Slashdot Mirror

First off, the spam filters are actually classification algorithms, not filters---the name filter is incorrectly used almost exclusively by spam classification software--and worse yet they're really only referring to a specific classifier (the "Naive Bayes" algorithm) rather than to classifiers in general. "Bayesian" filters are things like Kalman Filters, Particle Filters and Hidden Markov Models which are used in any number of fields, but not really germane to the tasks you're asking about I think. Using "Bayesian Classification" in Google will probably yield more fruitful results.

It sounds like you want to extend the naive bayes classifier to more than two categories and, in the best case, learn new categories from the data. Both can be done and have been done with varying degrees of success. You might try here for some pointers to more information about how it is done (the algorithm itself has been around since the '60s---people only think its something new). Unfortunately for things like RSS and email you're going to run into two problems: you really want to do your classification on-line and your data are actually quite sparse and your prior is usually uninformative so its going to be hard to do the actual classification. But, who knows, its still an active topic of research.

I'm starting to think we'll never see any real space development until a new, radical propulsion technology comes along.

Oddly enough, NASA is pulling out of its involvement in prototype craft and engine research of the X-43 hypersonic demonstrator and RS-84 reusable rocket engine, directly as a result of the new prioritization of space exploration.

Myself, I think we should skip that and work on antimatter production, storage, and propulsion concepts. Sure, it's a good 3 or 4 manhattan projects away from being useful, but it's the stuff we'll get to the stars with. Maybe if someone were to tell the current administration it's also end-all of weaponizable materials they'd throw a few billions dollars at a new accelerator to make it in usable quantities.

As a Penn Stater, I noted that our student newspaper opined today that the trustees are spending WAY too much time congratulating themselves over the deal with Napster. File sharing may be important (or may not be), but universities are starting to focus on it above other concerns. The RIAA targeting college students through their institutions only helps to give these universities something to focus on other than their real problems.

Will the recent acceptance by such reputable companies open the possibility to Universities that not all P2P distribution is inherently bad?"

Some of us are hoping that Lionshare will help a little with that also.

Finkployd

Ok, the article (especially the "6000x faster than DSL") doesn't make a whole lot of sense. Here's my take on it: they're talking about a new congestion avoidance mechanism.

Here's a super-simplified version of the problem they're trying to solve: Imagine you have a 3Mbps link to your ISP, as do 49 of your neighbors. However, your ISP has a 45Mbps T3 link to the outside internet. What happens when everybody on your ISP trys to download the Half-Life 2 demo at the same time, creating a need for for 150 Mbps at the ISP uplink? This is called congestion.

There are various solutions that you can use for congestion avoidance; you may have heard of TCP Vegas and Reno (I'm linking to the PDF document, because it contains a lot of math. This should also be a signal to you about how ridiculously siplified my explanation above is). Obviously, when there is congestion, somebody's got to wait, but determining who and how is not as easy as it might seem.

The new part of the problem is: today's fast networks have very different bandwidth and latency ratios to the networks of even five years ago. Vegas and Reno congestion avoidance algorithms don't work as well as they used to under these conditions. This paper presents a solution that does work well on today's high-speed networks. (Maybe somebody with more expertise could pipe in here with a discussion of "why the existing mechanisms don't work well, and how the new solutions address the problem"?)

I believe slashdot has already covered FAST, which I believe is a different solution to the same problems.

The difference is how atom of N, P, or K is delivered, as in what compound that atom is delivered in. Many chemical fertilizers, as well as raw, unprocessed animal waste and sewage sludge, has a tendancy to "burn" or over fertilize due to the nutrients being part of a less stable compound that releases the active materiakls too quickly. The bacteria that are essential to the secondary, aerobic composting "fix" the nitrogen into a usable form, while the inclusion of a carbon source, such as corn stalks, hay, sawdust, or wood chips, will buffer the mix so as to prevent overferilization. Atmospheric nitrogen is fixed into the soil in very high concentrations when you grow alfalfa or clover as a fallow crop.

I'm not going to claim that it is impossible (or uncommon) for organic fertilizers to "burn" a feild when there's too little rain, or for them to contribute to the polluting of our waterways when there's too much (I grew up in farm country, but in the east where there's sometimes, but not often, years that are "too wet").

But organic fertilizers are less soluble than chemical preparations, and tend to stay put where you place them rather than wash out in a heavy rain. Plus, the plants have a harder time breaking down the larger compounds that make up composted natural fertilizers, causing a slower release of the nutrients that last for a greater portion of the growing season. Sometimes this makes it difficult for the plants to make use of the phosphate (P) and potassium (K), so the composted natural fertilizers are sometimes innoculated with mycorrhizal funguses that are necessary for some plants to make use of these fertilizers.

Yes, all fertilizers can be damaging to both crops and the environment when applied at the wrong time or in the wrong amounts, but properly prepared composted natural fertilizers (PSU's AG department has some good materials here) are a much safer alternative than most chemically prepared solutions. All the crap from the "Organic Produce" lobby has given natural fertilizers the appeaerance of some sort of hippy shit, but they've been used sustainably for a thousands of years, and our grandparents knew that there was more to taking care of the soil than chemical powders and sprays were capable of doing. There's something to be said for farmers that see the land as being part of their life and their family instead of simply the investment the banks and the agribusinesses tell us it is.

Which isn't to say that it will be exactly like the SM Higgs, just that it won't look too different at low energy, or we already would have seen its impact in precision eletroweak measurements, for instance.

Is that true? I didn't think the precision electroweak stuff depended too much on the pure Higgs interactions, but just on the symmetry-broken 'residual interactions' - i.e. the ones that gave the particles mass. I always find it hard to tell, though, as most books completely gloss over the Higgs physics sections because it hasn't been seen.

we have no experimentally confirmed examples of fundamental tensor fields, either, but most of us think gravitons exist :-)

Well, we do have an experimentally confirmed example of a tensor field - gravity. That's what linearized gravity says - if you did have a spin-2 field, it'd generate gravity in the linearized limit. The important part is that the argument is reversible - you can say "what spin particle would cause these effects?" So we don't have experimental evidence of the particle, but we do have experimental evidence of the field.

The same isn't true for the Higgs field - you can't "reverse course" like you can with gravity, and take the interactions and work backwards to the dynamics of the particle. The easiest counterexample is technicolor, which would just as easily explain the Higgs interaction (ignore for the moment it also suggests other junk which is unobserved - it's unimportant to the argument). The point is that the scalar Higgs interaction does not uniquely predict anything. (As far as I know, no one's worked backwards from the fact that particles have mass and we see the interactions we do and said "only a fundamental scalar can cause this")

those line shapes are inconsistent with the presence of fermions that we haven't yet seen which are lighter than half the Z mass.

Yah, but I thought that restricted the heavier of the lepton family only (i.e. the electron-type) and not the lighter. Hrm, should go off and read the PDB section on that again.

But they all have their own challenges, usually conflict with existing data.

Ah, but doesn't a purely scalar Higgs conflict with existing data as well? We don't see one, after all. The excuse of saying "we haven't looked at high enough energies" seems to be exactly that - an excuse. I'll give the Higgs mechanism credit for being a "well-constructed theory" - a theory with enough flexibility in its parameters to avoid being disproven for quite some time. Like SUSY, for example (which I also don't believe is real).

The main reason that a simple scalar Higgs theory dominates now is because of the simplicity argument (and because it was first...), but I don't agree that having one fundamental scalar, and then everything else being more complex, is simple. :)

By the way, the link on your homepage to your research appears broken....

It is - that isn't my homepage anymore (I don't have a current one...), though my current research is here, if that web server's running. :) I really need to create a new webpage...

Anyway, the funny thing is that I know all of the complications about the Higgs's existence - I mean, I've done the toy problem as to why it has to have the isospin that it does, etc. - but I still just don't believe that any particle that conveniently avoids discovery, and is the only one of its kind, has to be real. Note that I don't necessarily believe in a fundamental graviton, either. :) And also, it's not like I have a better idea - I'm just skeptical. Lots of people can give me good reasons why a proton needs to decay, after all - and I'll still point to the >10^33 years measurement and say "Prove it."

Allows you to search all kinds of papers, including technical paper.s

Don't forget existing ad-hoc routing protocols that work fine with IPV4 or IPV6, like

dynamic source routing (dsr)
destination sequenced distance vector (dsdv)
temorally ordered routing (tora)
ad-hoc on demand distance vector (dsdv)
comparison paper

Some of these are even used in reasonably large real world networks.

-jim

The original paper is here

Claude Berrou, Alain Glavieux, and Punya Thitimajshima, "Near Shannon Limit Error-Correcting Coding and Decoding:Turbo-Codes", in Proceedings of IEEE International Conference on Communications, (Geneva, Switzerland), pp. 1064--1070, May 1993.
http://gladstone.systems.caltech.edu/EE/Courses/EE 127/EE127B/handout/berrou.pdf

(with 400 citations, as counted by CiteSeer ResearchIndex
http://citeseer.ist.psu.edu/context/31968/0
-- yeah, it is since 1993 .. not "new", but currently still a hot topic in telecomm.)

about the authors, the first two are French professors who had already mentioned in the article, the last one is Thai, at that time a PhD student at Ecole.

I ask because I am considering going to school to teach special education for gifted students, being one myself through school I know the children are often pitted against others for little more than academic sport. Integrated Knowledge based curriculum was the enlightenment of my adolescent age where suddenly the basic intellectual tools I had garnered from my parachioal schooling were gathered in force to attack problems that seemed tangible and engaging to someone like myself. I do not pretend I am some super genius aboce 200 but being on the opposite end of the bell curve from autism makes even people with a 100 IQ tedious to interact with at times. Around 130+ IQ typically do not mesh well with the philistines in society in spite of their expanded awareness in most matters they seem even less apt than children with autism to percieve social clues.

if the law is anything similar to the European database directive, you do not benefit from a direct copytight on all of the facts contained in the database.

Rather the law recognizes that a lot of effort goes into making a proper crosslinked, searchable and enhanced DB, even if it only contains facts.

For instance, try searching an academic paper on CiteSeer , now isn't that much better than doing it the the old way.

CiteSeer doesn't claim to own copyright of all those documents but the DB, it's layout, structure and organization sure is copyrighted (and rightfully so IMHO).

Well..I might be damaged from working in the field of intellectual property (and everything I wrote is of course only my personal opinion by the way) =)

I suggest you look at the history and publications relating to SIMNET, an old MMOG military simulation project from the 1980s DARPA funded. The classic paper is from 1993: "The SIMNET Virtual World Architecture", Calvin & Dicken, Proceedings of the IEEE Virtual Reality Annual International Symposium 1993, pp: 450-455.

Design Report circa June '03 here

If you properly stretch the string, you can stabilize the tuning in less than two minutes. No need to wait a day or two. (I'm not a pro, but have played many shows on stage in the past.)

So yeah. I'm a PSU student. They've just installed firewalls everywhere on campus to block out everything, but internet, napster, im.

Nope, just dorms. Still sucks I agree, but let's be factual.

Also technically it blocks everything but port 80 and 443. Guess which ports Napster uses?

PSU signed a deal with napster because one of the board members is on the RIAA commision. There is also some administrative link to Napster.

You are refering to Berry Robinson, who is on PSU's Board of Trustees and is the Senior Counsel for the RIAA.

Finkployd

That sounds workable emough. Granting power to individuals is useful. It's unaccountable power that worries me.

Hmmm, look a little harder. Googling for "Jury Nulification" turned up some interesting results right at the top. For instance, the Georgia and Virginia State constitutions specifically give juries power to "be judges of law as well as fact". Here and here.

Jury nullification provides an important mechanism for feedback. Jurors sometimes use nullification to send messages to prosecutors about misplaced enforcement priorities or what they see as harassing or abusive prosecutions. Jury nullification prevents our criminal justice system from becoming too rigid--it provides some play in the joints for justice, if jurors use their power wisely.

There is indeed a lack of legislative text about the topic, but that makes sense. How do you draft laws to dictate how people will ignore them? Indeed, it seems to be only the highest judicial levels that give the matter any weight at all (generally courts that don't actually have juries, oddly enough). Apparently just speaking in public in a courthouse about it is enough to get you kicked out or arrested.

There's a semi-urban legend of a burglar who fell down through a skylight while attempting to break into this one home and successfully sued the owners for negligence in not putting up warning signs on their roof. I'm unable to find anything more than anecdote about it, but (assuming it's more or less accurate) you can guess what happened; the jury was told that they had to base their decision off of the facts of the case alone. I'd bet my next paycheck that they were told that though the law, when applied to this case, lost all resemblance to common sense, they would have to find the owners guilty if the facts of the case demanded it.

That said, I fully appreciate the need for juries to consider the law far in front of their own consciences. Were I on a jury, for me to even consider nullification it would have to be a case that I felt to be so detrimental to the public good that to convict the guy would be a insult.

Just take a look at key military technology in the '60s and '70s:

• First space mission training/preparation casulaty: Valentine Bondarenko, 1961.
• First space mission casualty: Vladimir Komarov, Soyuz 1, 1967.
• Worst ever rocket disaster: the Nedelin disaster at Baikonur, October 24, 1960. Over 100 people died.
• Failed to replicate the US's manned moon program.

First working long-term space stations: Russia (also used for spying)

World's most powerfull rocket: Russia (Energija), implies that they could launch a BIG amount of plutonium for a BIG shot.

Most reliable rocket technology: Russia

There was also a big fuss about that the USSR stole the space shuttle technology for their Buran shuttle. Actually, the Buran uses a more modern design, has a much higher capacity, better aerodynamics and even can fly completly on automatic (whereas the US shuttle must be landed per joystick).

You said key military technology of the 60's and 70's and then listed a bunch of later achievements. In the 60's and 70's the USSR were clearly behind. At the time it was not obvious but it certainly is now.

but at least X clearly predates MS Windows.

How clearly?

Microsoft 1983

Xwindows 1984

1. Of the two, only Marie Curie died from causes of radiation exposure. Pierre got run over by a vehicle, but would have probably met the same fate.
2. Clarence Dally was Thomas Edison's assistance with Xrays. Here's a link.

why shouldn't someone be able to force me to write a program in such away as to force me to generate charts

The rules are different when a court determines your business is a monopoly. This change would not have happened if that was not the case.

"Penn State" is the abbreviated nickname for Pennsylvania State University, a governmental-run university with its head campus in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania (the state capital); there are a grand total of 18 satellite campuses throughout Pennsylvania. Penn State is known for its football team, the Nittany Lions. For any more detailed information, check the link. (I went to Gannon, so I could tell you more about that school.)

Actually the "head" campus is University Park and is located several hours away from Harrisburg. in a city called "State College"

And there are 21 campuses.

Finkployd

If I'm reading the FAQ correctly then it looks to me like students at PSU can stream any song that they want but if they want to actually put it on an iPod^H^H^H^HiRiver or whatever then they actually have to shell out their own money for the track that they then can keep for playing away from their computer.

Also, since this is a service that is drawn from out of the students' tuition fees that means that everybody is paying for it. What about people with a Mac? What about Linux/BSD geeks?

There are a lot of services that I pay on my tuition that I don't actively take advantage of (health services, gym, etc.) but at least with those I can say, "Well, I may be paying for them but at any time I can begin to take advantage of the services that I'm paying for just buy walking over to the Gym" However, in this situation if all I had was my PowerBook I would be paying for a service that I `literally` could not take advantage of. I'm paying for a service that in no way can be used without me investing in a Wintel XP/2000 PC. That sucks.

It's not being paid for with tuition money. The school had money left over since they do not distribute microsoft software anymore, so the financing for this came from leftover ITS funds. It didn't take long for them to put a stop to other downloading methods also.
Link

I work at PSU, and apparently, this service is free only to students. Faculty and staff members, like myself, get a discount, but it's not much.

The PSU-hosted site for the Napster service can be found here.

For you foreigners, this is a 'Pitt'.

It all boils down to this...
Pitt versus Penn State
Culture versus Agriculture

... and we have a supercomputers

For you foreigners, this is a 'Pitt'.

It all boils down to this...
Pitt versus Penn State
Culture versus Agriculture

... and we have a supercomputers

As a Pitt fan, trust me, there still is a Rivalry (at least on our side of the fence). My son is now six months old. If, when he turns 18, he decides to attend that evil school in State College, I'll write him out of my will. If he decides to attend West Virginia University, same thing.

Otherwise, he can pretty much go wherever he wants. Except for any ACC school. Those bastards.

Oh, and Pitt is ALSO a much better men's basketball team. Women's hoops? I give Penn State *some* credit. They are better in that sport.

About 350 years ago, a wealthy Brit was granted a lot of land on the American continent by the British monarchy. His name, William Penn. After the colonies revolted against the British crown, the colonies coagulated into states. Penn's state was big enough that it didn't need to coagulate into a larger territory, so it remained as it was: Penn State.

One of the legacies of Penn is a love of freedom, and this latest embrace of P2P by Penn State is another in a long string of "Live Free or Die" actions.

The story of Penn State is long and quite profound, but it's not quite pertinent to this discussion (except for the love of freedom stuff).

Great. Now for the Rest of the Story, told by someone who actually lives in "Penn State".

"Penn State", as the above (non-American) poster uses it, is actually the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania. (Derived from founder William Penn, "Pennsylvania" is composed from "Penn" and "Sylvania", and generally means "Penn's Woods".) Pennsylvania is one of two commonwealths (not strictly states) in the U.S.; Massachusetts is the other. (The difference is largely semantic to someone not interested in political theory and the like.) Pennsylvania is the only of the original 13 Colonies that does not have a border on the Atlantic Ocean; it is bordered by New York to the north, Ohio to the west, New Jersey to the east, and West Virginia, Maryland, and Delaware to the south. The only coastline Pennsylvania has is in the northwest region, on Lake Erie; the city of Erie (home to Gannon University) is an important port along the Great Lakes.

"Penn State" is the abbreviated nickname for Pennsylvania State University, a governmental-run university with its head campus in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania (the state capital); there are a grand total of 18 satellite campuses throughout Pennsylvania. Penn State is known for its football team, the Nittany Lions. For any more detailed information, check the link. (I went to Gannon, so I could tell you more about that school.)

Eventually, the Voyagers will pass other stars. In about 40,000 years, Voyager 1 will drift within 1.6 light years (9.3 trillion miles) of AC+79 3888, a star in the constellation of Camelopardalis. In some 296,000 years, Voyager 2 will pass 4.3 light years (25 trillion miles) from Sirius, the brightest star in the sky . The Voyagers are destined--perhaps eternally--to wander the Milky Way.

You are not entirely correct.

The average healthy human eye is most responsive to blue and yellow and least responsive to red. This is the reason you see red and blue lights in dim-lit areas. Blue lights stand out more and are easier to read whereas red-lights cause shorter term night and/or flash blindness[1]. This why you see redlights come on in emergancy situations in things like submarines, powerplants, etc. It's more gentle on the eyes.

For more information, try taking this course on human-machine interaction. The first 1/3rd of the course is how the eyes and ears work and basic perception modelling.

-Ab

[1] Night/fash blindness is what accurs when you get spot images in your eyes from extremely bright light, such as a camera flash, looking at the sun, turning on the bathroom light when you wake up in the middle of the night to relieve yourself, or walking outside after a fresh snow. It is caused by your pupil allowing too much light in at once and your retinal cells (mostly rods in this case) releasing too much neurotransmitters and not having enough to replace, rendering them incapable of sending more out until their supply has been replenished.

"Most professionals are moving to digital because the quality is now just as good for most situations."

Note you said "professionals". People who want to start photography don't have the resources professionals do. If I want to take great photographs, in many cases that rules out most point-and-shoot cameras. I can't tell you how many times I've gotten a bad shot from one of these because the aperature is set for your average shot and isn't adjustable, and I take a picture in low light and it has to keep the shutter open forever leading to a blurry shot. (BTW: anything 1/30th sec. or more is "forever", and 1/60th can be if you don't have somethnig to brace against.) Yet I've taken pics with an SLR in much less light that came out dandy because I could set the f-stop to 1.7 and speed up the shutter by a factor of 4 or so. I could *never* have taken these pictures of the aurora with anything but an SLR.

"Digital is the best choice for a beginner because you can do a lot more experimenting without spending a fortune on things like film and developing."

You just spend a fortune on the initial camera. Amazon's store (Electronics > Camera & Photo > Categories > Film Cameras > SLR Cameras > Manual SLR Cameras) has cameras centered about $250, with one $161. The least expensive digital SLR I've seen is I think ~$800. The difference then is about 50 rolls of film. I don't think I've shot that many in my life.

"Most professionals are moving to digital because the quality is now just as good for most situations."

Note you said "professionals". People who want to start photography don't have the resources professionals do. If I want to take great photographs, in many cases that rules out most point-and-shoot cameras. I can't tell you how many times I've gotten a bad shot from one of these because the aperature is set for your average shot and isn't adjustable, and I take a picture in low light and it has to keep the shutter open forever leading to a blurry shot. (BTW: anything 1/30th sec. or more is "forever", and 1/60th can be if you don't have somethnig to brace against.) Yet I've taken pics with an SLR in much less light that came out dandy because I could set the f-stop to 1.7 and speed up the shutter by a factor of 4 or so. I could *never* have taken these pictures of the aurora with anything but an SLR.

"Digital is the best choice for a beginner because you can do a lot more experimenting without spending a fortune on things like film and developing."

You just spend a fortune on the initial camera. Amazon's store (Electronics > Camera & Photo > Categories > Film Cameras > SLR Cameras > Manual SLR Cameras) has cameras centered about $250, with one $161. The least expensive digital SLR I've seen is I think ~$800. The difference then is about 50 rolls of film. I don't think I've shot that many in my life.

Mozilla Calendar really needs to be folded directly into the Thunderbird system. People want a calendar in their email client, and that's that. The sooner this is done, the sooner Thunderbird can start kicking Outlook's butt.

The place where Mozilla Calendar is a bit weak right now is its server support. Sure, you can publish and subscribe using WebDAV, but that's not the same thing as having a true server-side calendar. And you still can't send and receive meeting invitations, or check other users' free/busy times.

Fortunately, there is a group at Penn State working on fixing this. They're writing a new calendar API that can be used to hook into arbitrary servers. That means that modules will be able to be written for any back end, such as Citadel, Sun calendar server, Kolab, or whatever else appears out there in the future.

You might be an engineer if...

1. if you have no life - and you can prove it mathematically.
2. if you enjoy pain.
3. if you know vector calculus but you can't remember how to do long division.
4. if you chuckle whenever someone says "centrifugal force".
5. if you've actually used every single function on your graphing calculator.
6. if when you look in a mirror, you see an engineering major.
7. if it is sunny and 70 degrees outside, and you are working on a computer.
8. if you frequently whistle the theme song to MacGyver.
9. if you always do homework on Friday nights.
10. if you know how to integrate a chicken and can take the derivative of water.
11. if you think in "math".
12. if you've calculated that the World Series actually diverges.
13. if you hesitate to look at something because you don't want to break down its wave function.
14. if you have a pet named after a scientist.
15. if you laugh at jokes about mathematicians.
16. if the Humane Society has you arrested because you actually performed the Schrodinger's Cat experiment.
17. if you can translate English to Binary.
18. if you can't remember what's behind the door in the science building which says EXIT.
19. if you have to bring a jacket with you in the middle of summer, because there is a wind-chill factor in the lab.
20. if you are completely addicted to caffeine.
21. if you avoid doing anything because you don't want to contribute to the eventual heat- death of the universe.
22. if you consider ANY non-science course easy.
23. if when your professor asks you where your homework is, you claim to have accidentally determined its momentum so precisely, that according to Heisenberg,
24. it could be anywhere in the universe!
25. if the "fun" center of your brain has deteriorated from lack of use.
26. if you assume that a "horse" is a "sphere" in order to make the math easier.
27. if you understood more than five of these indicators.
28. if you make a hard copy of this list and post it on your door.

• "I think there is a world market for maybe five computers." - Thomas Watson, chairman of IBM (1943)
• "But what ... is it good for?" - Engineer at the Advanced Computing Systems Division of IBM, commenting on the microchip (1968)
• "There is no reason anyone would want a computer in their home." - Ken Olson, president, chairman, and founder of Digital Equipment Corp. (1977)
  http://www.astro.psu.edu/users/burrows/quotes.html

• Since its shipment in May of 1990, Windows version 3.0 has proven to be a remarkably stable product. In fact, Microsoft has only implemented a single update release (version 3.0a) to accommodate minor bug fixes. -- Microsoft press release for Windows 3.1
  

I've been using Red Hat 8 in a lab setting with 16 workstations and 1 server for over a year now, with no complaints ... well, no BIG ones.

However, the University I work for is preparing to have a meeting for which version of Linux to standardize on and get support for... Red Hat (I'm assuming Enterprise), SuSe, or Fedora.

I've been using Red Hat 8 in a lab setting with 16 workstations and 1 server for over a year now, with no complaints ... well, no BIG ones.

I've only been using 8 because it's more user-friendly than 7.3, and the software still works on 8 (it doesn't on 9... still testing Fedora). Of course, I asked them about Educational pricing a few weeks ago, but they never bothered to give me a REAL price... they actually told me that for 17 computers, it would be over $3500 per year. So, of course, once I spend a couple weeks testing Fedora and making sure almost everything works on it, they announce this, and now it looks like I might not have to upgrade after all.

BTW, I'm VERY happy with Fedora so far. It's very user-friendly (priority #1), secure (#2), and compatible with the software (#3). However, the University I work for is preparing to have a meeting for which version of Linux to standardize on and get support for... Red Hat (I'm assuming Enterprise), SuSe, or Fedora. Does anyone think SuSe would be a better choice than Fedora? I'm not really even considering RHE...

Dude, check your links!

Here's a torrent of the ISO.

Here's an American FTP mirror.

ACK and you shall receive.

Please use one of the mirror sites below to download your copy of TheOpenCD (note: not all have v1.2 updates). The ISO and source tar are also available on BitTorrent. For more info on Bittorrent, click here, or click here for a BitTorrent client.

Australia World Wide Web | FTP | Mirror courtesy of Jason Andrade and PlanetMirror.

Austria World Wide Web | FTP | Rsync | Mirror courtesy of Antonin Sprinzl and the Vienna University of Technology.

Belgium World Wide Web | FTP | Mirror courtesy of Cedric Gavage and Skynet Belgacom.

Brazil World Wide Web | Mirror courtesy of Aleck Zander and Universidade Estadual Paulista.

Canada FTP | Mirror courtesy of Thomas Cort and Bishop's University.

Finland FTP | Mirror courtesy of Harri Salminen and Funet.

Germany 1 World Wide Web | FTP | Rsync | Mirror courtesy of Daniel Lang and Informatik der Technischen Universitt Mnchen.

Germany 2 FTP | Mirror courtesy of Tom Rueger and the Universitt Bayreuth.

Germany 3 FTP | Mirror courtesy of Thomas List and SunSite Aachen.

Germany 4 FTP | Mirror courtesy of Holger Weiss and Freie Universitt Berlin.

UK World Wide Web | FTP | Mirror courtesy of Yang He and UK Mirror Service.

USA 1 World Wide Web | FTP | Mirror courtesy of A. J. Wright and the The University of Tennessee.

USA 2 World Wide Web | FTP | Rsync | Mirror courtesy of Sam Chessman and Tux.org

USA 3 World Wide Web | FTP | Rsync | Mirror courtesy of Jason Holmes and the Pennsylvania State University.

USA 4 World Wide

Great Papers in Computer Science edited by Phillip A. Laplante collects a lot of classic papers in one volume. Unfortunately, the book was put together a bit too quickly, with the result of many typos. (Laplante talks about that in the Amazon.com comments for the book.) However, I still find it to be a useful collection.

President Spanier is getting this at a "signifigant discount" as part of a pilot program, and other schools will likely follow suit. Subscribing to a service and absorbing the cost was suggested about 9-12 months ago. He's such a fan of this that he won't let it affect the technology fee at all. There have been DC rings that were broken up and the MPAA and RIAA have sent Kazaa notices to students several times. This is being offered as a service that you can take or leave, just like how any PSU student can get the USA Today each day for free if they so choose. If you really aren't satisfied, every email sent to president@psu.edu gets a reply from a real person, more often than not from Graham Spanier himself.

I submitted this earlier today, but was rejected. So here's what I had to say. It contains a bit more information.

After the University of Rochester announced last week in its school newspaper that students there would be offered legal music downloads starting the spring semester, Penn State President Graham B. Spanier announced today that his University has signed an agreement with Napster to launch a program in which Penn State will make Napster's Premium Service available at no cost to its students. This comes from the annual EDUCAUSE meeting of thousands of information technology administrators from universities around the country. Most notably are the panelists who are part of a P2P file sharing disscussion. They include, Cary Sherman of the RIAA, Jack Valenti of the MPAA, the Provost of the University of Rochester, and the President of Penn State. Too bad it's Napster and not iTunes.

I submitted this earlier today, but was rejected. So here's what I had to say. It contains a bit more information.

After the University of Rochester announced last week in its school newspaper that students there would be offered legal music downloads starting the spring semester, Penn State President Graham B. Spanier announced today that his University has signed an agreement with Napster to launch a program in which Penn State will make Napster's Premium Service available at no cost to its students. This comes from the annual EDUCAUSE meeting of thousands of information technology administrators from universities around the country. Most notably are the panelists who are part of a P2P file sharing disscussion. They include, Cary Sherman of the RIAA, Jack Valenti of the MPAA, the Provost of the University of Rochester, and the President of Penn State. Too bad it's Napster and not iTunes.

And, I guess he's not a member of the board, but Senior Counsel. I guess that means he's responsible for suing grandparents and little girls.

Where do you get that 75% number from? Have a look here. Penn State's state appropriate made up about 28% of their operating budget in 2002-2003, while student tuition makes up around 66%. PSU, like the University of Pittsburgh, is not state owned or operated but rather "state-related". Basically, the state related universities in PA are private entities which are given some state appropriation each year - but the bulk of the cost of education is picked up by the students (or their parents). The amount of the state appropriation each year has gone down as well, resulting in significant tuition increases.

I highly doubt giving the students free access to music is going to harm them academically, so what exactly is the big deal? The taxpayers aren't paying for this anyway, it is coming right out of the student's fees - which aren't being raised and also cover things like software, network access, student activities, transportation and the like. These things all benefit the student body as the whole and add to the overall university experience.

Just a quick note... My dad is the one who's working on the live.psu.edu site. It's running on apache and php on MacOS X Server. The server's getting hammered today, he says, but the machine's holding up quite well. It's a shame that open source and Mac technologies can be used to promote this new Napster program at PSU, and yet students with machines running similar OS's will be wasting their fees paying for a service they can't use. It's a shame PSU couldn't figure out way to work with the cross-platform iTunes Music store.

So join and work with the Penn State Linux Users Group to help put together proposals, petitions, and if necessary, protests, to pressure the school administrators to consider the needs of non-Windows users.

http://live.psu.edu/story/4583p

Of particular interest:
Is this service accessible on all computing platforms (i.e. Windows and Macintosh) and different types of Internet connections?

With the current pilot program being tested this spring, the service is only available to Windows 2000 and XP users. With the addition of certain software, it will also run on Macintosh computers.

Does this mean that Napster is going to be porting its service over to OSX? I haven't heard anything about that until now.

OK, on one hand you've got a point... especially seeing as how this comes on the heels of the largest tuition increase at PSU in over 20 years.

Then again, lets look at the numbers. Napster charges $9.95 a month for unlimited streaming. The deal is only for the 13,000 or so students in the dorms. So that's around $130,000 a month, not including any discounts the University is getting. So for the 8 months of regular sessions we're looking at around $1 million dollars (again not including discounts) to keep the kids streaming. Penn State's operating budget for 2000-2001 was over $2 billion dollars, so that million bucks or so is really only a drop in the bucket. At my school we got "free" buss passes and "free" software all paid for through liscensing agreements negotiated by the unversity, so why not "free" music as well, especially if it helps the university avoid hassles from the RIAA?