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I'm pretty sure it was with the introduction of the Pentium (which had the famous FDIV bug) that John Carmack officially made the switch to single precision FP for most things because it was finally fast enough. FP wasn't cheap, per se, but the simplification it brings over keeping track of binary points and precision/range tradeoffs in integerized algorithms should not be underestimated either.

For example, if I want to do a floating point multiply and add, I just say: f3 = f0 * f1 + f2. Before I even start writing a fixed-point multiply and add, I need to ask what the Q points (binary points) are for each of the terms, what Q point you'd like for the result, and what sort of rounding (if any) the result requires for stability. You can end up with a monstrosity like this, assuming all four numbers are at the same Q point:

x3 = (int)(((long long)x0 * x1 + (1LL > Q) + x2;

Ok, maybe you hide that behind a macro, but what about cases where some of the terms are at different Q points? A fully general macro (which is no fun to write, BTW) would also have a ton of arguments, and only reduce you to something like x3 = FXMULADD(x0, Q0, x1, Q1, x2, Q2, Q3); which won't win you any awards in the clarity department.

And look at the operations themselves, too. You have type promotion, extra adds and shifts... the instruction sequence itself isn't super efficient. It pays off when floating point takes 10s and 100s of cycles, but is a dubious win when most of the core FP starts coming down into the single digits. With the Pentium's dual pipes and the fact you could keep integer instructions flowing in parallel to the float, that's effectively what happened. And notice we haven't even talked about dynamic range and overflow errors and how they screw you up. If you have to add tests for that... yuck. With floating point, you degrade gracefully if your dynamic range spikes a little higher than you expect.

Anyway, getting back on topic: This isn't the first time an x86 has had a stack-pointer related bug. I remember the 80386s that had the so-called "POPAD bug". That one was a bit easier to hit.

Hopefully, AMD will be able to publish a microcode update or something to work around theirs. That's one thing modern x86s have over their predecessors: A good number of CPU bugs can be patched around with microcode updates. I believe Intel added that with the Pentium Pro, and AMD followed suit. I believe my Phenom is one of the affected parts. I guess I'll have to keep an eye out for such a patch.

"Ethicist" sound like bullshit?

Yes, it does. If you need to employ people to analyze your ethics you're doing it wrong. Ethics only gets 'complicated' when there is money, power or sex involved, at which point you use a professional ethicist to create rationalizations for the unethical.

The ethics 'profession' is actually a fairly fresh turd in the universe of professional bullshit. The Association for Practical and Professional Ethics is celebrating only its 20th anniversary and is still hosted in a university account.

Give them another ten years and they'll have an office tower on K Street. Doubtless there will be a consequent improvement it ethics generally...

Flynn Effect

(Link didn't work the first time)

Errm, IQ Scores are always centered at 100 by definition. Ergo average IQ score can't go up or down, only the raw survey scores can. Who would have thought that the very channel you praise for not dumbing down the populace would dumb down that fact.

Erm, no, sorry. IQ Scores are NOT always centered at 100 by definition. As raw scores shift higher, IQ scores will likewise shift higher until the the raw-score-to-IQ-score conversion process is renormalized. How often are they normalized? It wasn't an easy question to answer, but I found one website that claims they are only normalized "every 10 or so years".
http://www.psychpage.com/learning/library/intell/culture_iq_notes_5.html

Also, it seems that before the Flynn effect was discovered, there was no such periodic renormalizaion (which makes sense...why would you renormalize before anybody has even discovered that they've become unnormalized). Therefore at the time the Flynn effect was defined, scores were not normalized, and the Flynn effect was indeed described as IQ scores increasing over time. Look around the web. Every single reference to the Flynn effect I can find, even those from reputable sources, describe it as an increase in IQ scores over time. For instance, here's a page on it from a Psychology Professor at Indiana University:
http://www.indiana.edu/~intell/flynneffect.shtml

But congratulations on getting a +5 Informative for posting incorrect information. Maybe you should watch more Discovery Channel.

In my state, we have an explicit right to a *real* jury trial -- it's right there in our Constitution:

Section 19. In all criminal cases whatever, the jury shall have the right to determine the law and the facts.
Section 20. In all civil cases, the right of trial by jury shall remain inviolate.

Sadly, the federal bill of rights is less explicit, but the jury's right to decide law has been upheld by SCOTUS as well, at least w/r/t verdict. This being both a matter of sentencing and a civil case, however, I'm not certain what federal case law is.

If you are short of some good Christmas reading, you could do a lot worse than James Boyle's excellent book, "The Public Domain." It looks at a number of similar issues, critiquing the rise in the enclosure of the public domain, with the call to arms that, without defenders actively arguing in favour of the public domain, it will be gradually eroded by the proprietary claims of third parties, since it has no voice, nor lobbying power, of its own.

He has made it available in PDF under (CC) BY-NC-SA 3.0, so you can "try before you buy" or else not buy it if you do not want to but, in my opinion, it's worth every penny. (Although I feel rather stupid having a hard copy sitting untouched on my shelf, just so James and his publishers receive money, when the electronic copy was worth far more to me!)

David Bollier's "Public Assets, Private Profits" (sorry - Google link) is definitely worth reading, too, for those who care about the preservation of the commons.

don't use them anymore, go read that post: http://lkml.indiana.edu/hypermail/linux/kernel/0008.2/0171.html

Thanks for the suggestion (didn't read that). In any case, bearing in mind that Newton seems not to believe in demons, what one finds here: http://webapp1.dlib.indiana.edu/newton/mss/norm/ALCH00081 can perhaps be acceptable even to such an un-spiritual generation as ours.

Lisa Pratt studies sulfur and specifically biological sulfur with respect to the surface of Mars. Check out her lab's web page:

http://geology.indiana.edu/pratt/

Here's a list of her research interests from that site:

Geomicrobiology of sulfate-reducing microorganisms
Biotic and abiotic fractionation of sulfur isotopes in modern and ancient oceans and lakes
Influence of wildfire on carbon isotopic excursions during the Cretaceous
Fate of complex organic molecules on the surface of Mars

As far as I can tell from that list, Dr. Pratt is the only hard scientist. The others are more involved in managing the program (Meyer) or designing the instruments (Christensen, Dundas, McEwen). Interestingly, there are no post-docs or graduate students listed, and they would have been the lead investigators doing the actual work -- perhaps this is a reaction to the Felisa Wolfe-Simon snafu? I'm not familiar with the field, though, so much of this is speculation from 2 minutes' work with Google. Take it for what it's worth.

You need to ask yourself: How are we finding out about the briefing? Is it from someone who watches every minutia from NASA? then don't hold your breath. If it's from someplace more accessible to the general public, then MAYBE i'ts a big deal the general public...whether or not the general public understands it's impact immediately is a different question.

Lisa Pratt is involved, so my hopes are high the found evidence of life.

http://geology.indiana.edu/pratt/
http://www.indiana.edu/~deeplife/homepg.html

You need to ask yourself: How are we finding out about the briefing? Is it from someone who watches every minutia from NASA? then don't hold your breath. If it's from someplace more accessible to the general public, then MAYBE i'ts a big deal the general public...whether or not the general public understands it's impact immediately is a different question.

Lisa Pratt is involved, so my hopes are high the found evidence of life.

http://geology.indiana.edu/pratt/
http://www.indiana.edu/~deeplife/homepg.html

Wow, you take part of a statement, and then make your own absurd statement from it. I would say it is a surprise, but no, it's just you trolling. Unless you believe that it is impossible to read and post to slashdot without a UID.

I can see the UIDs well. From the UIDs, it is easily seen that I am here first way before you do. Slashdot doesn't recycle inactive UIDs. That's why I call bullshit on you.

I guess I errantly expected you were smart enough to realize that people can read and post here without UIDs, for as long as they wish. It is perfectly reasonable to read and post here arbitrarily long with no UID if you so desire, although I expect you will try to deny that as well.

I have meta-moderated wherever I liked it, and it works just fine. If you want to believe what a lot of people told you, then fine.

Clearly you have no idea what you are talking about. Meta-moderation is not something that you opt to do in a particular part of slashdot, nor has it ever been that way. If you click the meta-moderation link, you would know that you are given 10 random comments to meta-moderate.

Furthermore if you clicked that link you would immediately realize at least a few of the glaringly obvious problems with the system.

If I were to apply the same concept as you, then many people who commented on news about the Apple union like the one at http://news.cnet.com/8301-27076_3-20070919-248/meet-the-man-who-wants-an-apple-retail-union/ also commented about how evil unions can be, with some even trotting the same GM example. Because people says so, then unions is truly evil as those people says there (and here).

No, that is not applying the same concept at all. Nice try though, troll.

Allow me to reiterate. Meta-moderation is broken. This has been known and documented for some time. It has several substantial errors that you could easily see if you went to the meta-moderation page, and several more that you would realize if you went to it, and then read the slashdot FAQ on meta-moderation.

BTW, this thread has nearly 1000 comments,

Wow, you can read the three-digit number at the top of the page. Congratulations, this might be the first fact you have shared in this entire discussion.

which indicates that many people actually read it

Fail. It does not mean that at all. Hell, look at your own comment history, you have posted to this thread over 20 times already. Hence 1,000 comments could be reached with fewer than 50 trolls like you posting to it.

Surely I will have low karma by now

Not if very few people consider this thread to be worth moderating.

I am a troll.

Correct, you are a troll!

It isn't perfect, especially in cold articles, but it do work - http://jcmc.indiana.edu/vol10/issue2/poor.html#methods.

That is an article from 2005 that you cited. Very little of the code that runs this site currently has roots from 2005 or earlier.

Calling me a troll isn't going to work

Have you read the slashdot FAQ? In particular, it has definitions of troll and flamebait:

Flamebait -- Flamebait refers to comments whose sole purpose is to insult and enrage. If someone is not-so-subtly picking a fight (racial insults are a dead giveaway), it's Flamebait.

Troll -- A Troll is similar to Flamebait, but slightly more refined. This is a prank comment intended to provoke indignant (or just confused) responses. A Troll

I'm not sure if you could come up with a more ridiculous question if you tried...

Mainly because you imply that I am incorrect when I am saying USPS unions comes after the organization founding.

Wrong. Simply wrong. The USPS actually showed gains after the establishment of the unions. USPS started shrinking much, much later.

True only after the wars. Not during other times. Even between WWI-WWII USPS doesn't really do well.

Wow, you take part of a statement, and then make your own absurd statement from it. I would say it is a surprise, but no, it's just you trolling. Unless you believe that it is impossible to read and post to slashdot without a UID.

I can see the UIDs well. From the UIDs, it is easily seen that I am here first way before you do. Slashdot doesn't recycle inactive UIDs. That's why I call bullshit on you.

No, it doesn't work. Many more people agree that it is broken than agree that it works. Have you even tried to meta moderate, ever? If you would have tried it years ago, you would know how it was supposed to work. If you then subsequently tried it more recently you would see how badly it does not work. There are so many problems with it now that the only way you could possibly claim it to work is is you have never tried it, or had no idea whatsoever of what it is supposed to accomplish. What it attempts to do right now doesn't even live up to the name.

I have meta-moderated wherever I liked it, and it works just fine. If you want to believe what a lot of people told you, then fine.

If I were to apply the same concept as you, then many people who commented on news about the Apple union like the one at http://news.cnet.com/8301-27076_3-20070919-248/meet-the-man-who-wants-an-apple-retail-union/ also commented about how evil unions can be, with some even trotting the same GM example. Because people says so, then unions is truly evil as those people says there (and here).

I have already explained how your karma is not related to your trolling. Besides you've posted too much jibberish to this thread to catch the attention of the main source of moderation here, and you've trolled so far deep into discussions that the odds of being moderated is damned near zero.

Statistic doesn't lie. BTW, this thread has nearly 1000 comments, which indicates that many people actually read it. Surely I will have low karma by now if people did consider I am a troll.

If you think the moderation system itself to be without flaws then you aren't paying attention to that, either.

But then again we all know you are a troll.

It isn't perfect, especially in cold articles, but it do work - http://jcmc.indiana.edu/vol10/issue2/poor.html#methods. Calling me a troll isn't going to work. Whether someone is a troll or not, statistic can easily proved it to be true or not. Remember, meta-moderation doesn't affect the score of a post, but will affect the karma of the poster.

Well, this is slashdot, so let's do a simple calculation. Assume that there is 1 lb of fat for each lb of chicken eaten. Assume that fat has the same energy content as oil. What percentage of our energy will that cover? Well, according to this site , in the US, we use about 600 gallons of motor fuel per capita. A gallon of fuel is about 6 lbs (well, depends, really, but close enough for now), so 3600 lbs. So, 60 / 3600 is about 1.67 percent of our motor fuel usage. Is it worth it? I don't think so.

According to some, 90% of all email is spam. Does that make SMTP an illegitimate protocol? Often, the easiest way to find copyright infringing works is using Google. Does that make the search engine illegitimate? Porn drove early VCR development. Is VHS an illegitimate technology?

I think there is some confusion here. Red Hat is no longer providing separate patches in the Red Hat kernel package. I am pretty sure Red Hat will continue to provide patches back to the kernel development community. I don't think the kernel developer community are downloading the Red Hat source RPM for the kernel and extracting the patches to include in the tree.

I'm confused too. Red Hat says they still submit their patches upstream first, but then some kernel developers suggest that they poke around in the release kernel instead. I'm not sure which is which, whether RH is playing dirty, or whether there are specific incidents which are causing problems in an otherwise supportive relationship...

Apparently Red Hat is not making this easy, see the release announcement for 2.6.32.30. Not sure if it's related, but it appears it might be.

Specifically:
"Many thanks again to Maximilian Attems who dug around in a lot of different distro kernels and forwarded to me the original git commit ids that should be applied to this tree. Red Hat didn't make this very easy due to their "one giant patch" format, and his skill is helping everyone out here. It's much appreciated."

I think you missed the point. Say you've installed Ubuntu on a reiserfs partition inside a VM. The VM's harddisk file is stored at /var/tmp/ubuntu.vdi. For some reason, you need to fsck /var. It reads each block in /var's partition and looks for things that look like inodes and merges them back into the directory structure tree. Guess what happens when it starts scanning blocks that are inside ubuntu.vdi? It finds a lot of things that look like inodes and merges them back into the directory structure tree. Don't believe me? Fine. Maybe Theodore Ts'o can convince you.

If you want to wipe a hard disk, dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sda1

I don't think there's a single modern SSD or HDD where that will clear every bit of storage on the device. Both drive types keep spare blocks to swap into rotation whenever old ones become damaged and it's impossible to wipe those blocks with dd. Hence the need for a native drive command to do it. Apparently the drive designers thought so, too, and made a command to do that.

He is working on Einstein's Tonsorial Problem:

http://www.math.indiana.edu/people/profile.phtml?id=nhkatz

http://lkml.indiana.edu/hypermail/linux/kernel/9906.2/1214.html [indiana.edu]

There's one such example of proof of what I stated here -> http://yro.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1893378&cid=34423218 [slashdot.org], & if you search it on GOOGLE ("Microsoft IP Stack" and "BSD") via this query:

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&source=hp&q=%22Microsoft+IP+Stack%22+and+%22BSD%22&btnG=Google+Search [google.com]

You get even more...

APK

Sigh...

To create our selective surface, we start with a layer of stainless steel and add a thin layer of gold and, on top of that, a thin layer of silicon. The silicon layer looks black to visible light and has e(short wavelength) ~ 1. Since silicon is essentially transparent to infrared light, our selective surface behaves as a gold surface for infrared. Gold has an emissivity of only 0.10 for infrared wavelengths. This combination, then, is an excellent absorber of short wavelength light from the sun and a poor emitter of infrared light. Repeating our calculation, we find that this selective surface can rise to a temperature of 648 K (375 C)!

http://physics.indiana.edu/~brabson/p310/selectivesurf.html

One thing they didn't get to keep is their jobs: http://www.ibrc.indiana.edu/ibr/2010/spring/images/auto_fig3.gif

ZFS is used in production on FreeBSD by some people and I generally like the ZFS features, but I don't view ZFS as really production ready on any OS.

This is because ZFS on any OS does sometimes lose all access to the zpool (i.e. you lose the entire set of RAID volumes and filesystems on them, all at once) due to ZFS bugs, and there is no fsck. I can't think of another filesystem where you can (a) lose all access to your files and (b) there is no fsck. Same goes for RAID - even if you use RAID-1 with ZFS you can still lose your entire zpool due to a ZFS bug.

Given that the "no data loss by design" (can't find the reference for this, perhaps Sun/Oracle has stopped saying this) hasn't really worked out for ZFS on Solaris or FreeBSD, there is still a need to have a complete backup of any ZFS zpool (as with any other RAID / filesystem). The checksumming, COW, snapshots, and self-healing data (for RAID) are very nice, but losing your whole pool due to a ZFS bug means it isn't really a high availability solution. On the plus side, it does make it very easy to snapshot in order to take a backup, and makes incremental backups easy with zfs send.

Here are a few samples of complete zpool loss:

http://opensolaris.org/jive/thread.jspa?threadID=132089&tstart=120

http://superuser.com/posts/130822/revisions - FreeBSD

http://www.mail-archive.com/zfs-discuss@opensolaris.org/msg39578.html

My point is not that ZFS is a bad idea, but it really needs an fsck (see http://www.osnews.com/story/22423/Should_ZFS_Have_a_fsck_Tool_ ) and anyone using ZFS must have full backups onto another server of the whole zpool, perhaps into a non-ZFS filesystem to avoid software bugs that hit both the main and backup zpool. The need for backups isn't unique to ZFS but I haven't seen other filesystems/RAID implementations promising "no data loss by design"

http://breden.org.uk/2009/05/01/home-fileserver-a-year-in-zfs/ has some good info on using ZFS for a home NAS, with a separate backup server also using ZFS.

btrfs isn't mature yet, but its designer has said he will always make fsck a priority over new features: http://lkml.indiana.edu/hypermail/linux/kernel/0706.2/1284.html

Nope, I don't think you're imagining things. I didn't realize it myself until this article appeared and I came across your comment.

I've done some web design, and so here's my basic <theory> below, typed as a stream of consciousness. As for making something look "Japanese", I think it's a result of various things:

Rounded Corners:
I don't these are strictly Japanese (see Slashdot's header, Southwest Airlines, Expedia, BBC (UK), Virgin Group (UK)). Though, rounded corners have made websites nicer to look at (not rigid - don't round/curvy things make people generally happy? Interpret as you wish.)

Pastel color scheme presence:
This may be a Japanese thing - all the non-Japanese sites I mentioned above generally employ primary colors. Two interesting US-based website examples are: Sprinkles Cupcakes and Pinkberry Frozen Yogurt. Both sites use lighter, non-primary colors and those color shades and combinations give me a sense of "fun" instead of "corporate". Note, though, that the different color shades aren't necessarily pastel-like in my opinion. One US-based website that uses something very close to pastel colors is Martha Stewart Omnimedia. We'll have to bring in a color expert to state whether Martha's colors are truly pastel.

At any rate, I think that only certain companies can satisfactorily use pastels in the US, and that would be companies dealing with fun food (cupcakes, frozen yogurt, etc) and hobbyist home decor arts/crafts. I think this is part to how I (and maybe you) without a Japanese background/surrounding/etc interpret colors and, as part of our respective cultures, have an understanding of what those colors represent. See this Visual Color Symbolism Chart by Culture and Color Symbolism Chart by Culture for a basic review. As noted in these two charts, "Green" in the US can mean money and trees and other things, but in China green hats mean a man's wife is cheating on him. One color, vastly different meanings! More information on "green" as a color: http://desktoppub.about.com/cs/colorselection/p/green.htm.

High-Context (Japanese) v. Low-Context (N. American, German-Speaking, etc) Cultures:
I came across this article while looking up cultureal color perception in Japan: Elizabeth Würtz's 2005 analysis titled: "A Cross-Cultural Analysis of Websites from High-Context Cultures and Low-Context Cultures". In this study, she noted that Japan is a high-context (HC) culture, whereas North America (and German-speaking countries even moreso) are low-context (LC) cultures:

Face-to-face communication in HC cultures is thus characterized by an extensive use of non-verbal strategies for conveying meanings. These strategies usually take the shape of behavioral language, such as gestures, body language, silence, proximity and symbolic behavior, while conversation in LC cultures tends to be less physically animated, with the meaning depending on content and the spoken word.

What was interesting to read were two of her conclusions regarding animation and presentation of individuals+products on websites:

Animation:
Tendency in HC Cultures: High use of animation, especially in connection with images of moving people.
Tendency in LC Cultures: Lower use of

Nope, I don't think you're imagining things. I didn't realize it myself until this article appeared and I came across your comment.

I've done some web design, and so here's my basic <theory> below, typed as a stream of consciousness. As for making something look "Japanese", I think it's a result of various things:

Rounded Corners:
I don't these are strictly Japanese (see Slashdot's header, Southwest Airlines, Expedia, BBC (UK), Virgin Group (UK)). Though, rounded corners have made websites nicer to look at (not rigid - don't round/curvy things make people generally happy? Interpret as you wish.)

Pastel color scheme presence:
This may be a Japanese thing - all the non-Japanese sites I mentioned above generally employ primary colors. Two interesting US-based website examples are: Sprinkles Cupcakes and Pinkberry Frozen Yogurt. Both sites use lighter, non-primary colors and those color shades and combinations give me a sense of "fun" instead of "corporate". Note, though, that the different color shades aren't necessarily pastel-like in my opinion. One US-based website that uses something very close to pastel colors is Martha Stewart Omnimedia. We'll have to bring in a color expert to state whether Martha's colors are truly pastel.

At any rate, I think that only certain companies can satisfactorily use pastels in the US, and that would be companies dealing with fun food (cupcakes, frozen yogurt, etc) and hobbyist home decor arts/crafts. I think this is part to how I (and maybe you) without a Japanese background/surrounding/etc interpret colors and, as part of our respective cultures, have an understanding of what those colors represent. See this Visual Color Symbolism Chart by Culture and Color Symbolism Chart by Culture for a basic review. As noted in these two charts, "Green" in the US can mean money and trees and other things, but in China green hats mean a man's wife is cheating on him. One color, vastly different meanings! More information on "green" as a color: http://desktoppub.about.com/cs/colorselection/p/green.htm.

High-Context (Japanese) v. Low-Context (N. American, German-Speaking, etc) Cultures:
I came across this article while looking up cultureal color perception in Japan: Elizabeth Würtz's 2005 analysis titled: "A Cross-Cultural Analysis of Websites from High-Context Cultures and Low-Context Cultures". In this study, she noted that Japan is a high-context (HC) culture, whereas North America (and German-speaking countries even moreso) are low-context (LC) cultures:

Face-to-face communication in HC cultures is thus characterized by an extensive use of non-verbal strategies for conveying meanings. These strategies usually take the shape of behavioral language, such as gestures, body language, silence, proximity and symbolic behavior, while conversation in LC cultures tends to be less physically animated, with the meaning depending on content and the spoken word.

What was interesting to read were two of her conclusions regarding animation and presentation of individuals+products on websites:

Animation:
Tendency in HC Cultures: High use of animation, especially in connection with images of moving people.
Tendency in LC Cultures: Lower use of

By this logic, is any software one writes for Linux obligated to be GPL?

No, because of the "system library" exception in the GPL. See here:

However, as a special exception, the source code distributed need not include anything that is normally distributed (in either source or binary form) with the major components (compiler, kernel, and so on) of the operating system on which the executable runs, unless that component itself accompanies the executable.

And some commentary by Linus himself:

There's a clarification that user-space programs that use the standard system call interfaces aren't considered derived works, but even that isn't an "exception" - it's just a statement of a border of what is clearly considered a "derived work". User programs are _clearly_ not derived works of the kernel, and as such whatever the kernel license is just doesn't matter.

While it's a cute and funny Panny-arcade strip, it's not true.

Actually, there is research that suggests that under anonymous circumstances, otherwise normal people begin to behave in anti-social ways.
Article
Research paper
Another paper
One more

Do you think people would behave better when they drive if their real name was on their car? No. However retaliation for precieved slight would certainly increase.

The better question to ask is if people drive with less regard because they feel they are unidentifiable. Would you shout at a driver who cut you off if you knew they could hear you and find you? Would you drive around a line of backed up cars and force your way into line if you believed your reputation could be affected?

As for retaliation, privacy is already a myth. Anyone who wants to retaliate already can with a little bit of investigation. Physical retaliation is still rare, though. Using real names just removes this facade of privacy, making it obvious to those who speak that they can be held responsible and accountable for their actions (as they already can), and thus reinstating the disincentive to behave badly.

Pfft. I live in Kokomo, IN. Everyone is selling property here. Get in line.
http://www.ibrc.indiana.edu/ibr/2009/outlook/kokomo.html

Then you'd better start writing all the software to control the various scientific instrumentation I use, because it all currently requires proprietary software running on the recent Microsoft OSes (that Oxford NMR actually does have a Linux client available, but the PC controlling it runs XP for ease of file transfer).

Any research relying on results produced by close-sourced software is voodoo.

Well, then 98% of published chemical research is voodoo. Companies aren't going to write open software to control the $750K spectrometer they just sold you, and to be perfectly honest, I don't think I'd use software off of Sourceforge to control an investment of that type, anyway. Nd-YAG lasers don't grow on trees, unfortunately.

ROTFL with your statement about the controlling PC running XP for easy file transfer!!!! File transfer is far simpler and more versatile with Linux. Also any scientist worth their salt does not use closed black box instruments they cannot understand. Now tell me how you can understand what goes in a closed proprietary package.
Actually it has been revealed in at least one scientific journal that recently published chemical research is voodoo and that multiple articles have been cited as being useless.

Any research relying on results produced by close-sourced software is voodoo.

Well, then 98% of published chemical research is voodoo. Companies aren't going to write open software to control the $750K spectrometer they just sold you, and to be perfectly honest, I don't think I'd use software off of Sourceforge to control an investment of that type, anyway. Nd-YAG lasers don't grow on trees, unfortunately.

Now that this is an "Ask Slashdot," I'm sure someone (who probably helped develop Xenix or something) will give you an exact answer. But in general, "what file system does Xenix use and will it interoperate with Linux/anything modern" is not a difficult sort of question to research, if you're willing to go beyond a Google search. Amazon has plenty of used Xenix books for cheap, and at least the Dallas and Cleveland (and based on that sample, I'm guessing most large city public) libraries have at least a title or two. Even Ebay has a Xenix manual up for sale.They should tell you whatever you need to know about Xenix, and then you can Google about support for it in modern OS's. .

In fact, you may even be able to just Google it. No need to bother a million Slashdot readers.

Linux uses available memory for cache, and rather aggressively. All available memory can be filled with cached file blocks. This happens routinely on systems which have big randomly-accessed files open, like databases.

There's nothing wrong with this, except that, once in a while, Linux hits a race condition in prune_one_dentry, causing an "oops" crash, when there's an unblockable need for a memory page and something is locking the file block cache.

This is one of the Great Unsolved Mysteries of Linux. Linus wrote about it in 2001 ("I'll try to think about it some more, but I'd love to have more reports to go on to try to find a pattern.. "). As of 2009, this area is still giving trouble. The locking in this area is very complex.

We've had the Lincoln cluster online and offering processing time since February of 2009. 196 computing nodes (dual quad cores) and 96 Tesla units. That being said, congrats to the Aussie's for bringing a powerful new system online.

Someone later in thread asked if these GPU units would actually be useful for scientific computing. We think so. Our users and researchers here have developed implementations of both NAMD, a parallel molecular dynamics simulator and MIMD Lattice Computation (MILC) Collaboration that use the power of the GPU's. Both of these codes are freely available and widely used in the HPC community. We've had no lack of requests for time on the Lincoln cluster.

Are these GPUS for everyone? Nope. To disappoint all you gamers out there, the Tesla units have no graphics out ports. All the communication is done over the the PCIe bus. But for all of you budding scientists out there, these cards use the same freely available CUDA language that runs on all modern (8xxx and above) Nvidia hardware, so you may already have compatible GPU in your desktop now, even if it's just a single unit and slower.

One last note, while these units run really fast with single precision, they are capable of running in double precision, albeit much slower. For some problems, multiple initial runs can be done at the lower precision to localize the solution set, before doing a slower high precision run to find the final solution. This is similar to what Hollywood does when rendering animated movies- they first render a quick lo res version to see if the timing and characters are correct, then they run a hi-res version which takes longer to get a finished product. (Yes, I know, there's a lot more steps to it, but hey, this is just an analogy)

Re:1.0 right now (Score:5, Informative)
by metricmusic (766303) Alter Relationship on Tuesday November 09 2004, @08:14AM (#10764927) Its great! I downloaded it from here: http://mozilla.ussg.indiana.edu/pub/mozilla.org/fi refox/releases/1.0/win32/en-US/Firefox%201.0.zip Don't think slashdot will be able to bring down an edu. Go firefox!


Re:1.0 right now (Score:5, Funny)
by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday November 09 2004, @08:26AM (#10765036)
[Vader]I find your lack of faith distrubing[/Vader]...

You would make a good point if it weren't for the fact that people keep getting smarter.

So, they have it right that RedBox is cutting into their sales, but only of crappy movies which covers 2/3's (depending on who you are, this number fluctuates wildly).

I heard this one guy had higher standards than that, and some are even more discriminating in their taste.

Ahem.

I attend Indiana University. While the majority of our Student Technology Centers (STCs) are either Windows Vista Enterprise or Mac OS X, the Computer Science department has rooms full of Red Had Enterprise Linux workstations.

There are some programs that require a specific OS (like Journalism, Fine Arts, etc) most don't care what OS you use. Moreover, Debian and friends, SUSE, and RHEL are supported just as much as Windows and OS X (there's a 24X7 support line). All of the campus resources support Linux and most are online and don't use ActiveX, so they're browser neutral as well. Our course management and application portal are both open source.

With that said, there is much more commercial software available free to Windows or Mac users (Microsoft Office, all Adobe products, etc) through our IUWare Program. To answer your question though, Linux is supported just as well as the other major OSes.

The Internet Oracle has pondered your question deeply. Your question was:
> oracle: all knowledge, all questions, answered all the time
> (that might change the way we think of our education system!)

And in response, thus spake the Oracle:
> The internet's had an Oracle since 1975.
>
> ZOT!!! You owe the Oracle six woodchucks and a trowel.

Adamatzky I'm already familiar with, citing his Chemical Computer in a senior paper to finish my CS degree. This is no more crazy than using electrostatic foam to compute.

There's also the view that that entire framework for statistical analysis is fatally flawed. An argument to that effect (available publicly from his course website):
http://www.indiana.edu/~kruschke/articles/KruschkeBayesianDataAnalysisDraft.pdf
Hope the uni servers don't get slashdotted >.>;

Looks like the only reason to set this to 0 would have been to run wine. For support of 16bit windows apps.
Correct me if I'm wrong.

http://www.linuxplanet.org/blogs/?cat=408
http://lkml.indiana.edu/hypermail/linux/kernel/0907.2/01466.html
http://lkml.indiana.edu/hypermail/linux/kernel/0907.2/00715.html
http://linux.derkeiler.com/Mailing-Lists/Kernel/2009-07/msg08106.html

Looks like the only reason to set this to 0 would have been to run wine. For support of 16bit windows apps.
Correct me if I'm wrong.

http://www.linuxplanet.org/blogs/?cat=408
http://lkml.indiana.edu/hypermail/linux/kernel/0907.2/01466.html
http://lkml.indiana.edu/hypermail/linux/kernel/0907.2/00715.html
http://linux.derkeiler.com/Mailing-Lists/Kernel/2009-07/msg08106.html

I agree with this quote. A lot of computer scientists try to build artificial intelligence without really understanding how their own brain works. It is really too bad because they have an unusually observable specimen right in their own head. Genetic learning? Is that how you feel you learn personally?

There are a few that are doing really interesting research into just that, I recommend this book: Fluid Concepts and Creative Analogies: Computer Models of the Fundamental Mechanisms of Thought It goes into quite a lot of detail about trying to simulate analogy making and it is written in quite a human, personal style and studies quite beautifully simple cognitive processes. Its such a shame that people like Kurzweill get all the attention, when there are some really insightful, philosophical AI researchers out there, (such as Douglas Hofstadter).

If nobody intends to implement this feature, then why is there a listing in the linux chattr man page?

When a file with the 'u' attribute set is deleted, its contents are saved. This allows the user to ask for its undeletion.

I don't know if the current kernel implements this flag or not, since I have not tried it. However, there is this patch from 1996 which appears to implement it...

I suppose someone could play with setting this flag and deleting files on different filesystem types to see.

Furthermore, some languages have access to control constructs that C does not. C is limited by its function call convention, which is to push function parameters, call the function, then clean up the stack. Unless a function gets inlined, C must do this every time it moves program control outside the current function. But there are other languages that can call code without doing this.

For one, aggressive tail-call optimization compiles down to a stack-rewrite plus a goto, rather than consuming the additional time and space needed to push before the call and pop afterward.

For another, coroutines allow a program to maintain multiple argument stacks, effectively executing gotos between threads of control. There is no easy, portable way to do this in C (although there are a few hideous, stack-rewriting hacks).

While it's admittedly unlikely, solutions that are particularly efficient due to these techniques might be more efficient than any possible C program.

But, more to the point, for a given problem there is likely to be a C program that is as efficient as a high-level approach, but it may need to be written in manner so convoluted and atypical that it is effectively unmaintainable, maybe even unwritable by humans. (For example: Is Scheme Faster Than C?)

You forget about compilers. LISP gets compiled (by most implementations), too. All the "nifty high level programming shit" can, and sometimes does, if you have a good enough compiler, get compiled away. Furthermore, the "nifty high level programming shit" provides a whole lot more information to the compiler, allowing it to do much more aggressive optimizations because it can prove that they are safe. If somebody comes up with a slick new optimization technique, I don't have to rewrite my LISP code, I just implement it in the compiler. You'd have to go back through every line of C code you've ever written in order to implement it. If somebody gives you a radically different CPU architecture, the C code that is so wonderfully optimized for one CPU will run dog slow. You can reoptimize it for the new arch, but then it will run slow on the old one. With a good LISP compiler, the same code gets optimizations that are appropriate for each arch.

Check out Stalin, SBCL, and http://www.cs.indiana.edu/~jsobel/c455-c511.updated.txt. You might be surprised at what you find.

According to one of the mass storage maintainers, the message was to inform users that the kernel sometimes got angry if you hot-unplugged USB devices. It had nothing to do with integrity of data written to a disk.

Besides, you should be verifying your backup media after you write to it. md5sums is your pal.

Holy shit, you might be on to something.

It's well known that the terminator runs on the 6502 microprocessor (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MOS_Technology_6502).

Apparently Linux does as well: http://lkml.indiana.edu/hypermail/linux/kernel/0004.0/0000.html

The GPF on the mailing list is probably when the terminator is blown to pieces. Not to worry, it automatically reboots (and proceeds to get smashed, but the software worked fine).

The reference for that patent issue: http://lkml.indiana.edu/hypermail/linux/kernel/0010.0/0343.html - the filesystem was Daniel Phillips' Tux2, and it was making some progress before development was halted due to the risk of treading on Network Appliance's toes.

And if you're the Oracle, you remove users with ZOT