Slashdot Mirror

here

Lets see how this does...

Back in college, I once told my (at the time, future) roommate how to recursively remove the "dot files" and "dot file directories" in a subdirectory under his home directory, with "rm -rf .*". Under most modern Unices, this isn't an issue. Under the old SVR4 system we were on, it globbed ".." and recursively removed that directory (his home directory) also.

Oops.

Part of the irony of this is what the SunOS 4.x man page had to say about this behavior: (emphasis added)

WARNING

It is forbidden to remove the file `..' to avoid the antisocial consequences of inadvertently doing something like `rm -r .*'.

I guess someone in BSD or SunOS land committed the same boo-boo. I consulted the above man-page after the incident had happened, since I had accounts both on an AT&T StarServer and a Sparc 2.

It appears that this page holds a man page similar to the one on the AT&T box. Notice that it says: "It is an error to specify . (dot) or .. (dot dot) as the final path name component of file, although these entries may be removed with the -r or -R flags."

This kind of thing can even happen at places like RIT. I once recieved a friendly visit from a campus safety officer. He told me the neighbors upstairs had some sort of personal firewall running and that it gave them a message that someone was hacking their computers. The IP address was that of my, my roomate and our friend across the street. Of coruse I was like wtf? It turned out that whenever we played a LAN game of half-life using IPX it set their firewalls off because we were all behind the same switch. It was quite hilarious. Thankfully the situation was rectified quickly because there are indeed smart computer types at RIT. Stupid art majors.

The size decrease is shameful. There is very little 'mini' about it. I'm a strong fan of Apple's products, and I'm more than willing to pay extra for the better quality, but the form factor on this thing is terrible. The colors are awful. I wouldn't have such a problem with them if they offered 'Plain' - like the original iPods, or if they looked even remotely like they were rumored to. I know, I got taken by it, but I'm very disappointed. Maybe my disposition will improve once I get to see one, up close and personal, but I doubt it. Not for that price.

shortcuts.mov

omniwebtabs.mp4
workspaces.mov

omniwebtabs.mp4
workspaces.mov

So even thought some of the other screenshots are in the ugly Motif theme they will soon be all re-taken using the OSX theme.

Also notice how in the Dock the KDE applications icons show up (and scale wonderfully!). We have a script that generates OS X .app directories of the KDE applications and also generates those directories with the proper icons. You can see some of them in the background of the screenshot in Finder.

-Benjamin Meyer

More information about Neumann:

http://ei.cs.vt.edu/~history/VonNeumann.html
http://www.neumann.com/
http://www.mbi.ufl.edu/~vetneumann
http://www-gap.dcs.st-and.ac.uk/~history/Mathemati cians/Von_Neumann.html
http://www.math.columbia.edu/~neumann/
http://www.zyvex.com/nanotech/vonNeumann.html
http://www.karto.ethz.ch/neumann/
http://www.rit.edu/~drk4633/vonNeumann/
http://www.fsm-a.org/neumann

haha!

And for those that will miss the reference when the story is surely ammended:

"Sunday is the one hundreth anniversary of the birth of John Von Neumann, the man with one of the strongest claims to the title of Father of Modren Computing. Although, as noted at the time by Mark Stanley of Freefall, several sources indicate that it may have been December 3rd."

LOL!

And for those that will miss the reference when the story is surely ammended:

"Sunday is the one hundreth anniversary of the birth of John Von Neumann, the man with one of the strongest claims to the title of Father of Modren Computing. Although, as noted at the time by Mark Stanley of Freefall, several sources indicate that it may have been December 3rd."

Here at least, the old name was NMR (or NMRI), for Nuclear Magnetic Resonance (Imaging). I used to wonder if MRI was new tech, before discovering it was just a PR move.

Of course it's completely crazy in the sense that the 'nuclear' refers to the fact that it uses a property of the atomic nucleus, and there are no nuclear reactions to be seen.

I blame poor science education!

PS: There's a nice online text discussing NMR/MRI, at least for the lay person like me.

The problem is that it looks like it affects them all.

That is not the case, if it was, it would be a design flaw in html. This is just a case of different handling of an error condition.

I saw a post somewhere that said that the vulnerability works with either a ascii 1 or an ascii 0 character before the "@".

Here are 2 exploit pages that I just created, that just have a link to http://slashdot.org @goatse.cx.

ASCII 0
ASCII 1

(Below are the browsers I just happen to have installed)

IE6 for windows (for sake of having a control):
0 brings you to goatse.cx with http://goatse.cx in the address bar
1 brings you to goatse.cx with http://slashdot.org in the address bar

Opera 7.23 for windows and Opera 7.11 for FreeBSD:
0 brings you to slashdot.org with http://slashdot.org in the address bar
1 brings you to goatse.cx with http://slashdot.org^@goatse.cx/ in the address bar, where ^ is ASCII 1.
Note: Opera brought up a dialog box warning you that the link was to a site with a username in the URL on the ASCII 1 link.

Mozilla Firebird 0.7 for windows and Mozilla 1.5 for Windows:
0 brings you to slashdot.org with http://slashdot.org in the address bar
1 brings you to goatse.cx with http://slashdot.org%01@goatse.cx/ in the address bar

So of the browsers tested, the vulnerability only works in IE, and only for ASCII 1.

The problem is that it looks like it affects them all.

That is not the case, if it was, it would be a design flaw in html. This is just a case of different handling of an error condition.

I saw a post somewhere that said that the vulnerability works with either a ascii 1 or an ascii 0 character before the "@".

Here are 2 exploit pages that I just created, that just have a link to http://slashdot.org @goatse.cx.

ASCII 0
ASCII 1

(Below are the browsers I just happen to have installed)

IE6 for windows (for sake of having a control):
0 brings you to goatse.cx with http://goatse.cx in the address bar
1 brings you to goatse.cx with http://slashdot.org in the address bar

Opera 7.23 for windows and Opera 7.11 for FreeBSD:
0 brings you to slashdot.org with http://slashdot.org in the address bar
1 brings you to goatse.cx with http://slashdot.org^@goatse.cx/ in the address bar, where ^ is ASCII 1.
Note: Opera brought up a dialog box warning you that the link was to a site with a username in the URL on the ASCII 1 link.

Mozilla Firebird 0.7 for windows and Mozilla 1.5 for Windows:
0 brings you to slashdot.org with http://slashdot.org in the address bar
1 brings you to goatse.cx with http://slashdot.org%01@goatse.cx/ in the address bar

So of the browsers tested, the vulnerability only works in IE, and only for ASCII 1.

Great idea. Go 500 AU away from the Sun, then take out your big telescope and ultra-sensitive visible/IR detectors and point them back at ... the Sun. You'll see a blindingly bright object, magnitude -13 or so. And your goal is to search for planets around other stellar systems, which might be, what, apparent magnitude 25 or so?

"But the gravitational lensing will amplify the light from those faint little planets!" you cry. Amplify by how much --- you need a factor of over one trillion in order to bring these planets up within one-millionth the apparent brightness of the Sun. Oh, and by the way, you'll be magnifying the STARS around which those planets circle by this same amount, which won't make the planets any easier to see.

Take a look at one of my course WWW pages describing the difficulties of direct detection of planets to get some idea of the practical difficulties. Using the Sun as a gravitational lens won't help at all.

For some truly free (as in freedom) music, browse around at my personal archive http://libre.rh.rit.edu/audio/.

Just for the heck of making a huge image, I once scanned a palm leaf on my flatbed. It was big, so I scanned it in two sections and stitched it.

My scanner scans at 2400 x 2400 dpi without interpolation, and it's 8.5" x 11.75", yielding two uncropped images, each at 20,400 pixels x 28,200. Cropped, my final image was about 30,000 * 28,000. OK, only .84 GigaPixels, because I intentionally scaled it to work in Photoshop. But it would be a piece of cake to make images way bigger, when you can capture 575 Mega Pixels at a time with a sub-$200 scanner. Someone else out htere must have done this already, right? Even if not, I don't see it as such a big milestone, since many thousdands of people across the US have the equptment to do this at their fingertips. Sure, it only works for flat images, but actually, you can turn your scanner into a camera- see here or here.

Additionally, I would like to argue with him about the potential of film to match this. I scan 35mm slides shot on films like Ektachrome 100. It's worth scanning a good sharp image on this film at 2400 ppi. The image size on 35 mm film is 24 x 36 mm, or about 1 1/3 square inches, yielding about 7.6 MegaPixels.

100 speed films are commonly available in 8 x 10 size, which should yield 460 megapixels.

But wait! We can go higher than this. Konica Impressa 50 should be much finer grained than this. There's a reason drum scanners go up to 4,000 x 4,000 ppi- to suck the resolution out of really fine-grained films. So an 8 x 10 scanned at 4,000 x 4,000 ppi can yield 1.28 GigaPixels- more than this image. And that's not even getting very exotic yet.

Polariod used to make a viewcamera that took 16" x 20" negatives. If you special order uncut sheet film from Kodax or Konica and cut your own 16 * 20 negatives, this could take you into the 5 GigaPixel range. The two issues that aren't clear here are 1. if any lenses have high-enough resolving power to deal with this, and 2. how the hell you scan it. Scanning it probably will boil down to cutting it, scanning it, and re-stitching it on the computer. Still, the image would have been captured all at once, probably in a lot less than 13 minutes depending on the maximum aperture of your lens.

In terms of affordability and portability, the digitals are really nice, and it's mostly the way I've gone. I still shoot 4 * 5 black and white negatives sometimes, and they make great 16" x 20" prints, but that's mostly for the fun of it. Digital panoramas are great. I'll not deny that digital is where the future is.

Oh, and about printing, per the question on his site. For the highest quality image per inch, hire someone with a Durst Lambda 130. It can make continuous photographic prints up to 60" x 164' (yes, that's feet) in a resolution equivalent to 4,000 x 4,000 dpi in inkjet terms, and continuous tone.

A ColorSpan Displaymaker Mach12 can get you up to 72" wide by effectively unlimited length, and it prints with a 12-color ink set. Not as high quality as the Lambda per square inch, but impressive.

And if what you really want is just plain big, HP DesignJets go up to 96" wide now. The quality's still good.

Where do you find people with these kinds of machines? Here are a couple of suggestions, but there are lots more: Harvest Productions or Design Image.

Next, assume the student is working for 1/2 tuition credit (which a lot of colleges like to do for part time work), at ~ $14,500

What? Where in the world did you pull that number from?

I currently attend (and work at) another large techinical school - RIT. That said, I can tell you that for 99% of students here, they're stuck doing jobs like working in the cafeteria, manning the library desks, sitting around as computer lab assistants, and such....At around $6.50-8/hour. Even the few jobs paying higher will only be $10-12/hour at the most. And yes, i've seen more than a few postings for part-time and full-time co-op positions at rates like those.

Sure, there's going to be some exceptions, but in general, you're going to be laughed at to your face for suggesting that ~20 hours/week should somehow be worth half a student's tuition at a school like RIT, MIT, or lots of other private tech schools.

Since they're working part time and going to school, lets be generous and say they work three days a week: 24 hours.

I can also say that that's more than likely off as well....Assuming you're talking about a student doing software development work or somesuch, and not just navel-gazing in a computer lab or something...~20 hours of real work combined with a full 4-5 class schedule at someplace like MIT is going to burn you out real fast.

Close, but not quite. The apple II didn't use VRAM; it used standard DRAM as part of the memory map (at either 0x400-7FF default, or 0x800-0xBFF page two).

This was part of the beauty of woz's design ... processor and video accesses were interleaved at a 1:1 ratio, so when the video system scanned through memory to draw to the screen, it also refreshed the dram. (You didn't need to access all the memory to refresh it, just through a certain number of low-order bits). The IBM PC required a timer and a dma controller to handle its refreshes, adding extra hardware.

And, to continue the grumpy old man tradition... my PC-4 had 544 bytes standard, and I bought the 1K expansion module. It had a display on the screen that showed the number of bytes remaining.

The Software Engineering department at RIT has an application domain (like a concentration w/in your degree) for Computer Game programming. I believe this concentrates much more on the programmming aspect of game programming, though... I don't think they get very much into the artisitic realm of this.

The Software Engineering department at RIT has an application domain (like a concentration w/in your degree) for Computer Game programming. I believe this concentrates much more on the programmming aspect of game programming, though... I don't think they get very much into the artisitic realm of this.

The Software Engineering department at RIT has an application domain (like a concentration w/in your degree) for Computer Game programming. I believe this concentrates much more on the programmming aspect of game programming, though... I don't think they get very much into the artisitic realm of this.

I'm guessing that we'll run out of usable energy before we run out of dirt.

But I might be wrong.

Here's a page about it. Looks like he's packaged 0.11 which is one release behind, but worked fine and included the Mythmusic module. There's probably someone out there who's put together a 0.12 (or a latest CVS) binary package, there tends to be debs for just about everything somewhere (Mandrake is probably #2 for availability now).

Good luck. Its a sweet PVR package too and 0.12 includes a news feeds module so you can get your slash/fix in the lazyboy.

Screenshots and photos here: http://www.csh.rit.edu/~benjamin/programs/program. php?program=KBinaryClock

get yours today

The CS House at the Rochester Institute of Technology has hacked a drink machine that can dispense drinks via the internet.

The CS House at the Rochester Institute of Technology has hacked a drink machine that can dispense drinks via the internet.

The CS House at the Rochester Institute of Technology has hacked a drink machine that can dispense drinks via the internet.

Pretty much.

I just saw a video of Paul Rand, who argued that one of the primary qualifications of good (graphic) design was usability-- it had a funny sequence where he was wandering through a hardware store (I think it was shot in the 80s) and making fun of some of the gadgets.

Design with function at the forefront was also an idea espoused by these guys, who some of you may have heard of.

Long distance electricity transmission is done using DC, not AC.

So STFU, moron.

MRI is a great application but how much it is due to the actual theory? Incidently, the inventors of MRI already got their prize this year.

Come on. How would one even use a MRI machine without any theory? One need to have an theoretical understanding of how the different tissues influence the magnetic field they are in, a theory to seperate the noise from the relevant signals, and then a mathematical (theoretical) algorithm to make a 3D image out of these signals based on the original physical theory of the interaction between the field and the matter. Yes, because you did not think that these fancy images is actually what comes out of these machines when one turns them on? Theory is what creates those images from the experimental data.

One could as always have a long debate if the best theories comes from experimental physicists with an intuition about what happens in their equipment or from theoretical physicists with a deep understanding of fundamental theories. But as always the truth is that the world is not black and white; theories inspire new experiments whose new results give rise to new theories. And few theoretical or experimental physicist can afford to either neglect experimental or theoretical work that is done in the field they work.

I can understand that some find the more abstract theoretical physics frustrating since they can not follow the arguments. But if one takes the time to listen, one will find that they always refer back to experiments done, or more importantly, new experiments that can be done to check what they are saying is correct.

On a side note, MRI is based on Nuclear Magnetic Resonance (NMR) which is a property of atoms not discovered before quantum mechanics came along. The very abstract and mathematically complex theories scribled on black boards in the 30's is therefore the first guides to the experimentalists that a MRI machine could be build in the first place.

= 9J =

Here's an image showing a close-up of a CMYK image.

(And if I remember correctly black is actually printed at 45 degrees, not straight up and down like I said)

So... it's an uncomfortable couch with a $10 digital scale built in?

And they got on CNN? Obviously the rest of us just aren't trying hard enough.

Real geeks don't want that couch, they want funny-looking ergonomic sofas or something with a built-in stereo and drink holder. ...or a couch made of mouse pads.

Somehow, i'm not too worried....Probably 90% of the Indians and other Asians i've had to deal with in support positions frankly don't know shit about computing.

Case in point: The Indian lab assistant I had to deal with this morning. The computer I was at couldn't see or allow setup of the normal network printer for some reason, so I waved him over. After seeing the situation, he then proceded to randomly click around in the root C: folder for 5 minutes, muttering "It should be in here somewhere...". After he tried the same "procedure" for the 3rd time, I just gave up and went to another building.

Also of note is the fact that my employer told me I beat out 30 or so other canidates for my co-op as a support technician this summer. When I asked him how that was, he said they'd had a huge amount of foreign students (at RIT, this means a high percentage of Indians, followed by Chinese, Koreans, and Vietnamese.) apply, but that when interviewed, none of them knew enough about computing to actually perform the duties they were applying for.

As for "learn good English", i'm afraid there's still a long way to go here as well. I do not define "good" as having such a thick accent or bad pronunciation that I have to ask them to repeat themselves three times before I can understand a sentence.

Take support jobs away from overpaid arrogant first worlders.

Oh, so sad that we're overpaid and arrogant. If you really want to do something about the imbalance, you'd work to change your own country instead of sounding just as arrogant yourselves.

I work for RESNet at Rochester Institute of Technology. We've implemented a pretty good solution which has stopped no-one from internet access for any extended period of time.

Every PC on our network must go to start.rit.edu (when they plug in they get a temporary 10. IP, which can only access select servers, and other machines on their subnet). At the start.rit.edu page we've coded an activex control which checks the version numbers of the RPC DCOM patched files (We compiled a list of every major windows version, every service pack, pre/post RPC DCOM patch). If the user is not patched, they are redirected to a page indicating which patches they must download/install off our server -- we also have allowed the users to access windows update through a proxy (if IE auto proxy detection is turned on).

Finally we've coded a program, and put it on a CD entitled the RIT Windows Resource Kit. The program automatically detects their OS version, and upon them clicking a button, runs ipconfig /release to get them off the network, installs any and all necessary patches, installs the university-licensed mcafee antivirus, updates the definitions, and prompts them to restart at appropriate moments. Also on the CD for severe cases we have all the individual updates, and the Stinger virus remover.

We also have RIT servers on campus who's logs are parsed on an hourly basis, and any machine which has connected to it in an attempt to spread the worm is blocked from the network. We then have a new custom-coded web interface which correlates with our network registration database: IPEdit that we can use to look up users who can't get online, explain to them to get the CD, patch their PC, run stinger, and then we can reeanble them. Most users are back online within an hour.

So far we've distributed over 5,000 copies of the CDs to each incoming freshmen and returning upperclassmen. (15,000 students at the college). As can be seen, our bandwidth usage is very much under control. Although we've experienced a lot of call volume (300 students a day) this last weekend as 2500 freshmen moved in, I'm happy to say that over 4000 students are registered on the network, and the phone in our office hasn't rung for the last hour.

I work for RESNet at Rochester Institute of Technology. We've implemented a pretty good solution which has stopped no-one from internet access for any extended period of time.

Every PC on our network must go to start.rit.edu (when they plug in they get a temporary 10. IP, which can only access select servers, and other machines on their subnet). At the start.rit.edu page we've coded an activex control which checks the version numbers of the RPC DCOM patched files (We compiled a list of every major windows version, every service pack, pre/post RPC DCOM patch). If the user is not patched, they are redirected to a page indicating which patches they must download/install off our server -- we also have allowed the users to access windows update through a proxy (if IE auto proxy detection is turned on).

Finally we've coded a program, and put it on a CD entitled the RIT Windows Resource Kit. The program automatically detects their OS version, and upon them clicking a button, runs ipconfig /release to get them off the network, installs any and all necessary patches, installs the university-licensed mcafee antivirus, updates the definitions, and prompts them to restart at appropriate moments. Also on the CD for severe cases we have all the individual updates, and the Stinger virus remover.

We also have RIT servers on campus who's logs are parsed on an hourly basis, and any machine which has connected to it in an attempt to spread the worm is blocked from the network. We then have a new custom-coded web interface which correlates with our network registration database: IPEdit that we can use to look up users who can't get online, explain to them to get the CD, patch their PC, run stinger, and then we can reeanble them. Most users are back online within an hour.

So far we've distributed over 5,000 copies of the CDs to each incoming freshmen and returning upperclassmen. (15,000 students at the college). As can be seen, our bandwidth usage is very much under control. Although we've experienced a lot of call volume (300 students a day) this last weekend as 2500 freshmen moved in, I'm happy to say that over 4000 students are registered on the network, and the phone in our office hasn't rung for the last hour.

I work for RESNet at Rochester Institute of Technology. We've implemented a pretty good solution which has stopped no-one from internet access for any extended period of time.

Every PC on our network must go to start.rit.edu (when they plug in they get a temporary 10. IP, which can only access select servers, and other machines on their subnet). At the start.rit.edu page we've coded an activex control which checks the version numbers of the RPC DCOM patched files (We compiled a list of every major windows version, every service pack, pre/post RPC DCOM patch). If the user is not patched, they are redirected to a page indicating which patches they must download/install off our server -- we also have allowed the users to access windows update through a proxy (if IE auto proxy detection is turned on).

Finally we've coded a program, and put it on a CD entitled the RIT Windows Resource Kit. The program automatically detects their OS version, and upon them clicking a button, runs ipconfig /release to get them off the network, installs any and all necessary patches, installs the university-licensed mcafee antivirus, updates the definitions, and prompts them to restart at appropriate moments. Also on the CD for severe cases we have all the individual updates, and the Stinger virus remover.

We also have RIT servers on campus who's logs are parsed on an hourly basis, and any machine which has connected to it in an attempt to spread the worm is blocked from the network. We then have a new custom-coded web interface which correlates with our network registration database: IPEdit that we can use to look up users who can't get online, explain to them to get the CD, patch their PC, run stinger, and then we can reeanble them. Most users are back online within an hour.

So far we've distributed over 5,000 copies of the CDs to each incoming freshmen and returning upperclassmen. (15,000 students at the college). As can be seen, our bandwidth usage is very much under control. Although we've experienced a lot of call volume (300 students a day) this last weekend as 2500 freshmen moved in, I'm happy to say that over 4000 students are registered on the network, and the phone in our office hasn't rung for the last hour.

Bad Apples and how commercial companies should utilize Open Source with in-house development.

Open Source software is for most a new and unknown idea whose time has finally come. Many managers who have never even heard of Linux are finding themselves attempting to integrate it into their in-house development. They hear all of the wonderful benefits of utilizing Open Source software and want to be part of that. Unfortunately too often the projects fail for what seems unknown reasons. The majority of the time the problem stems from the false idea that Free Software means no cost across the board. Projects are done on a shoestring budget and the idea of interacting with the community is forgotten. The community is a large asset at the companies disposal that should not be ignored. A successful Open Source project within a company must incorporate developers within the community into the project.

John Macintosh owned an apple tree farm. The vast majority of his apples were shipped out by the ton to a company that made apple cider. After seeing a local farm open its fields to those who wanted to hand pick their own apples with fantastic success he decided to do it also. The margin for selling hand picked apples is much better then selling apples by the ton so why not give it a shot he thought. Come the next spring he put out a sign by the road stating that anyone could hand pick apples. As the summer wore on he found a few customers stopping by, but due to the infrequency he mostly found them to be an annoyance and considered stopping the program all together. Near the end of the August he had a friend over whom also ran an apple farm. The topic turned to John's field and the his lack of customers. His friend quickly pointed out a number of problems that John had overlooked:

• Customers were given little help when picking the apples. Basics such as ladders, apple grabbers, and bags or crates were not provided.
• There was no one officially hired at the farm to deal with customers. John who was often busy with other things made the customers feel as though they were not his top priority (it doesn't matter if they really were or not).
• Getting customers to know about his farm was nothing more then a sign down near his driveway. Because of the success of other farms he incorrectly assumed that this is all he would have to do.

Each one of these were a problem that in the end hurt John's apple farm.

Of course John Macintosh and his farm doesn't exist, but if you replace him with a manager and apples with Open Source you suddenly have an interesting situation. Most all business managers when presented with the apple story know the list of problems even before it was listed, but when talking about Open Source they go tripping all over themselves asking why didn't it work? The problem is mostly a lack of knowledge about how Open Source works. They hear about Open Source and Free Software and think that is exactly what it is, something that they can take for free and with very minimal effort get Open Source developers to help. Half of the reason for using Open Source software is to utilize the community, letting them help in improving and developing the software. Managers hear about the army of programmer just working away on code in their free time. They then incorrectly assume that this army of free programmers are just waiting for them to start their project. Managers often times think that very little to no effort will be needed to utilize the community.

Customers were given little help when picking the apples. Basics such as ladders, apple grabbers, and bags or crates were not provided.

Developers want to work on Open Source software, your Open Source software! There is no ex

Maybe time to start pimping my new desktop background picture.

You work for the RIAA/MPAA, don't you? ;)

I'm curious, though, have you actually lived on a college campus in the last 5 years or so? Students game constantly, even the liberal arts kids. Yes, people use Kaaza, but more often than not, they're using it to get more games that they then play. I can't remember a time when I could walk down a dorm hallway and not hear some form of game going on.

Also, many schools are starting to throttle down services like Kaaza, forcing students to turn to other forms of entertainment....Not much use for getting mass quantities of music and movies when it only goes 1-10K/sec, is it?

I go to a rather large school myself, and there's organized tournaments pretty regularly- the Electronic Gaming Society chapter here is even planning on throwing a LAN party for the incoming freshmen.

I recently went back to school and finished my degree at RIT taking almost all of my classes online through their distance learning program. Since I never felt much of a 'connection' with a physically present class in the first place I found this arrangment much closer to my ideal learning format than having to drive to class everyday, get there ontime, etc.

I loved that I could do the bulk of my work after mid-night (I was working during the day). The key to making the class happen is having a responsive teacher who knows how to use the tools. There were problems when teachers I knew didn't undstand how to use the software to present and organize the class, that was mayhem.

In 2 seperate occaisions professors of mine had parents get sick and then pass away during the class. This caused a great deal of turmoil in the class as it took over a week in each case before the class knew what was going on and why the professor had suddenly dissapeared. In each case though professors showed great dedication to seeing the class through, which I really appreciated. They went above and beyond what I think you might expect from someone in those situations.

Windows and Linux do represent different ways of thinking. There are differently designed. Yes, they are just tools. But why shouldn't you be allowed to use whatever tool you want?

Quite true....I think what some people don't realize, though, is that if the school doesn't support it, it doesn't mean use outside of school is prohibited.

I think schools should go out of their way to expose students to a diverse toolset, so they can choose the best one for the job. This goes for computer science and everything else.

Yeah...Some do, some don't, I guess. Another reason to do your research when you're applying. As i've said a lot already, though, I don't think software choices should be the sole factor.

I attend RIT. at the moment. I'd say non-Windows stuff is pretty entrenched there...Heck, our whole Student Information System, most of the course registration functions, and the school's email are accessed via VMS and VAX clusters. I'm not a CS major anymore, but they start(ed) out those students learning Java on Solaris machines, as well.

what off hours? there is no such thing in most cases. and the off hours wouldn't be enough time to download the patches anyways in time(speed just isn't fast enough)

Do you not sleep, or what? And of course they're not going to download in one shot, that's what resumable multi-part downloads are for.

typical users DON'T leave their home computers on when they don't use them btw.

I feel like a broken record saying this, but you don't speak for everyone. Unless you regularly provide in-home support for a wide variety of users in many different countries, which I doubt, you just can't assume that.

I can only speak for what i've seen in my corner of the US, and some friends in England, Australia, Canada, and Russia, but any "typical" user i've seen leaves their PC on 24-7 or close to it. The university I attend leaves the umpteen computers in it's public labs on continuously. I don't think i've ever seen a system turned off there unless it had some sort of failure.

IANACSM (I am not a computer science major) but the algorithm seems to be a standard one taught in CS courses. A google search on the "first fit" algorithm (mentioned in the comments of the code) yields many results such as this one:


* size(block) = n + size(header)
Scan free list for first block with nWords >= size(block)
If block not found
Failure (time for garbage collection!)
Else if free block nWords >= size(block) + threshold*
Split into a free block and an in-use block
Free block nWords = Free block nWords - size(block)
In-use block nWords = size(block)
Return pointer to in-use block
Else
Unlink block from free list
Return pointer to block
*Threshold must be at least size(header) + 1 to leave room for header and link
Threshold can be set higher to combat fragmentation


It's be pretty hard to claim as intellectual property something that's common knowledge....

Only if it's in the desert...in the lightning...in the rain.

Intercal... or BRAK.