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I think I'd rather help bring it around than just sit and hope.

An excellent area for contribution is design software. Currently there are a number of excellent free molecular modeling packages: MMTK, NAMD, Moldy, NWchem. There are also several excellent display programs: RasMol, VMD, Midas, and my own feeble effort, xyz2rgb. What is still lacking is:

• Software to generate structures painlessly. Two efforts in this area are CavityStuffer by Markus Krummenacker, DiamondCAD by Chris Phoenix and John Michelsen, and some tinkering of mine.
• Some kind of wrapper that makes all this stuff easy to use. There is a commercial package called HyperChem, and the DiamondCAD folks are working on an open-source version called OpenChem.

If you're not interested in using NFS behind a firewall (just because it's slow, insecure, ugly, unreliable, fault-intolerant, and buggy doesn't make it bad, right?) you might be interested in PVFS. It sounds like what you are looking for, and under the "Files" link are the sources.

Personally, I like the "adventure" of Coda, but haven't tried setting it up in a few months. Now that my roommates have agreed to be guinea pigs for the Windows client, I figure I'll set it up behind my NAT box and play with it again. It's overkill for everything but a big installation, but I still think it's kind of fun. The thought that terrifies me is working with a multi-GB datafile or such over Coda -- but since my roommates will probably be more interested in playing Dopewars and moving around small files on a FE network, I'm going ahead with the grand master plan anyways. Besides, I have a laser printer and a burning desire to experience the frustrations of Samba...

This is not the first American Express smartcard, I don't think.

There is the so-called Charter Card, which is black, and comes with a pocket smartcard reader which is designed to access some of the data stored on the smartcard chip - details of foreign exchange rates, cardmember discounts, insurance, benefits and so on.

Just in case any of you think that I'm making this up, I happen to have a photo of one right here.

American Express Charter Member card.

Cool, huh?

The physically most interesting primes correspond to primes near prime powers of two: at this stage not possible to explain why electron corresponds to Mersenne prime M_127 or intermediate gauge bosons correspond to M_89.

What does this mean? Well, aside from the fact that 89 is a bit more awkward for my NVM theory than I might like, I would suggest it means that there is less of a conflict between "computer science" and the study of nature than people might otherwise believe.

The core laws of von Neumann's quantum logic (e.g.: S' = T**-1 S T ) are presented by von Neumann as being based on a great deal of "physics". However, they have been shown by Tom Etter of the Alternative Natural Philosophy Association as being theorems of the relational calculus that have important engineering ramifications for quantum computing!

I don't know about you, but this is the sort of result that makes me glad I work with computers -- well -- at least glad that I've been investigating relational semantics as the proper foundation for programming environments since the early 80's rather than committing Occam's Chainsaw Massacre.

> Software Engineering

[list of schools snipped - all US based]

The Computing Laboratory at Oxford University does an MSc course in Computation that has a software engineering strand.

If you're interested in the more theoretical end of software engineering (formal methods, Z notation, abstraction machine notation/B method, automated proof checking...) then you could certainly do a LOT worse. see Oxford Univ. Computing Lab home page.

The Comlab is also strong on reconfigurable hardware and hardware compilation, distributed/parallel computing etc.

There's more info about Colossus here, where they make the obvious point that "The question of what is the worlds first computer is less a question of history than a question of definition."

My personal vote goes to the "Manchester Baby", which has an extensive homepage all to itself.

Of course, Babbage can claim not only to have invented the first computer, but also the first printer - they're in the process of building it at the Science Museum in London (UK) right now. No reference to it on their web page, unfortunately.

The talk was "The Design and Implementation of a Large Scalable Mail Server". It's about the mail cluster I set up here for Oxford University and it sounds similar to what the original request was for. We have about 30000 users. I successfully argued against MS Exchange and designed and built a completely Open Source solution based on a Linux cluster with 250GB of disk, UW imapd/ipopd, Exim (MTA) and an Apache/mod_perl-based web to mail gateway that I wrote called WING. The two Solaris nodes in the cluster were there for political reasons and are being replaced by Linux boxes within the next few weeks. There is a WING web page and mailing list which includes a link to the PostScript slides of the talk. The slides will also be shortly be available from UKUUG.

The talk was "The Design and Implementation of a Large Scalable Mail Server". It's about the mail cluster I set up here for Oxford University and it sounds similar to what the original request was for. We have about 30000 users. I successfully argued against MS Exchange and designed and built a completely Open Source solution based on a Linux cluster with 250GB of disk, UW imapd/ipopd, Exim (MTA) and an Apache/mod_perl-based web to mail gateway that I wrote called WING. The two Solaris nodes in the cluster were there for political reasons and are being replaced by Linux boxes within the next few weeks. There is a WING web page and mailing list which includes a link to the PostScript slides of the talk. The slides will also be shortly be available from UKUUG.

Oxford University have been doing this kind of stuff for ages - go to the oxford University Wolfson Research Laboratory. I don't have the full link off hand, but you'll find their research in the Parallel Computing department.

_Fountains_of_Paradise by Arthur C. Clarke also had microfilaments. In that book they were very think carbon chains or tubes I believe. Today we'd call the tube form Bucky-Tubes. The ends could turn into some other structure that wouldn't cut through things. You could then have one end fastened to a handle, and then in the other end have a chunk of superconductor. A strong electromagnet in the handle would keep the bucky-tube tight. (the superconductor would be repelled by the electromagnet) Not a light-saber, but a pretty neat high-tech "blade" weapon. The blade would probably be close to invisible too...

Come to think of it, such an idea might've been proposed in a Larry Niven story, though I can't remember what, or even if...