grabbing all of the ECOOP workshop documentation.

In the end, it was worth the money. No, not for the book, god no! But by getting me excited and reading the ACM Communication articles and then talking to my adviser about it. It turns out the editor for the AOP material in the ACM communications is a professor at my school, and even better is happy to let me help her out next semester (I'm extremely swamped now). So now I'm considering doing the thesis option on my masters. I'll spend the summer reading REAL material.

My opinion: AOP is awesome but the book is a waste of money. Here are a few good readings:

Alternatives to AOP
Generitive Programming chapter
AOP publication
AOD 2002 workshop
ECOOP97

What's wrong with NyQuil?

BTW, I think you can factor out the "69.1*" out of all those equations. Basically, the sqrt(power(69.1*x, 2) + power(69.1*y, 2)) is the same as 69.1*sqrt(power(x, 2) + power(y, 2)). And since you're sorting, only relative magnitude matters, so you can just omit the 69.1.

This equation seems to be based around Euclidean distance: sqrt(dx*dx + dy*dy), where dx = x1-x2 and dy = y1-y2. Note, however, that they're finding the distance in terms of latitude and longitude. By using latitude and longitude, they're actually measuring distance along the surface of the sphere. Also, if you notice, the longitude is being adjusted by the cosine of the latitude. The net effect of this is to adjust for the fact that latitude lines are closer together near the poles and farther apart near the equator.

So, I'd say this equation already is doing a passible job of taking into account the curvature of the earth, at least for short paths. One thing that does seem kinda bogus is using only cos(zipcode.lat). Seems like you should use (zipcode.lng*cos(zipcode.lat/57.3) - $long1*cos($long1/57.3)). It's still not a great approximation, but it seems a bit more balanced to me.

If you really want to take into account the curvature of the earth correctly, you should do a search on "Great Circle distance." I did one just now, and at least this page has some JavaScript that shows how it's done.

For those of us under 50, here's some history of the granddaddy of all high-level programming languages.

• [Slightly OT] A BRIEF HISTORY OF FORTRAN/Fortran (very brief)
• Cambridge University Dep't of Engineering's brief history of Fortran

IIRC, my former graduate advisor and professor was on the team that wrote a very early Fortran compilers at MIT in the late 50s, written entirely on punch cards. We've come a long way in ~50 years.

Like: "reality: 1, humans: 0"?

If you read any of the websites linked from the original post you should quickly realize that this almost certainly a perpetual-motion machine as it clearly violates the 1st Law of Thermodynamics. You can not get more energy(work) out of a system then you put into it. Real electric cars that are based on gas-powered models can only go 50-150 miles (depending on model) on a single charge because the amount of energy that can be stored in their batteries is rather small compared to the chemical energy stored in a few gallons of gasoline.

'But it runs' you may say. Well, even an array of twelve 12-volt car batteries (large diesel engines have larger batteries just to start them) has enough energy to make the car go around the track for some distance (up to 52 miles according the most optimistic computer model). And as people who had to suffer through electo-chemistry know, battery voltage does not fall off substantially until the battery is nearly dead, and that the apparent voltage of the battery drops when in use due to the battery's internal resistance. The vehicle has yet to break the laws of thermodynamics, but the 'inventors' claims certainly have.

As for encouraging research into technologies that will reduce our dependance on fossil fuel, I am very supportive. Real research is happening in this area, and at my school, the primary focus is on hybrid and ethanol-powered vehicles. And guess what, much of it is sponsored by the big, evil corporations.

Now as for how to stop people from pushing perpetual-motion machines, we could always unlease my thermo professor on them. She has little tolerance for people you violate the laws of thermodynamics, like the guy in the class who kept trying to leave the condensor out the air-conditioner problems...

Actually, it has been attempted. Sun created a java chip, called picoJava. There also is an ARM chip with a hardware interpreter for JVM bytecodes, Jazelle. There are plenty of other examples of this.

Nothing that sits on the mobo to supplement a 'real' CPU tho.

Is there a reason why these virtual machines aren't taken as a blueprint for real hardware and implemented as such?

I'm no hardware guy. But I have a wee bit of experience hacking on the Smalltalk virtual machine. I imagine that this is so because VMs are designed as VMs, not as a blueprint for hardware. To support an entire computer, I wouldn't be surprised if you had to add a lot more instructions than most VMs provide.

Make it an IPRO! ipro.iit.edu

Sorry to burst your bubble, but lately Linux and open source aren't "ruling" at the university level.

I'll second that. My university was a hodgepodge of technologies, but almost all lab computers were NT boxen and the compiler of choice in the low-level courses was VC++. As an instructor of some of the 100-level courses there, however, I can attest that nobody was learning MS-specific stuff (like MFC) in those courses, but the technology was there.

You may not want to believe this, but most students are looking for the skills/terminology that will get them the most coin, not necessarily the ones that are the "purest" or "most interesting," from either a theoretical or aesthetic standpoint.

Note that I'm not condoning any of the above. I couldn't wait to get out of a university that presented such a confused picture to its faculty and students.)

Of course, I can hardly argue against your first hand experience, but what about Falung Gong?
Of course, I can hardly argue against your first hand experience, but what about Branch Davidian's of Waco or Ruby Ridge

Or the China Democratic Party founder Lu Xinhua, who was convicted of subversion [bbc.co.uk] for an article posted on the internet?

Or the U.S. Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer & McCarthy jailing Commies(TM)Even better is Bush / Aschcroft Terrorist campaign this is amusing. How about this jailed dissident?

Lastly, I'd like to remember at the incident at the Tiananmen. It maybe more than ten years ago, but the leaders are the same.Lastly, I'd like to remember at the incident at Tulsa. It maybe more than 80 years ago, but the leaders are the same.

Furthermore they stated (in 2001) that its decision back than was correct because it was a "counter-revolutionary turmoil" aimed at overthrowing the administration.

How about the CoIntelPro program during the 60's? And the rest of the past and present domestic and foreign PsyOps and BlackOps programs -- active campaigns to squelch "counter-revolutionary" ideas.

Red Flag is under the control of the China Academy of Sciences, headed by Jiang Mianheng, the son of the president Jiang Zemin

Does nepotism bother you? How about a Senator screwing with the voting in his state to help elect his OWN BROTHER... did I mention that they were both Sons of a former President? Its almost like a father appoints his own children to office...

Such a project is not that difficult, in fact, we had to develop a program for my senior software engineering class, with a GUI and all. It was based on Halsted's metrics which is based on lines of code, variable names, function calls etc.

The problem with such a method is in introduction CS classes (or even OO classes) there are very few ways to do things. Furthermore if the professor gives information related to it, it's highly likely such information will appear verbatim in the solutions.

My university uses such a program, and often it seems to flag people who didn't cheat. We might hear about how many people get "caught" but it never shows how many people actually DIDN'T cheat (ie the rate of false positives). Of the three people who I know well that were flagged, none of them cheated and all were exonerated. Fortunately, I attend a small enough school that a few well placed connections can correct this, but I feel bad for people at larger institutions.

As a TA for a senior level class, I still frequently come across copied homework and lab assignments. Unfortunately, all I can do is give the people 0's on the assignment (no harm if they never did it in the first place). I'm wondering what the punishment at other institutions is.

I've found this one to be more than sufficient. Runs on Java.

http://www.iit.edu/~gawojar/ldap
http://www.mcs.anl.gov/~gawor/ldap

Mike

Softerra's LDAP Administrator is pretty good, and they have a freeware version called LDAP Browser. The LDAP Browser/Editor is nice also.

If you are using LDAP as your addressbook, ldap-abook is a nice interface to add/delete/modify entries. Most email clients are LDAP-aware these days and it's convenient to be able to share an address book between my personal and work email accounts.

I've had to roll my own to do system accounts, however. Make ldapmodify your new best friend, or write an interface of your own - there is a lot of support for Perl or PHP LDAP functions out there. Server-side, I've used OpenLDAP and iPlanet's Directory Server, and I prefer iPlanet. iPlanet has a free non-commercial license option, is significantly faster than OpenLDAP, and has hooks to synchronize with an NT or Active Directory domain so you could do all the user administration in Windows and they would propagate over to your LDAP server.

Other fun things you can do with LDAP are:

Handle Unix authentication through pam_ldap
Hook into NIS with the NIS/LDAP gateway
Authenticate through apache with mod_auth_ldap or auth_ldap or Netegrity
Centralize your smtp routing data in LDAP for sendmail

Good luck.

• • [OIDs Registry]

• • [Softerra LDAP Browser]
  • [Java LDAP browser/editor]

• • [LDAP client API for Python]

• • [Directory Schema Contents]

I also found it here: LDAP Browser/Editor.

This is one thing that I'll never figure out.
Why can't people use Google to solve these types of problems. Finding that took about 10 seconds with Google.

At IIT a few years back (c. 1992), ME majors were required to take Fortran 77, although I see now that the course syllabus CS105 has been changed to C++. The reasoning was that Fortran was still used for computational analysis, particularly FEM.

At IIT a few years back (c. 1992), ME majors were required to take Fortran 77, although I see now that the course syllabus CS105 has been changed to C++. The reasoning was that Fortran was still used for computational analysis, particularly FEM.

This past August, I shipped my case from Florida up to college in Illinois. I shipped this, along with my monitor, stereo system w/ 15" floor speakers, and a crapload of clothes via FedEx Ground. I spared no expense on insurance - everything was covered even for total destruction.

The case was shipped in the factory box and padding, so nothing should have gone wrong there. Expecting the worst, I carried my RAID array with me on the plane, just to make sure. My mistake was shipping the other components *inside* the case, instead of shipping the mobo, CDR, etc. separately. For it seems, at some point during the 5-day trip, the case was dropped hard on its side - the motherboard side!

Yes, it was rather stupid of me to ship my case with the half-kilo copper heatsink mounted on a CPU *without* a shim. Needless to say, that impact not only chipped the CPU die but put a crack through the entire chip. It was dropped hard enough to knock the motherboard off the standoffs, and it was loose in the case upon arrival. The fall even dismounted my light kit, which had been held in place with *epoxy*. DAMN...

Now, if they dropped my case hard enough to break epoxy, I think they're partially to blame here. So, I filled out an insurance form - I only wanted $200 to replace the chip and mobo, as everything else still worked or was easily repairable (this is MUCH less than the insured total). As you guessed from the title, I'm still being given the runaround.

In their claims instructions, they tell you to save the packaging, but nothing further after that. You can imagine how I was somewhat peeved 2 months later when they rejected my claim - they never saw the packaging. Gee, perhaps if they had told me when/where/how they needed to see the packaging, they might've had a chance. The packaging is still here, cracked styrofoam and all, waiting for another FedEx reply. I've finally photographed it, and am just waiting to find out who needs to see it (methinks I'll be waiting a long time).

MY ADVICE: (geez, I wish this thread was around in August...)
Store EVERY box that your PC parts come in, and ALL of the original padding. COMPLETELY disassemble the computer and ship the motherboard, expansion cards, and CD drives separately. Keep your HDDs and your CPU on your person, as these are the most fragile/sensitive/valuable. Finally, ship the case EMPTY. Insure everything for its market value, and don't take any crap if your goodies get broken.

BTW, the other things I shipped arrived just fine, except for some minor (cosmetic) damage to the floor speakers. This was because I neglected to save the original packaging - even a quilt was not enough to keep the boxes from chafing each other.

Here's wishing you better luck!

while i was very dissappointed in the size of the coronal loop images (far to small for a backround of even an average size desktop, much less at 1600x1200), i feel it is my duty to report that some of those images have astounding potential for tiling.
just fire up the gimp,and go to Filters->Map->Make Seamless. (you have to change the GIF's to RGB color first.)

the two that i particularly liked are here and here.

while i was very dissappointed in the size of the coronal loop images (far to small for a backround of even an average size desktop, much less at 1600x1200), i feel it is my duty to report that some of those images have astounding potential for tiling.
just fire up the gimp,and go to Filters->Map->Make Seamless. (you have to change the GIF's to RGB color first.)

the two that i particularly liked are here and here.

A my school they were going to do this during the fall semester of last year. They even went so far as to buy a 10,000 user site license for the Windows users so they could use SecureCRT.

Anyway, despite the fact I'm a unix sysadmin at work, I still was against this move. First of all, my school has a HUGE proportion of international students (somewhere around 35%). Some of these students are from countries where their legal status to use such encryption in the US is questionable at best. Secondly my school apparently hadn't compiled in the RSARef library and the sysadmin couldn't figure out how to do it. (When you pay $30K for a sysadmin you get a $30K sysadmin).

But the bigger issues were these. First of all, there was no suitable legal Macintosh SSH client at the time as NiftySSH apparently suffered from the same nasty patent problems. Secondly, most school systems have HUGE amounts of accounts (this system has 14000+ accounts on it), many of these have never been used and getting access via a default password (usually last.first or social security numbers at most places) is trivial.

Turning off telnet then only really makes it a headache for people who can't get SSH, or who go home for the weekend and don't have an SSH client. It doesn't address the poorly configured log files which are the real problem in the first place.

As a postscript, my school has now implemented some crappy java/html insecure mail system which makes it easier to read other peoples email because now it's sent all at once and you don't have to filter out the cursor keys in sniffit logs.

It's true, if SSH were available for every platform, freely (FAIB and FAIS) then this would be good, but it's not, telnet and FTP are.

The Hacker Manifesto was written back in the ancient eighties by a hacker named Mentor. Read it.......it may be about you.

Also of interest may be the Hacker's Ethic. Something of a code that should be lived by, particularly by those reading these pages. It's where the, "Informationwants/should be free", quote comes from.

Just in case Promise decides to be a biznatch and change the drivers to ruin all our modifications, I mirrored the drivers for the Ultra66 and the FastTrak66 here. No manuals though. Had to cut them because I filled up my quota posting the drivers and utils. Damned quotas...


"I threw my hands up in disgust, wondering if it had been such a good idea to have eaten my hands in the first place..."

This article is by now so old that no one will read this comment, but what the hell. Karma whore, etc.

Some of the articles that have been posted seem to miss the point. Several people suggested that this design goes against the principles of RISC. I am puzzled. The RISC philosophy is about maximizing efficiency by reducing CPU complexity. But this is memory management research, i.e. it proposes a new MMU design, not a new CPU. It is like suggesting that 3D accelerator boards are contrary to the principle of RISC design because they involve complex hardware. There's no contradiction in having a simplified CPU and complex off-chip hardware to back it up.

Others have suggested that there's no point to this work because a hardware implementation of malloc() and free() would run only marginally faster than their software counterparts. I suggest reading some of the publications on their Web site, particularly their Introduction to DMMX. They aren't merely trying to implement malloc() and free() in hardware, and the solution they describe would allocate and sweep the heap in constant time. If the scenario described in this paper is feasible, it could be pretty interesting stuff.

It's not just Tipper.
Remember the "Clipper Chip" and the CDA? Both were supported (if not proposed) by the Clinton Administration.
I don't understand how these people are considered liberal...

More information...
Clipper Chip information
CDA

jonathan@apathetic.net
(I will never be able to make a decent looking post.)

Oh please. DNET is a dying cow for various reasons. Their biggest problem is their lack of speed in getting anything done. They had a CSC core long before they deployed it. They've been working on OGR for two years (I was the first person to work on it.) They've had very simple solutions to prevent "cheating" for years yet they've done nothing. It's taken how long to get updated clients and some still haven't been updated? They want their name plastered all over everything but they fail to give credit to those who have contributed to their work. I did some work to retool the stats processing, but I guess it made nugget look too bad as no one ever looked at it -- a full days run can be done in less than 15 minutes and not require gigs of "temp" space; in fact, sans ranking, it could be near real-time. And to make matters worse, they "secretly" harrass their founder and former president for several months over a domain name they never used and never will. I bet you didn't know DCTI filed three suits against Adam L. Beberg, Mithral Communications and Design, Inc., and "those in concert therewith" a few weeks ago -- right before Christmas.

Bovine's explaination of netrek only shows his lack of understand of how "blessed binaries" work(ed). There is no "date" in the key itself. Expiration is completely artificially added by the key service agent along with other bits of data -- it was not to prevent people from recovering the secret key but more to push people to upgrade their client(s). Netrek uses (used) 128bit RSA numbers ("secret key", "private key", and "public key"). In the modern world, factoring a 128bit RSA number is not difficult. Recovering the secret key embeded in the client is _NOT_ easy. Unlike Xing, the key is not in one place; it's randomly scattered throughout a very large static binary. (The key is generated and destroyed by the build.) In ten years of working with netrek, I've never known of anyone to recover the key from the client. I have personally regenerated the secret key by factoring the public data, but that was (at the time) a very non-trivial task.

I must admit, I'm starting to truely dislike DCTI and their current attitude. The CSC clients are duplicating work. They don't tell anyone this until it's obvious -- over 100% of the blocks have been checked in. They continue to have trouble with stats -- two years and counting now.

Here's some links to resources where you can learn more about HDML (WML), and WAP (Wireless Application Protocol).

A quick definition of HDML from whatis.com
"What is HDML?", at w3.org

Another short definition of WML from whatis.com
The Wireless Application Forum - good resource for wireless info.
WAP, from both a technical and practical perspective.


It should be noted that HDML (Handheld Devices Markup Language) and WML (Wireless Markup Language) are, more or less, the same thing.


.------------ - - -
| big bad mr. frosty
`------------ - - -

We've been actually doing the same thing for a year and a half now. though we took the opengl approach.

we're also working on a powerglove interface (aka the old nintendo powerglove).

it's part of an IPRO (inter professional project) at my university. you can check out us out: dimension

our webpage isn't quite as cool...and we're in the middle of a rewrite/restructure so we don't have all the features down yet, but its coming along. =)

We've been actually doing the same thing for a year and a half now. though we took the opengl approach.

we're also working on a powerglove interface (aka the old nintendo powerglove).

it's part of an IPRO (inter professional project) at my university. you can check out us out: dimension

our webpage isn't quite as cool...and we're in the middle of a rewrite/restructure so we don't have all the features down yet, but its coming along. =)

I would paste, but /. doesn't allow

So read this :)
http://www.iit.edu/~beberg/techjobs.html

Funny to see that article by the EFF. They have no idea how much they have underestimated the NSA.

I used to work for a company called Annapolis Micro Systems (Annapolis, MD). They specialize in selling high performance configurable computing boards (both VME and PCI versions). These boards are especially suited to numerically intense algorithms (image processing, encryption).

It's no big surprise that the single biggest customer of AMS is the NSA. They routinely bought Wildfire arrays (see website) by the dozens. Two guesses as to what they were using them for, and the first doesn't count...

It must be emphasized what kind of power these arrays confer. Anyone familiar with configurable computing knows several things:
1) It's not for the light of wallet.
2) It requires a hefty design overhead for each application.
3) It presents the fastest known solutions to almost every NP-complete and iterative solution problem ever posed.

I am a hardware designer by trade, and I can tell you that is almost beyond my ability to measure what kind of processing power these boards can enable, purchased in groups.

Be afraid, be very afraid...

(Author's note: from my limited knowledge of encryption, keys larger than 1024 bytes probably aren't crackable by brute force in this day).

The ONLY time I've EVER been offended at ANYTHING on TV is this. The damn censors covered up her cleavage! So my conclusion is that censorship only causes things to be offensive.

NDS is cool because it means you can use the same usernames and passwords for both UNIX and Windows systems. Something like NIS will only work with the *NIX's and isn't as secure or robust as NDS.

Unfortunately, NDS is very expensive to implement given Novell's licensing fees. This provides an opportunity for an open source clone of NDS which reimplements NDS's protocol.

Is anyone working on such a beast? Maybe I should if nobody else is.

I know there are open source alternatives to NDS, but why do something incompatible?

Does Novell publish the specifications for NDS?

Cheers,

George
news@lemont.rice.iit.edu

This government-sponsored scapegoating is ridiculous. Fine, all you self-righteous people think cracking systems is the worst thing any hacker can do. Well, for myself, and a great deal of my friends, it was crucial. Living in a small town, you're not exactly handed copies of UNIX to learn from, and you won't see a network, that's for sure. Cracking is a learning tool. Few of us ever did any damage. So get off it. As for the 'damages', considering that the stolen source code wasn't exactly STOLEN, seeing as the companies still had their copy, it was more like a photocopy, which is hardly 10,000,000 dollars worth of theft. You guys can discount cracking, and condemn in a holier-than-thou fashion, but we're not criminals, we're just curious parties. And lest we forget, Mitnick's greatest crime, and the one they'll never forgive him for, is the fact that he outsmarted people. Read the Manifesto (1986)