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on building to last for a long time is How Buldings Learn: What Happens After They're Built. by Stewart Brand (See also here, here and here

The book covers everything about buildings after they are built from leaks, technological changes to changing styles. Have a look at the Amazon link for the samples pages to get an idea of the content and especially the pictures. The book covers modern homes, office buildings, castles, farm houses. small shacks and everything in between. It is definately the place to start if you want to build something that will be around and used in 50 or 500 years.

It's not a howto or builders guide except in the general sense. However it covers the general picture of the things you need to think about and provides links to other sources with more specific information. Overall it is one of my favourate books.

The author is president of the Long Now Foundation which is building the 10 ,000 year clock so he's very much into thinking about the longer term.

Think about the space required to store that many primes...your method of "trial division" is also known as "brute force".
Here is a very fast program that generates primes using the concept of Wheel factorization
Wheel factorization sounds like a neat way to factor composites, but I tried it and it cannot compare to the quadratic sieve or the number field sieve

I had a job lined up in germany this summer, great job. Chance of a lifetime kind of deals. I could get out of the US for a while, out of Kansas specifically, and live in germany. Then the German government put a halt on that one. In order for them to hire a foreign worker, they have to prove to the government that there is nobody local qualified for the job. If there's nobody local, the government will send people that are probably qualified. Only after they discount those people could they hire me. Considering I was fresh out of school, the chances of that happening were slim to none.

So a friend and I packed up our wordly possesions and are now living in Canada, and having a rough time getting work permits. (Which is strange considering that this country relies on 300k immigrants a year to keep its economy going -- according to a Reuters article last week)

Any place is better than Kansas, even in complete poverty. So get out and live someplace strange. You might have to do shady things to make a living, but ehh...

Oh, my interview for that Germany job was during a 2 month stint backpacking across europe. You can read my emails from that at my website. I highly reccomend traveling, and if nothing is cooking for me next year and I have a few thousand, I may travel to south east asia.

Taos

On a sidenote, hope joystick101.org gets put back up, I've got a few ideas burning that are being wasted on kuro5hin.

he concedes macroevolution in all its guises

While I see what you mean, I think you have this the wrong way about. Assuming that everything else is constant (ceterus paribus), price is a function of overall existing demand and supply, not the other way around. The price of beer will only go up/down if there are conditions that cause a shift in supply and/or demand.

Rather than try to retro-fit your example (which is a bit flawed to begin with) here's a simple page that I pulled off google that explains basic supply and demand.

This of course is the classical view of macroeconomics, which is probably what your professor was teaching.

Personally I'm a poor programmer, for question you asked. I tend not to use flowcharts because I find it easier to express what I would write down in code anyways. If I use any conceptual model its typically just a class diagram for large projects, or maybe a memory map for smaller architectures. Rational Rose seems to be about the only real standard out there for conceptual stuff, unless you count hand waving Design Patterns.

But I feel sorry for any intiate who takes on such advanced topics like "programs are made of..." because not all programs can be seen as a knowledge base, or a system of sending messages. I would focus more on the math behind the scenes, because thats where things are heading. Things like assertions and domains are finally being promoted in Software Engineering and it takes a solid foundation to appreciate and understand it. Computers operate on a mathematical level. The smallest component of a program is an instruction. If you want to model that using parse trees thats an interesting approach but mostly useless. Reguardless of the content, for an entry level class the best thing you can do to get more of the class to understand things is lots of bite sized homework. Its a pain on the graders and the students might complain, but doing things several times using similar solutions helps you generalize concepts better.

Thats what my university did. For the entire campus I believe it its throttled down to 64-128kbps. I have tried to connect and I can never connect for more than 5 minutes and while connected cannot achieve more than 0.5kbps.

The only thing that keeps them from blocking these ports off entirely is that there is one professor that claims he needs it for "research"

I'm not sure where you went to school, or if you did, but most of my intercollegiate friends' schools have CE bundled closely with CS. Computer Engineers build chips and occasionally program the chips. Which is why they get to learn about things like basic programming and data structures. Because even though you send data to your HDD as a string, in reality its a linked list. I like to think we have a good CE program at my school.

My roommate is President of the Solar Car team at Kansas State University. His team recently finished 5th overall at the 2k1 American Solar Challenge. Since he's president I get to hear all about these things. Very few actual solar panel manufacturers enter, but rather sponsor universities. Sponsorship is why the University of Michigan, near the auto industry capital of the USA, is taking their car, and why we cant afford to ship ours over there.

As far as the actual electricity generation goes, I'd think its a bit beyond the capabilities of a group of freshman and sophmore (my roommate is a sophmore) undergrads to not only design a better grade solar array, but then manufacture it. Even if some kid did manage it, they couldn't afford the costs. I believe the cost of the current solar array is some 25k, which generates about 14 hp. That gets them up to about 75 mph max, but that eats of the batteries pretty fast.

Most solar cars don't use the latest and most efficient solar array. If I recall correctly, the latest car from KSU, CATalyst, uses 14 percent efficienct solar panels. The most efficient are gallium-cyanide (or something like that) that are extremely expensive (like 500k or so). Of course there are a few things that can be done besides simply upgrading the solar array. I've heard of shaping the solar cells in inverted pyramids at the near molecular level will increase absorbtion, but the return is expected to be on the order of .1~1 percent. In contrast, redesigning the body of the car gave us about 35 percent less drag. In addition, the concept of "regenerative braking," using the kinetic energy of the car to run the engine in reverse and charge the batteries, greatly increases overall effiency. Essentially, research into solar panel mechanisms requires extensive knowledge in both electrical engineering and mechanical engineering, which few people have, and of those who DO have that exp, few of them would put up with a university salary.

Yea, I can't spell efficiency, but who cares, I'm only a Computer Science major.

I know exactly where this is! This is so cool. Wamego is on the east side of Manhattan, KS, better known for Kansas State University where I used to work and school at. This is so cool! I never even knew it was there. There was a big drug bust right around that area a while back IIRC. A buddy of mine said it was in the paper up there.

EDU rules allow a 4-year university to have only one permanent .edu domain. You might know of a few universities that have more than one. Kansas State University is one of those. Somebody got the brilliant idea to move from ksu.edu to k-state.edu. (Whatever dumbass thought of that should be shot, but that's just my opinion.) They were allowed to have two for a transitional period. Fortunately the plan died (last I heard) and KSU will stick with ksu.edu. That's supposed to be the only time a university can have more than one .edu domain--for a transition period.

Umm... not quite. We use patterns instead. You can specify the logical specification using these patterns. It's not hard. Check out the spec patterns homepage here.

More complex patterns can be broken down into some simpler ones.

I am working for a research group that develops a tool for checking software *automatically*. Yes, you read it right. It's not only against syntactical error, but also logical error. This was previously intractable and infeasible task as the scientist proves that nobody ever breaks the Turing machine. But, we've got a way to get around with it.

The catch is you have to specify the expected properties of your program in terms of logical language (yes, and this is very hard sometimes). If you stated the properties correctly, then our tool is able to detect violations against the properties. And, no, it's not those lousy tools that you've heard about ten years ago (maybe from Compaq or ISU), but this is a ground breaking new tool. Check it out. You can even download the tool too (but read this message thoroughly first).

About the properties, our research group has successfully identify 92% of all patterns of all logic in programming. Thus, rather than inventing the logic language your own, you can rather use our template. Click here for the patterns.

Our tool is still very very buggy and limited. It currently checks a subset of Java. Syntactically correct Java can be fed in, but there are (a lot of) features we won't consider yet as this will require more research, like: Object relations, array abstractions, exceptions, and so on.

When our research is mature enough, the whole software development world will be revolutionized.

I am working for a research group that develops a tool for checking software *automatically*. Yes, you read it right. It's not only against syntactical error, but also logical error. This was previously intractable and infeasible task as the scientist proves that nobody ever breaks the Turing machine. But, we've got a way to get around with it.

The catch is you have to specify the expected properties of your program in terms of logical language (yes, and this is very hard sometimes). If you stated the properties correctly, then our tool is able to detect violations against the properties. And, no, it's not those lousy tools that you've heard about ten years ago (maybe from Compaq or ISU), but this is a ground breaking new tool. Check it out. You can even download the tool too (but read this message thoroughly first).

About the properties, our research group has successfully identify 92% of all patterns of all logic in programming. Thus, rather than inventing the logic language your own, you can rather use our template. Click here for the patterns.

Our tool is still very very buggy and limited. It currently checks a subset of Java. Syntactically correct Java can be fed in, but there are (a lot of) features we won't consider yet as this will require more research, like: Object relations, array abstractions, exceptions, and so on.

When our research is mature enough, the whole software development world will be revolutionized.

What happened to those? Are they being made but covered up by NDAs? Did they jump ahead too far, then had to go back to do more basic research on the properties of materials at that? Surely SOMEONE on Slashdot works at a materials lab and can clue me in.

Nope. The Visual Quantum Mechanics Asst brought all the tiny pieces to my High School where a student inadvertantly knocked them from the tech's hand. The entire class has spent the last 6 years picking them up. Sorry about that, we'll return them to the science community real soon.

Its a cleaner language than C/C++, missing the pointer and 'by reference' operators.

Its a good Object Oriented learning language, but only if you remember to actually teach OOP and not just "classes" and "inheritance." This means talking about program architecture and MVC. Some people claim that if Java were "truely OOP" it would support adding Integer Objects with a + or something. This is misleading. An OOL should avoid special cases like that, and a good Interger would have an add(Integer add) function.

Its cross platform compatible. Your students shouldn't need to worry about whether the code will compile on the grader's computer/OS. C++ that works on Mac may not like BeOS or *NIX.

What I'd really like to talk about though is what NOT to do with the language:

Group Projects: Don't go overboard with proving the usefulness of interfaces. A friend of mine at another school had to do a group project, and some idiot (another student or the TA, I can't remember) wrote out some horrible system using a hash table that wouldnt work given the concept of a hash table. The only thing that people will learn from that kind of thing is that the people around them are idiots. Save that one for Grad School.

Don't teach student about Linked Lists and Hash Tables by talking about the Sun package that implements that feature. Students are there to learn about data structures and algorithms, not Java Packages. If that means they're less likely to pass the Java Certification Level I, maybe Sun needs to rethink the Cert.

Don't go into great detail about hardware limitations and stuff like that. Its important to know, but Computer Science is mainly about mathematics, not Computer Engineering.

Don't test students over BufferedReader keyboard = new BufferedReader(new StreamReader(System.in)); its not worth the trouble it causes, espcecially if the class is going to get into GUI related stuff. The static methods in JOptionPane will suffice, and they give you an oppertunity to discuss why static methods are useful.

Having said that, I am only a second year student with a junior status, I have yet to experience the entire ciriculum, and I do not know how educators feel about the rigor and content of their classes. All I know is that after CIS 200 about 2/3's to 3/4's of the people in the class changed majors. A lot went into MIS (poor, poor students). A couple found a new home in CE, of course they still need plenty more CS classes as well. And this was without discussing the headaches like passing by reference and passing by value that C++ would introduce.

Its a cleaner language than C/C++, missing the pointer and 'by reference' operators.

Its a good Object Oriented learning language, but only if you remember to actually teach OOP and not just "classes" and "inheritance." This means talking about program architecture and MVC. Some people claim that if Java were "truely OOP" it would support adding Integer Objects with a + or something. This is misleading. An OOL should avoid special cases like that, and a good Interger would have an add(Integer add) function.

Its cross platform compatible. Your students shouldn't need to worry about whether the code will compile on the grader's computer/OS. C++ that works on Mac may not like BeOS or *NIX.

What I'd really like to talk about though is what NOT to do with the language:

Group Projects: Don't go overboard with proving the usefulness of interfaces. A friend of mine at another school had to do a group project, and some idiot (another student or the TA, I can't remember) wrote out some horrible system using a hash table that wouldnt work given the concept of a hash table. The only thing that people will learn from that kind of thing is that the people around them are idiots. Save that one for Grad School.

Don't teach student about Linked Lists and Hash Tables by talking about the Sun package that implements that feature. Students are there to learn about data structures and algorithms, not Java Packages. If that means they're less likely to pass the Java Certification Level I, maybe Sun needs to rethink the Cert.

Don't go into great detail about hardware limitations and stuff like that. Its important to know, but Computer Science is mainly about mathematics, not Computer Engineering.

Don't test students over BufferedReader keyboard = new BufferedReader(new StreamReader(System.in)); its not worth the trouble it causes, espcecially if the class is going to get into GUI related stuff. The static methods in JOptionPane will suffice, and they give you an oppertunity to discuss why static methods are useful.

Having said that, I am only a second year student with a junior status, I have yet to experience the entire ciriculum, and I do not know how educators feel about the rigor and content of their classes. All I know is that after CIS 200 about 2/3's to 3/4's of the people in the class changed majors. A lot went into MIS (poor, poor students). A couple found a new home in CE, of course they still need plenty more CS classes as well. And this was without discussing the headaches like passing by reference and passing by value that C++ would introduce.

I'm a CIS student in the CSAB accredited program at Kansas State University. The year I started they switched to Java as the learning language.

Personally, as an Object-Oriented language I think it's pretty good and as a learning language it's easy to teach and learn. However, there are some key problems with using Java that are more pragmatic than theoretical.

1. Java does garbage collection automatically--a nice feature, but stupefies programmers.
2. Java does not contain any real form of general programming as C++ or SML does.
3. Java is very clean and relatively easy to use so programmers are insulated from many problems experienced in other languages

All of these insulate students from many of the realities of programming. In any case, everyone ought to be made to take a C++ or C course early on so they can be made to understand some of the deeper programming issues. I know far too many programmers in my classes that don't understand the basics of memory management or how to handle abstract complexities involved in pointer manipulation or even the basic idea of a non-virtual method (all non-static Java methods are equavalent to being C++ virtual).

We have courses like Programming Languages and Operating Systems that seek to dispel these problems, but I still see programmers graduate without understanding how to really do anything outside of Java because of the insulation it gives them.

I say teach them rough edges and hacks and work-arounds before given them a nice clean language like Java or Python to mess around with. Don't we teach derivitives and anti-derivitives by first teaching them the hard way and then giving them the easy formulas? I say use the same method in computer science and make them learn the difficult theories from the ground up with an imperfect implementation.

Another method of doing this is to use the FAQ-O-MATIC, written primarily by Jon Howell I believe. Jon's approach differs because the FOM is meant to be user driven. It can easily be closed up for in-house maintenance only but it's original intent was to be a user-driven and user-support tool to aide other users. I've used it and have been impressed with it as well. It gets better and better with each new release.

Any knowledge base type of tool will have one very important thing in common. They require time, and possibly lots of it. They require time to build, time to administer, time to update, and time to maintain. It's not always an easy task. If you can delegate some of the responsibility for bits and pieces of it down to others better suited to those bits and pieces, all the better. Making sure they keep up on their end of the deal though will need some superior oversight. Indiana Unv says they spend 300 hours a week on their KB. While it may not be exactly that much time and of that time they may not be working hard on the KB, they do spend a lot of time on it (I imagine they took their total number of student consultant * a percentage of their weekly working hours to get 300 hours--it's still a lot of hours). I never built K-State a knowledge base. I started more than once but I always ended up running out of time. If this is something they want you to do, make sure they know that it can use up a lot of your time, especially in the beginning. Make sure they acknowledge this and don't expect you to do this job and another fulltime job on top of it. Good luck!

--

Advertisers use subliminal messages in commercials... ;)

Venona

Well, had you used this Google search you might have found a number of pages that mention it however briefly, like this one. Some of them even have pictures.

This isn't the first research in this direction. Here is an AP article about a study with monkeys, and there is also an interview here with 2 scientists who did similar studies on rats at U-dub Madison. I could've sworn one of those two followed a "restricted calorie" diet himself, but that could be someone else... ah, hell, I can't find that. Anyway, lots of preliminary evidence out there.

So why would you want to write a program recursively when you can write it using a loop? Well, the main answer is that recursion is a more general mechanism, so it can express some solutions simply that are awkward to write as a loop. Some programmers also feel that recursion is a stylistically preferable way to write loops because it avoids assigning variables.

in the article linked, they give a quote by Metallica saying they didn't put anybody on the list that only had downloaded bootleg music. While this keeps with Metallica's tradition of allowing bootlegs (they are an incredible live band and their live stuff is extremely good), I hardly believe anybody sat down to listen to every Metallica file all 300,000 had downloaded. But I digress, the real matter here is that they only were after the songs that were off of albums, which means they're after the money. Therefore, this leads me to believe this is the lawyer's battle, not the band's. How could Metallica truely be after a sum of money as small as this? 300,000 people * 50% that actually would buy the cd * $.50 per album? That's $75,000. Hell, take the $2 million that napster is paying Limp Bizkit to go on the free tour in consolation and you'd be sitting pretty. As our own little protest, the (college) radio station I work at has banned Metallica from our tower. (Sometimes it gets played by the less-intelligent DJ's, but they get punished accordingly) Check us out: WildCat Radio 91.9 Taos

The military has already tried to collect the DNA of its employees into a database, ostensibly for the purpose of identifying casualties of war. Two marines, however, refused to provide samples and were courtmartialed for disobeying direct orders. They're still in the midst of a lawsuit.

For further reading, here are some links I've found relating to the case:

• Marines refuse to give DNA
• Marines' DNA defense: The order was illegal
• Marine court-martial called landmark case

This just makes the fight against spam that much more difficult.

Don't try to tell me that AOL can't pay a FTE or three to sort through the abuse mailbox and dispatch the complaints to the appropriate team.

It's so sad to see a film that schmoes out, overyanks the wonder-teat .
You start to wonder about the unholy cabal that influences Lucas (the blue elephant in the bar in Revenge, the fuzzEwoks, Jar-whose-name-shall-not-be-spoken.)
Did they get to DePalma? Are they also choosing films for Robin Williams? Go see Titus. American Beauty. Two movies that won't fail you; guaranteed to restore your faith in movies, (although not sci-fi.)

I work at a I2 institution and have seen a major change in the available bandwidth. It helps me get my work done faster. Here is an application of I2 from last fall at a few instituions.

Another benefit of I2 is as a testbed for new protocols and applications. Multicasting is already up on most of the network and IPv6 is being tested and will probably be in production in a year or so.

This produces a much longer time-to-failiure because there are no motive parts to get in the way of the motor. Nearly 0 friction = nearly 0 wear & tear.

The lower carbon emissions claim is dubious--suffice to say critics of SR studies reveal that it's similar to the early 90s claim that oatmeal lowers your cholesterol, but debunkers showed that their studies relied on you eating oatmeal and not egg yolks for breakfast.

For more information on this subject, see here

"Whoops! That SCSI controller died. Better go buy a new CPU for that server..."

Exactly what I'm thinking. Hmm, well, that 4MB video card that came with my computer isn't good enough for Quake 3. I plan to go out and buy a TNT2 Ultra. But in this brave new world of integration, I'd have to get a PIII-550 (do you really think they'd stick a TNT2 on anything less?), a SB-Live!, an even newer (but not much different) 10/100 card... forget it. After buying my new PCOAC, I don't have enough to get Q3.

I doubt this will ever come to servers, though. Graphics and sound (the to big components of integration right now) aren't of much use on a server. I think that most administrators would stay away from integrated controllers, as well- for just the reason you mention.

Personally, I'd never, ever, get integrated components on a motherboard. I wouldn't trust the makers of my motherboard with making my video- I'd rather they spend that time on improving the bus architecture (sp?). I like being able to take the old SB16 ISA card (which I think is plenty good sound) from my old 486 and stick it into the new bare-bones K6-2 350 I just got. It's the same reason I dislike laptops- no facility for upgrading (or rather, very little).

Next thing you know, we'll be getting computers with the case welded shut. Sorry, you can't get inside this box. Oh, you want better video? Well, you can get this new computer for only $500. Nope, no getting a new video card for $150. After that, you'll get a solid-state black box with a slot for whatever removable media is the standard. Or better yet, just stick it on the bottom of the monitor! That way, you can't even get that 17" you've had your eye on without also getting that extra baggage they call "integration."

I hope this day never, ever, comes. I'll fight this kind of "integration" to the end. It's almost like MS "integrating" IE into Windows.