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It's not Rochester University, there is no Rochester University. The school that did this is RIT (Rochester Institute of Techonology). There is a University of Rochester but that's a seperate school.

• Ayashi-no Seles
  • Ayashi.net
• Bubblegum Crisis
  • Bubblegum Crisis page
  • Tokyo 2040: Rare and Useless Pages
• Neon Genesis Evangelion
  • Neon Genesis Evangelion site
• A.D.V. Films
• AnimEigo
• Anime Grapevine
• Anime Hideaway
• Anime International Company
• Anime Marriage Prospects
• Anime Nation
• Anime On DVD
• AniPike
• AniSound
• Ex
• OX-11 ("Gall Force: The Web Page")
• U.S. Manga Corps

When RIT had new apartments installed, they put Ethernet, Cable and phone connections in each bedroom and the living room. Granted, it's college housing, but this was very important... (and they didn't think to shunt all 5 cable connections together the first time... and the same with the phones...) Oh well. That's RIT for ya. (RIT = Retards In Training)

:(

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It sucks, I know.

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Enjoy.

Let me give you some idea for the current state of the survey: we're taking a number of "test" strip scans of portions of the sky, and have perhaps 2 or 3 out of roughly 50 or 60 scans done so far. There's still an issue with calibrating the data, but we're working on it. The data is put on tape at the mountain, shipped by FedEx to Fermilab, and they reduce the heck out of it with pipelines specially designed for the survey. The data goes into a database at FNAL, and a copy is sent to JHU. I believe that Microsoft would work with a copy of the JHU database. Some of the JHU astronomers are building a friendly querying system so that people can ask questions like:

Give me info on all the stellar objects in this tiny area of the sky, with colors (g-r) 2.0, and with no close companions

The database will also allow people to download little "postage-stamp" sized pictures of the sky which are cut out around all detected objects.

You can see some examples of pictures (and detected objects) at:


http://a188-l009.rit.edu/richmond/sdss/showtell/ sdss.html

As another poster stated, we look at each piece of the sky only once (well, small sections twice), so finding motions or variability from this data alone won't be easy.

The survey won't be finished, in my opinion, until sometime around 2003 or so (for the imaging half of the survey -- the spectroscopic section of the survey will take another few years after that). There is some period of a year or so -- it's rather vague at this point -- before data is released to the public. I'm not sure if it's a year or two after the photons are collected, or a year or two after they have been calibrated and placed into the database. It's possible that a small subset of the commissioning data might be made available sometime before then, but I wouldn't hold my breath.

I'd be happy to answer questions about the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, if someone wants to set up an
interview mechanism (hint, hint).

Well, could this be made into an app like SETI@Home? A nice distributed app that runs on all sorts of computers with some pretty screensaver (maybe of the current pics being processed) might be something people really like. Even just a catalogue would be pretty extensive. But if a whole lot of people each proccess one picture, it might be worth it.

There are possibly some applications that could be automated, such as building a complete two-point correlation function for the clustering of the objects in the field, or maybe trying to categorize all the objects by colour, redshift and position into groupings in space and colour. However, most of these tasks are doable in a reasonable amount of computing time - say two-weeks computation on an UltraSparc machine (although the two-point correlation function is an O(n^2) problem, that requires 10^16 comparisons at a rough estimate, with maybe 10^8 comparisons a second, that would require ... umm ... err ... about 3 years of CPU time). So yes - possibly an automated tool might well be worth it. I strongly suspect that few astronomers would bother to do the correlation function for the whole field at all scales, and would settle for looking at the function for scales up to around 4 degrees separation on the sky (that's much bigger than the largest known cluster of galaxies).

However, looking at the automatically processed picture strips, I see all sorts of problems with background level correction (the background appears to be wavey in these pictures so there is definitely room for improvement). Modern astronomical analysis often requires significant time spent on looking at a particular frame of interest - I spent over a year examining and refining an image of a pair of Quasars as part of my thesis - so my feeling is that there is much to be gained by picking an object which interests you, possibly from a Radio or X-ray survey, and following it up with the SDSS survey here. With this much data I think you can be assured that the Astronomy community will get to grips with the important statistical analysis on it's own. What it won't be able to do is follow up every field, every interesting quasar or galaxy and really really work on it. It may be possible to see gravitational lensing (although it won't be very clear since the point spread function will be around an arcsec) or do some funky image processing to try and deconvolve the images to recover more detail. In fact, there are lots of things to play with which are unlikely to ever get done on every part of this image data, so grab yourself a copy of IRAF or Source Extractor and go play.

Cheers,

Toby Haynes

http://www.csh.rit.edu/~eriky/raite

The Raite allows firmware upgrades from a CDrom you can download and burn yerself. From what I've heard, that may not be true with the Apex.
__________

in case one is needed.

1. In the US, every citizen is guaranteed a fundamental right to own a firearm. The founding fathers realized that fundamental rights MUST REMAIN ABSOLUTE, or you might as well have no rights at all.
2. In the US, almost half of all households have a gun in them. It is therefore statistically ludicrous to assign severely abnormal traits to gun owners.
3. Studies have shown that gun owners who are properly trained are likely to be less violent than non gun owners.
4. All instances of children accidentally shooting themselves or each other is the result of irresponsible parents failing to properly secure their guns and teach their children proper respect for them (Yes, children CAN learn respect for things, you liberals have a way of treating kids like emotional and intellectual retards)
5. In the past 30 years, the number of firearms owned by Americans have increased from 122 million to more than 220 million. During that time, violent crime, school violence, and domestic violence rates have decreased.

• Taking aim at Gun Control
  
• Why gun control is wrong (by Yours Truly)
• GunCite - Everything you need to know about gun control and why it's wrong.
• Ethics from the barrel of a gun: what bearing arms teaches about the good life - Written by the same dude who brought you The Cathedral and the Bazzaar

Here at RIT, the Student Government is (was?) trying to implement an internet based student review system of professors.

The nice page they made for it is up on their website: Professor Evaluations

Of course, it has said "Coming Soon!" since about October, when it was first announced. No surprise there... not surprised one bit. I think the Administration here is holding it back for some strange reason...

-Misch

The images produced by Pogge and Martini show material in the inner spiral arms of the galaxies. It's a stretch to refer to this as material "being sucked into gigantic black holes." Note the scale of the images: the resolution is a few hundred light years. The accretion disk around the black hole is less than one light year in radius; it is completely unresolved in thes pictures.

The material shown in these images MAY be spiralling gradually in towards the center of the galaxies, but it may also be in relatively stable orbits around the center. Suppose that a small component of the total velocity -- which is several hundred km/sec -- is radially inwards. It would take tens of millions of years for the material to reach the black hole.

Writing that these pictures show gas which is
"being sucked into a gigantic black hole" is about as accurate as writing "and here's a picture of Angeline Jolie growing old and wrinkled at the Academy Awards ceremony." Sure, technically, she is growing oldER and adding a micro-wrinkle or two as she sits in the audience ... but it's not really relevant under the circumstances.

By a curious coincidence, I just wrote up a lecture on black holes at the centers of galaxies
for the introductor astro course I'm teaching. Check out

http://spiff.rit.edu/richmond/classes/phys240/le ctures/blackholes/blackholes.html.

here is the Big BG pullin a GPF in front of a live audience. It's got drama, comedy, conflict, and, errrr...well it's just funny.

I think that the statement "We're almost there" is a very accurate one. There are many groups, commertial and open, who see the lack of good multimedia applications in Linux. The desktop void is being filled, audio support is getting better, but AV tools for the OS just aren't there.

This is actually one of the long term goals of the LSDVD group: to produce video authoring software for linux. It's a long term goal, one which would take a lot of time and money, and might have to be slightly closed source in order to get by licensing issues with The Man.

We all love music. Most of us probably play and write music as well. Just be patient, the tools are coming...

-davek
ps: big things are happening with LSDVD, stay tuned.

I think that the statement "We're almost there" is a very accurate one. There are many groups, commertial and open, who see the lack of good multimedia applications in Linux. The desktop void is being filled, audio support is getting better, but AV tools for the OS just aren't there.

This is actually one of the long term goals of the LSDVD group: to produce video authoring software for linux. It's a long term goal, one which would take a lot of time and money, and might have to be slightly closed source in order to get by licensing issues with The Man.

We all love music. Most of us probably play and write music as well. Just be patient, the tools are coming...

-davek
ps: big things are happening with LSDVD, stay tuned.

No one in the Linux world was willing to shell out $10000 for the DVD license. I don't see anyone wanting to shell out more money for more restrictions anytime soon. well, actually somebody did. http://www.csh.rit.edu/lsdvd/

female CS majors on the decline? female CS majors? there is such a thing? where???? only a handful here at RIT
but thats the life, i guess. ive gotten used to seeing the same classroom full of guys for 3 years.

To you

My question is: where is the line drawn? What protection should companies (or individual software vendors) have with their intellectual property? Should every media format be forced to be public, or just allow it to be "figured out" by whomever wants to?

-davek
LSDVD developer

More Scooby links:
ScoobyCentral
Scottish Scooby site
Shaggy's Groovy Pad
Scoobyland links

Come On Scooby-Doo, I See You . . .
Pretending You Got A Sliver.
But You're Not Fooling Me,
Cause I Can See
The Way You Shake And Shiver.

You Know We Got A Mystery To Solve,
So Scooby-Doo Be Ready For Your Act.
Don't Hold Back!
And Scooby-Doo If You Come Through
You're Gonna To Have Yourself A Scooby Snack!
That's A Fact!

Scooby-Dooby Doo, Here Are You.
You're Ready And You're Willing.
If We Can Count On You, Scooby-Doo,
I Know We'll Catch That Villain.

Trolling for Scooby-doo!

Scooby dooby doo!

More Scooby links:
ScoobyCentral
Scottish Scooby site
Shaggy's Grovvy Pad
Scoobyland links

WARNING: WHATEVER YOU GET: DON'T LET THE CALC DO STUFF YOU COULDN'T DO BY HAND IF YOU HAD TO. You will be cheating yourself if you do.

Now my plug: index of sites with math/science programs for TI-89/92+ at www.rit.edu/~smb3297/ti/.

Just hacked get_slashdot_news to produce HDML. It's available now for HDML browsers at www.csh.rit.edu/~airwick/s.hdml Thanks to leaf who helped me hack perl for the first time. Next project ideas are a Internet Drink Machine gateway or a Slashdot article gateway.

Just hacked get_slashdot_news to produce HDML. It's available now for HDML browsers at www.csh.rit.edu/~airwick/s.hdml Thanks to leaf who helped me hack perl for the first time. Next project ideas are a Internet Drink Machine gateway or a Slashdot article gateway.

Just hacked get_slashdot_news to produce HDML. It's available now for HDML browsers at www.csh.rit.edu/~airwick/s.hdml Thanks to leaf who helped me hack perl for the first time. Next project ideas are a Internet Drink Machine gateway or a Slashdot article gateway.

Actually the direct url to RIT's Distance Learning program is http://distancelearning.rit.edu/.

Try the Rochester Institute of Technology. They do lots of distance learning stuff. Pretty decent courses, too. http://www.rit.edu

Some of us really do put a lot of work into our courses, and, while it is a nice ego-boo to hear that students elsewhere may use our materials to help themselves learn, it would annoy me greatly to learn that someone may be making money off notes that I made (or verbatim copies).

For an example of the material I put online for my students (before each lecture), see stupendous.rit.edu/classes/p hys212/phys212.html

I think that if someone approached me about using notes derived from my lectures, I'd be happy to work with him -- perhaps we could improve the quality if we worked together. Perhaps it boils down to an issue of courtesy.

Vicki and I met on a Usenet newsgroup, rather than interactive chat. Maybe it's because we're older than most geeks, but communication where you actually put some thought into every sentence you write worked better for us. We started exchanging email, we met face to face about 2 months later. 6 months after that, I got a job in her city so we could start dating like real people. About two years after that we got married. I'm sure you horny young geeks think that's an incredibly long time to wait, but we'd both been married before and we both had kids, so we had to be sure this was right.

Anyway, check out our wedding web page

Anyway, I gotta say something that was sort of left out of the interview. From reading what Paul said, it sounds pretty much like the LSDVD project is all about taking all the pieces related to a DVD player and glueing them togeather. This might be an initial goal, but let me assure you that the groups final goal is to produce a complete, stable, open sourced (as much as possible) DVD player for linux. This would include support for various MPEG decoder cards as well as a software decoding module (which is what I am working on now). The AC-3 audio encoding might have to be written by us as well, I'm not sure about the licensing issues with that.

One question that wasn't really asked was: What have we written so far? Well, we're attacking it from two different sides. 1) we have code to parse all the nasty VOB blocks and headers, but we can't get to the straight MPEG stream because of the encryption, so 2) we are working separatly on code to read the DVD implementation of the MPEG-2 standard. There's plenty of code, but it doesn't do much more than print numbers to the screen.

And what about the time frame? Well, the three of us are all in different places right now, and development is lagging because of it. But next month we all return back to the old skool and that's when the project will begin to bear fruit. We hope to have a usable (or at least demonstratable) program by April 2000 (after we've all dropped out of school or died because of sleep deprivation).

Carpe Diem,
-Dave Klint

new Dream Theater Oct 26. Giddy!

Amen. The motivation of so many students now is so close to nil that it's not even measurable. I remember that when I was still in elementary school, I was on a first-name basis with every librarian at the local branch. :-) I still am. It was the way I taught myself; I devoured books. Even though a lot of what I read was computer-related, I'd read pretty much anything I could get my hands on. Computers, science, magic, sci-fi, electronics, photography, you name it, I'd check it out and read it. I had a lot of free time in elementary school, so I'd snag a book and read a couple hundred pages a day. That, and by example, is how I've taught myself virtually everything I know about technology. And the important thing isn't that I did it, it's that I've taught myself how to learn. That's the important thing, because if you can teach yourself that, you've acquired a skill that will be of immense benefit to you for the rest of your life. The ability to pick up a few books and absorb everything in them, and then to be able to go use all of that material is amazing. If I took 2 Visual Basic (ugh) courses and a Bourne-shell scripting course at RIT, I'd be a junior in the InfoTech Department right now. I've learned very little in the IT classes so far; it amazes me the graduates that they're turning out, perhaps people who see the lucrative IT field and salivate at the big money "they could be making." And did I mention that I'm seventeen years old and still in high school? So it definitely can be done.

But back to your point. So many teachers in schools nowadays, even in advanced classes, assume that all of their students have absolutely no idea how to go about the business of learning. They assume that each of their students must be force-fed information the way they have planned, and woe be the day when you even hint at the fact that you might know best how to teach yourself. After all, you've had years of experience discovering how you learn, years that no teacher will ever come close to having. Bring them in, fill them up, send them along. Assembly-line style.

My AP US History teacher last year made the fatal mistake of deciding that he was going to dictate pretty much exactly how your notes were going to be formatted, down to actual content and headings. And he collected them and graded them based on his criteria, and his criteria alone. That was a huge culture shock for me, because so far, even in two other AP classes, I'd taught myself everything by reading to learn, not to pass the upcoming test, not to please anyone else, but to absorb the material because I wanted to. Schools are totally unprepared for people in my situation. They view us as mere heretics that will eventually bow to the force of having their educational methods pressed upon us. So I did his lame notes for a couple of months, and then started skipping about every other assignment, instead giving the chapter a thorough read to remember, instead of reading to be able to quickly bullshit the night's assignment. He told me once, point blank, that my test grades were some of the highest in the class and that my homework grade was actually bringing me down.

I had a chat with him and explained my perspective, and he dictated to me a "modified" notes format just so he could "make sure" that I was doing the reading. If he original plan was an insult, this was a punch to the face. I let my homework slip almost totally in the last quarter and took a 76, my first quarter grade below a B+, ever. I made a 4 on the AP final. (For those unfamiliar with the AP grading system in the States, it's on a scale of 1 to 5, a four is about the top 20-30% of all students who take the exam). But I know that I could have gotten a 5 (~top 10%) if I had been allowed to use my own, proven system. Thank you, American Educational System.

Lissa Light and Peter Anderson (scroll to the bottom of this page) reported on their interesting research into engineering better keyboard layouts than Qwerty or Dvorak. They used a few simple heuristics (eg. it's better to hit a sequence of keys with alternating hands; it's better to keep fingers on the home keys) to obtain a fitness rating of keyboard layouts. Then they used simulated annealing techiniques to find layouts that maximized their fitness rating. Their paper is a good introduction to the art of optimizing combinatorial systems.

How's this new? RIT was doing that years ago when I was going there, the student ID card had it in barcode form *and* plain text right on the card. They simply tacked a 0-9 onto the end of it for the number of times you'd lost your ID card.

I was more upset when I found that my heathplan number was my social security number. They already know too much about me.

Loren Osborne posted a good one as part of the July 30th discussion. Very clear explanation of the issues, with analogies the non-technical should understand. It's here.

<OFFTOPIC>First, I did not leave the Berlin Consortium for any political reason, and am still very in-favor of what they are doing. Basically (to make a long story short) I significantly over-extended myself. For example, right now I am:

• I am working "full-time" as a software developer for a commercial software firm. (No... not M$)
• I am involved in three theatrical productions:
  • I am playing Constable Loche in "The Music Man"
  • I am playing Herr Sessman in "Heidi"
  • I am runnig audio tracks for "Bye Bye Birdie"
• I am involved in 3 Linux related computer clubs:
  • I am marginally involved in Orange County Linux User Group
  • I am (or at least was) reasonablly active in Unix User's Association of Southern California
  • I am supposed to be in charge of the Linux/Unix SIG for North Orange County Computer Club (If anyone is interested in taking over this group, please let me know)
• I am going to be beta testing Railroad Tycoon 2 from Loki Software
• and... I'm trying to get back into school to finish my BS

In response to Jordy's remarks:

1) To develop for X you have to be an X Consortium member which costs about $50k/year to do any real work. This is why so much work is being done on layers above X, because no one can actually submit the kind of radical modifications to X that are needed to bring it into the 90's.

2) The X consortium maintains full control over X itself... meaning they can (and have at least once) change the licensing to kill off any free implementations such as xfree86.

3) The software is extremely dated with over a decade of backwards compatibility which no one even uses any more bloating the code base.

4) C... Object Oriented environment.. please. I'm sure a lot of people will bash this, but writing GUI programs in an OO language is simply easier. And before you start on the OO toolkits out there, read the next point.

5) Of course there are C++ and Java toolkits out there, but until they are standard within X, it's a big war. I have roughly 15 X toolkits on my machine to run a total of 8 programs and a window manager. Doesn't anyone else think this is silly?

6) Sluggish. I have AccelX and I have to admit the entire experience is still very slow. Netscape flickers gray every time I scroll up and down, windows take ages to redraw when switching between them, etc. I multiboot to Windows and don't have any of these problems, everything is quite snappy... even if it crashes every 8 hours :)

7) Inconsistant. With all the toolkits out there, it is so very hard to get a nice consistant desktop. I wouldn't even claim that Windows is consistant, but it is pretty close. MacOS is better.. but at least both environments are intuitive.

Once you understand the basics, you can switch between different applications and automatically pickup that the scisors in the toolbar means cut or that the file menu will have an 'exit' entry or even that ctrl-c will copy the selected text (most of the time at least :)

So in short, I'm not saying that there should be one "true interface" that all GUIs should be modeled after, but rather that the user should be able to select a style of GUI that (s)he is comfortable with, and have all the apps reflect that. (i.e. I could want all the "File" menu text to be in red... in all my programs.)

Additionally, a few things that Jordy didn't mention include:

1. X only supports black-and-white (or more specifially "two-tone") fonts... This might sound fine to someone who doesn't know alot about graphics rendering, but this totally precludes the possibility of anti-aliasing, which can make text much more readable... especially with smaller fonts.
2. Besides the concept of a "window" X has no concept of GUI "widgets" (like buttons, scroll-bars, edit boxes, etc. ) Whenever you press on a "button" (that, lets say, depresses when you press the mouse on it) the server sends the press event accross the "network" to the client, who has to send back instructions over the "network" for how it should be redrawn to look depressed. For something as trivial as a button press, this is a terribly in-efficient use of network bandwidth. With something like Berlin, the logic of how these buttons respond can be sent to the server, so all the GUI look-and-feel issues can be handeled on the server, then it simply needs to tell the client: "I've been clicked on... do whatever you are supposed to when I'm clicked on..."
3. X lacks real support for any 3D, video rendering... esspecially WRT hardware accelleration... the typical X way to do this to hand off a chunk of the screen for rendering to a program who knows how to handel the acceleration itself, not only is this a cludge, but it may tend to introduce security issues.
4. no support for alpha channels (semi-transparency)... or other similar effects.
5. (I may be wrong on this last point but...) There doesn't seem to be any global color-correction settings in X... for people in the publishing industry, this could prove a real headache.

Thanks again to Jordy (and Graydon, and all of the gang) who are helping with Berlin,

<OFFTOPIC>First, I did not leave the Berlin Consortium for any political reason, and am still very in-favor of what they are doing. Basically (to make a long story short) I significantly over-extended myself. For example, right now I am:

• I am working "full-time" as a software developer for a commercial software firm. (No... not M$)
• I am involved in three theatrical productions:
  • I am playing Constable Loche in "The Music Man"
  • I am playing Herr Sessman in "Heidi"
  • I am runnig audio tracks for "Bye Bye Birdie"
• I am involved in 3 Linux related computer clubs:
  • I am marginally involved in Orange County Linux User Group
  • I am (or at least was) reasonablly active in Unix User's Association of Southern California
  • I am supposed to be in charge of the Linux/Unix SIG for North Orange County Computer Club (If anyone is interested in taking over this group, please let me know)
• I am going to be beta testing Railroad Tycoon 2 from Loki Software
• and... I'm trying to get back into school to finish my BS

In response to Jordy's remarks:

1) To develop for X you have to be an X Consortium member which costs about $50k/year to do any real work. This is why so much work is being done on layers above X, because no one can actually submit the kind of radical modifications to X that are needed to bring it into the 90's.

2) The X consortium maintains full control over X itself... meaning they can (and have at least once) change the licensing to kill off any free implementations such as xfree86.

3) The software is extremely dated with over a decade of backwards compatibility which no one even uses any more bloating the code base.

4) C... Object Oriented environment.. please. I'm sure a lot of people will bash this, but writing GUI programs in an OO language is simply easier. And before you start on the OO toolkits out there, read the next point.

5) Of course there are C++ and Java toolkits out there, but until they are standard within X, it's a big war. I have roughly 15 X toolkits on my machine to run a total of 8 programs and a window manager. Doesn't anyone else think this is silly?

6) Sluggish. I have AccelX and I have to admit the entire experience is still very slow. Netscape flickers gray every time I scroll up and down, windows take ages to redraw when switching between them, etc. I multiboot to Windows and don't have any of these problems, everything is quite snappy... even if it crashes every 8 hours :)

7) Inconsistant. With all the toolkits out there, it is so very hard to get a nice consistant desktop. I wouldn't even claim that Windows is consistant, but it is pretty close. MacOS is better.. but at least both environments are intuitive.

Once you understand the basics, you can switch between different applications and automatically pickup that the scisors in the toolbar means cut or that the file menu will have an 'exit' entry or even that ctrl-c will copy the selected text (most of the time at least :)

So in short, I'm not saying that there should be one "true interface" that all GUIs should be modeled after, but rather that the user should be able to select a style of GUI that (s)he is comfortable with, and have all the apps reflect that. (i.e. I could want all the "File" menu text to be in red... in all my programs.)

Additionally, a few things that Jordy didn't mention include:

1. X only supports black-and-white (or more specifially "two-tone") fonts... This might sound fine to someone who doesn't know alot about graphics rendering, but this totally precludes the possibility of anti-aliasing, which can make text much more readable... especially with smaller fonts.
2. Besides the concept of a "window" X has no concept of GUI "widgets" (like buttons, scroll-bars, edit boxes, etc. ) Whenever you press on a "button" (that, lets say, depresses when you press the mouse on it) the server sends the press event accross the "network" to the client, who has to send back instructions over the "network" for how it should be redrawn to look depressed. For something as trivial as a button press, this is a terribly in-efficient use of network bandwidth. With something like Berlin, the logic of how these buttons respond can be sent to the server, so all the GUI look-and-feel issues can be handeled on the server, then it simply needs to tell the client: "I've been clicked on... do whatever you are supposed to when I'm clicked on..."
3. X lacks real support for any 3D, video rendering... esspecially WRT hardware accelleration... the typical X way to do this to hand off a chunk of the screen for rendering to a program who knows how to handel the acceleration itself, not only is this a cludge, but it may tend to introduce security issues.
4. no support for alpha channels (semi-transparency)... or other similar effects.
5. (I may be wrong on this last point but...) There doesn't seem to be any global color-correction settings in X... for people in the publishing industry, this could prove a real headache.

Thanks again to Jordy (and Graydon, and all of the gang) who are helping with Berlin,

Here at RIT we use a software package called PMDF from Innosoft. We have a cluster of Digital Unix boxes that support close to the numbers you are talking about. Innosoft supports Solaris, DU, and VMS. It is a great mailer. The support is excellent and they are fast to deliver fixes. It isn't free but it will definately do what you want.

http://a188-l009.rit.edu/rich mond/answers/snrisks.txt

Analyzes the threat from X-rays, gamma rays, neutrinos, and energetic particles (cosmic rays).

Also, check out this newsgroup thread:
sci.astro.amateur: closest safe supernova?

I have encountered this problem before -- the solution then was to move the file to the NT boot drive and run it from there. Appears to be a bandwidth / caching issue. Now, this solution won't work. I can't even get it to work by streaming the file off my server (10 Mbit ethernet) -- another previous solution.

This isn't just the 25 MB trailer having problems -- it appears to be a Quicktime player problem. My other quicktime files experience the same problem. Does anyone know of a solution? Perhaps the (Quicktime?) settings need to be tweaked?

On the topic of trailer downloads starwars.countingdown has links to mirrors of this file. If someone is good enough to make a MPEG conversion, I have no doubts a link will show up there. Just so countingdown doesn't get /.ed (too badly), the mirrors (as of this writing) are: Mirror 1 Mirror 2 Mirror 3 Mirror 4

Mike
--

gotta agree. What if the state of Virginia decides to define spam to include any email that contains the words "bomb" or "terrorist." This sounds like a good idea, but I believe this is the responsibility of the ISP's, not of the government. Scarry stuff.
-davek
homepage

Quantum T

Here's another mirror:

http://lonewolf.rh.rit.edu/prequel
---
Greg Smith
ipfwadm@adirondack-park.net
http://www.adirondack-park.net