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PSU just recommended Firefox over IE by finkployd · 2004-12-09 11:23 · Score: 1 · on New Technologies for Colleges?

I submitted this morning but it got rejected, but this seems a good place to bring it up.

In a tech news story Penn State recommends that its 120,000+ users "use standards-based Web browsers other than Internet Explorer to help minimize exposure to attacks that occur through browser vulnerabilities. Web browser options include Firefox, one of several alternatives available for Windows, Mac and other operating systems. It works with all Web-based applications used at Penn State"

"ITS has made this recommendation because the threats are real and alternatives exist to mitigate Web browser vulnerabilities."

Finkployd

Agreed by Anonymous Coward · 2004-12-08 04:16 · Score: 0 · on PA Sues Online 'University' For Spamming

Pennsylvania needs to do all it can to shut down degree mills like the one mentioned in the article and this, lesser publicized one.

Re:Whoof by Anonymous Coward · 2004-12-06 10:15 · Score: 0 · on Daring to Dream: Apple & IBM

the original ad

the "enhanced" ad

Re:Whoof by Anonymous Coward · 2004-12-06 10:15 · Score: 0 · on Daring to Dream: Apple & IBM

the original ad

the "enhanced" ad

Re:The battle continues... by bastard42 · 2004-12-06 09:38 · Score: 1 · on New BSD licensed CVS replacement for OpenBSD

Too bad the plan9 compiler license isn't compatible with openbsd.

But you have to admit, using "The Creator's" compiler has a certain ring to it. I'd love to see plan9 in more places. Too bad the communities don't match up. Or what little is left of plan9's.

Article Failings and Synchronized vs Locks by ban · 2004-11-22 22:26 · Score: 1 · on JDK 5.0: More Flexible, Scalable Locking

I have a few issues with this article. Why isn't there any mention of exactly which JVM he is using? Why is there no source code for his tests?

I happen to write a JVM for a living, and there are huge differences between how locks perform in different situations on the different VMs.

When it comes to using synchronized vs Locks, and that synchronized should be implemented with the methods in Lock et.c. people tend to miss two important facts.

Having monitorEnter/monitorExit paired gives you nice possibilities for optimization (like keeping track of recursion depth as a result of the lock operation, since you know which unlock should be the real unlock et.c.).
You can potentially synchronize on every object in Java, and uncontended thread local synchronization should be fast and not introduce memory overhead.

If you think that the implementation of synchronized use O/S or user level mutexes as the implementation for the fast case you should probably read http://citeseer.ist.psu.edu/bacon98thin.html and continue with the articles referencing it.

But then again, this is Slashdot, why would people read anything about the subjects they're commenting on.

Re:Swift Song... by Satai · 2004-11-20 14:18 · Score: 2, Insightful · on Swift Observatory Launched

You may recall the issues having that song on their site has caused for the Penn State Astro Department...

PSU was a major partner in Swift, and the MOC will be in State College, PA. It's a great place to be right now for GRB physics...

Debugging in space: a case for dynamic systems. by voodoo1man · 2004-11-20 08:09 · Score: 4, Interesting · on Writing Code for Spacecraft

In 1998-2001, the JPL successfuly flew the Deep Space 1 spacecraft. One of the systems on board was the Remote Agent, a fully autonomous spacecraft control and guidance system. The software was written entirely in Common Lisp, and parts were verified in SPIN (there is an interesting paper written on the verification process, along with an informal account by one of the designers), which yielded the detection of several unforeseen race conditions. The parts that were not verified were thought to be thread-safe, but unfortunately this proved mistaken as a race condition occured in-flight. With the help of the Read-Eval-Print Loop and other Lisp debugging facilities, the bug was tracked down and fixed in less than a day, and Remote Agent went on to win NASA's Software of the Year Award.

Perhaps not surprisingly for anyone who has heard about the management at NASA, C++ was selected for the successors to the Remote Agent on the grounds that it is supposed to be more reliable (this despite the fact that the Remote Agent was originally to be developed in C++, an effort that was abandoned after a year of failure). This caused more than a few people to be upset (including a very personal account by one of the aforementioned designers). Clearly the debugging facilities of Common Lisp are far superior to static systems like C++, something which is very useful in diagnosing unexpected error conditions in spacecraft software (read the first question on p. 3 of the interview to see what pains the JPL staff went through to adapt similar, ad-hoc methods to VxWorks). It's also clear from this interview (question: "How is application programming done for a spacecraft?" Answer:"Much the same as for anything elsesoftware requirements are written, with specifications and test plans, then the software is written and tested, problems are fixed, and eventually its sent off to do its job.") that NASA has in no way tried to adapt formal verification methods for it's software, prefering instead to rely on the "tried and true" (at failing, maybe) poke-and-test development "methods."

Clearly, formal verification methods to eliminate bugs before critical software is deployed, and deployment in a system with advanced debugging facilities is a clear win for spacecraft software, and should be adapted as the standard model of development. Unfortunately, like in many other software development enterprises, inertia keeps outdated, inadequate systems going despite a strong failure correlation rate.

Google vs. Citeseer vanity search by Laaserboy · 2004-11-18 11:05 · Score: 1 · on Google Keyhole, Google Scholar

Google Scholar seems like it's just a much better interface to the same idea

I agree. Some quick results of a vanity search. I found all of my papers and more through Google. Citeseer found none of them. I'm still hunting. Google even found papers where I was listed as an author which I did not know existed.

It is interesting that Google (bombing|spamming) in the world of article references predates Google. Want a promotion in the academy? Cite yourself hundreds of times in your own articles, and your citation count goes through the roof, like this. Promotions and disgust from colleagues usually follow.

Re:Authors by Jagasian · 2004-11-18 10:14 · Score: 1 · on Google Keyhole, Google Scholar

Too bad somebody has already done it

Re:lexis-nexis replacement by jacobm · 2004-11-18 02:40 · Score: 4, Insightful · on Google Keyhole, Google Scholar

More a CiteSeer replacement, I think. The idea behind CiteSeer is that in academic computer science, most researchers (and most conferences and journals) make their papers available for free on the web, but there are so many of them and so many places to look that actually finding a paper that's relevant to your research is really hard. The CiteSeer folks realized that web spiders could do a very good job of indexing all those papers and putting them in a searchable form and that it was much cheaper (computationally, financially, effort-wise) than traditional approaches like Lexis/Nexis. CiteSeer has been available for free for years, and Google Scholar seems like it's just a much better interface to the same idea, so I don't see any reason why they'd turn it into a pay service.

Scholar search! by Xpilot · 2004-11-18 01:59 · Score: 5, Interesting · on Google Keyhole, Google Scholar

Excellent! As a postgrad CS student, I've been more or less relying on Citeseer and Google to search for literature online. Citeseer is really useful, but I find its search rather cumbersome. If Google can create a specialty search for academic papers...I'm more than thrilled! Go Google!

You mean creationist claims #CC111? by geekotourist · 2004-11-17 22:30 · Score: 4, Interesting · on Humans in America 25,000 Years Ago?

While claims have been made about skeletons in older rock, or of human and dinosour interactions, these claims aren't corroborated- they are disproved.

Finding new skeletons in older rock can be easy. Finding fossilized skeletons- the same age as the rock- that would be interesting.

For more reading, check out the whole index of standard creationist claims, as well as their good set of FAQS, including How do we know the age of the earth?, and fossil hominids.

As to humans making it out to the New World that much earlier than previously known, I'm not surprised... we're a wandering species (and genus), going way back. Modern Homo sapiens was poking about in odd places by 100k years ago, so there isn't any inherent reason why we shouldn't have been there. However, generally when humans arrive in force we tend to leave evidence (like stone age habitats or megafauna extinctions), so these potential first North Americans were keeping fairly quiet, archeologically-wise.

Re:My Favourite by delete · 2004-11-16 11:42 · Score: 1 · on Ex-Britannica Editor Reviews Wikipedia

I have disagree to some extent that the Internet is out for serious research, at least for CS. Citeseer is generally my first point of call for research papers. For journal articles, depending upon the publisher, an ACM or IEEE subscription may be required. However, I find that an increasing number of researchers are making their publications freely available on their home pages.

Either way, I generally find it useful to trawl Google - the sheer volume of indexed PDFs containing citations can often suggest other relevant papers. Of course, anything pre-1996 can be difficult to find, though companies such as IBM still provide online access to papers dating back to the early 1970's.

Re:No. by _Sprocket_ · 2004-11-15 08:00 · Score: 1 · on Are Usability & Security Opposites in Computing?

Take pgp and email. There are TONS of plugins for various emali clients to support signing and encrypting email.

A great example. Let's take PGP. It's been available for over a decade. It has been fully integrated (directly or via plugins or scripts) for years. Yet how much do you see it? And of those you do see using it, who are they? In my experience, it is a small subset of technicaly knowlegable individuals or small groups that require encryption and have been told to use PGP. PGP is not used by the masses. Why?

Ultimately, clear-text email is easier. Using PGP requires considerably more effort than not. So the general masses, even those who understand the falibility of clear-text email, tend not to use it unless there is a need to go to the added trouble.

This falls in line with our premis. Increased security impacts usability. That doesn't mean that we couldn't minimize that impact (and PGP's interface couldn't be improved, for example). But even with those considerations, the end user will still feel some kind of impact.

Re:HTTPS? by Southpaw018 · 2004-11-15 00:16 · Score: 1 · on DIY LED-Illuminated Sleep Chamber

Thankfully, Penn State uses a nice proprietary system they "creatively" (sarcasm) call eLion. I can point to many, many stupid things PSU has done in reference to technology and the monkeys with typewriters at the Office of Telecommunications, but eLion has always been solid.

Re:Sensationalist /. headlines by Anonymous Coward · 2004-11-10 12:11 · Score: 0 · on Latest Version of MyDoom Exploits New IE Flaw

Sounds to me like you don't care for slashdot much. If that's the case, why are you here?

It's not that I don't like Slashdot in general, but I don't believe everything I read here.

Oh yes, let's just generalize for the purpose of making him sound like a moron. At least he's sticking to the topic, virus and how it exploits IE.

Everything he said applies to the Linux kernel too. He was trying to say that Windows is broken because it took so long for SP2 to be released. It took at least as long to get from the stable release 2.4 to 2.6 of the Linux kernel, so is that proof that 2.4 is broken? No.
Furthermore, he named no specific viruses, exploits in IE or anything else.

And you know this... How? Oh wait, let me guess, you read it on slashdot, so it must be true...

If it's so easy, then how come there aren't any provably safe/correct OSes in existance? The only provably correct software I am aware of run a few critical functions for orginizations that can afford the development: nuclear reactor computers, some of NASA's software. Nothing even approaching the complexity of Windows or Linux have even been attempted. Information is hard to link to because you have to pay for it. See http://archive.comlab.ox.ac.uk/procos/codesign.htm l, http://citeseer.ist.psu.edu/lin91provably.html, http://csd.informatik.uni-oldenburg.de/persons/ste phan.kleuker/s-kleuker.hti-abstracts.html.

No, he's not saying the Linux kernel is invulnerable. Far from it. He's saying Windows has far more vulnerabilities. No study necessary. Unless you're a total Microsoft Zealot, you should be able to see that as plain as day.

He specifically said the "heart" of Linux: I can only assume he is referring to the kernel. You've avoided that point entirely. The Windows kernel has equal or less vulnerabilities than the Linux kernel does. I dare you to name even one recent one that allows privlege escilation in SP2. Here is one in 2.6.0, and another in 2.6.6... Just ask Google

So you are saying that your position is so obvious and such common knowledge that you cannot find any support for it? That's called doublethink. If it was obvious, you should be able to provide copious, valid, fair and detailed sources to support your position. Stating that it's obvious without any support at all, as I posted earlier, destroys your credibility. No one is going to believe you just because you say it's true. That's the main problem I had with E-Rock-23, and now you.

Back off him, he does have a good point.

A point cannot be any good without support. He stated his case with zero references of any kind.

Besides, you're the one who posted anonymously

1. I don't see a name at the top of your post
2. What makes you think that's why I posted AC?
3. If your threshold is so high, how did you see the grandparent?

Re:It's is a SHAM. by Theatetus · 2004-11-07 13:11 · Score: 4, Informative · on U.S. Continues Opposition to Kyoto Environmental Treaty

Maybe you should go find the section in the treaty that says "China and India can produce as much polution as they like".

Jesus...

Kyoto doesn't apply to developing nations like India and China.

Maybe you could start learning about the subject before you form an opinion?

Prior Art by Anonymous Coward · 2004-11-04 08:57 · Score: 1, Informative · on Amazon Sued Over Recommendation Patent

Can you say "prior art"?

http://citeseer.ist.psu.edu/shardanand95social.htm l

This is the first hit on Citeseer: a 1995 paper that describes pretty much the exact same thing. This patent is totally bogus, it should have never been awarded.

Re:Advice: Get lots of RAM by Anonymous Coward · 2004-10-30 12:03 · Score: 1, Informative · on Experiences w/ Software RAID 5 Under Linux?

Consider one row in a 7 drive array. It has 6 data blocks and one parity block:

D1 D2 D3 D4 D5 D6 P1

where P1 is the XOR of D1 through D6.

If I write to D1, but leave any of D2-D3 alone, then it is necessary to read SOMETHING in order to calculate the new parity. Yes, I know what I'm writing, but unless I overwrite the whole thing, I must perform extra operations in order to update the parity block correctly. These extra operations degrade performance, and are known as the small write problem. As another AC above said, the update can be done with two reads and two writes; read the old D1 and the old P1, then write the new D1, and write P1 to be (old D1 XOR new D1 XOR old P1). It's a bit of trickery, but it does give the correct parity block. It does, however, take two reads and two writes, to update the one block.

Linux (last I looked) doesn't do this. Instead it takes the simpler approach of reading the blocks in the row that it isn't updating (D2 through D6 in this case), and then computing P1 as the XOR of D1 through D6 again.

The small write problem is a big deal. Although the IOs can happen in parallel, the latency for the write becomes the maximum of the reads plus the latency of the parity write. The larger number of IOs also keep the array busy when it could be doing other things, which degrades the performance of those other operations. And it causes this performance degregation for small updates (those under the stripe size), amoung the most common operations. Even if all of your files are big, and written in a streaming manner, the metadata updates are generally in a different row in the array, and are small, isolated writes. A journaled file system, depending on how it is implemented, can be much worse for generating lots of scattered writes. Here is a paper from CMU that gives one possible solution (one that isn't implemented by Linux). The traditional solution is write caching--you delay the write until either you've updated the other entries in the row, you've read the other entires in the row, or it is otherwise convienient to do the update (i.e. array isn't busy). This is of course dangerous because your data isn't on disk but in RAM. OTOH, witha good UPS, loosing the contents of RAM is a relatively rare event. To sidestep the volitility of RAM entirely, nice HW raid controllers have some amount of non-volitile memory (either NVRAM or battery backed DRAM) for this purpose. Writeback caching can also help perfomance on non-RAID devices, since it allows you to reorder the writes to minimize head seeks and rotational latency. These two, especially the head seeks, are what make disk IO slow.

You obviously don't have much background in storage. Try reading Chen's classic paper on RAID, go and search for a few papers the reference it, and then come back and spout off. Until then, quit giving people bad advice.

Re:No chance... by freelunch · 2004-10-26 04:29 · Score: 2, Interesting · on Nuclear Rockets Moving Along

The fear is ridiculous because nuclear plants have an excellent track records, because modern designs are inherently safe, because nuclear waste is compact and relatively easy to store.

It isn't ridiculous. As this recent near catastrophy illustrates.

A buddy of mine has a masters in nuclear engineering. He tells me of testing steel alloys for various reactor applications and finding siginficant issues. But because the goal of the study was elsewhere, he was told to ignore it by the professor.

You should hear him talk about how F'd up the Yucca mountain waste storage project is. The government and US industry consider the project solved to the point where they won't even fund further research. He says Europe is much further along in how they encapsulate and handle the waste problem.

Did Forbes do ANY Actual Research? by finkployd · 2004-10-22 07:27 · Score: 1 · on America's Most Connected Campuses

They got PSU completely wrong.

From the Top:

Is there a campuswide network? Yes
Hey, Forbes got one right!

Is there a wireless network? No
There is not wireless completely covering the huge campus, but there are wireless hotspots all over the place. This admittedly is a problem since only a handfull are centrally managed and use the University's central authentication system.

Can students access e-mail away from school? No
Yeah, because we don't offer POP3 (SSL POP3 and Kerberized POP3 for that matter). And if that doesn't count we wrote our own frikkin (extremely popular) webmail application for crying out loud (none of the existing ones scaled all that well or made use of our existing infrastructure)

Does the school provide Web pages? No
Wrong again

Does the school offer classes online? No
World Campus

Can students register online? No
Since about 1998 or so.

Can students do other administrative functions online? No
I cannot think of any administrative functions you CANNOT do online.

Are students required to own a computer? No
True, but only because just about every one does and if they do not there are general use labs at every campus.

Can students get discounted computers? Yes
Forbes now has two correct answers.

Does the school support handheld computers?
That's kinda vague. I'll accept no for now but that is being actively worked on.

Does the school stream audio or video of any courses? No
Yes

Is network access available in dorm rooms? No
Has been for years possibly a decade (there was when I got here in 96)

Is network access available in dormitory lounges? No
There are now three correct answers, go Forbes :)

Is a computer ethics policy in place for the school? No
Yes, remember who (for good or ill) pioneered the Napster II stuff? That was as a result of the ethics policy.

Do students have access to Usenet newsgroups? No
Since Usenet existed (we were one of the first Bitnet nodes for crying out loud)

Does tuition include a computer? No
Four! Four correct answers...ha ha ha ha

Does the school provide multimedia equipment? No
Yes

Does the school offer courses in emerging technologies? No
I know quite a few professors who would be ticked at that answer.

Does the school stream its campus radio or TV stations?
WPSU, For all your NPR and PRI needs :)

If all the stats Forbes has on schools are as accurate as this one, then this report means nothing.

Finkployd