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So it doesn't work, won't help, and might even end up hurting more that a few people, but it's going to enhance passport security?

yeah, read the arguments

http://dlis.gseis.ucla.edu/people/pagre/bar-code.h tml

Let nobody get between snake-oil salemen and the antiterrorism budget...

So, what diminished costs do music pirates face ? Do they have no computer to decode the mp3? No hard drive to store the mp3? No opportunity costs involved in finding the mp3 in the first place? No network costs? No cost cd-r's to burn them to? Why exactly can't the record companies harness the same technology that makes digital music so inexpensive to distribute on an ad-hoc basis? And exactly what algorithms have software patents given us that we wouldn't have otherwise? No GIFs? Oh wait, PNG, JPG, etc. No MP3 or MPGs? Hmmm... OGG. No "one-click shopping", no "buy-it-now"? Which new works of art have now been made available to us since copyright was extended from 50 to 70 years?

For further your further reading pleasure.

The opinion says that this is a narrow decision.

"Today we resolve an apparent conflict between California's trade secret law (Civ. Code, [sec.] 3426 et seq.) and the free speech clauses of the United States and
California Constitutions. In this case, a Web site operator posted trade secrets owned by another on his Internet Web site despite knowing or having reason to know that the secrets were acquired by improper means. The trial court found that the operator misappropriated these trade secrets in violation of section 3426.1 and issued a preliminary injunction pursuant to section 3426.2, subdivision (a), prohibiting the operator from disclosing these secrets. Accepting as true the trial court's findings, we now consider whether this preliminary injunction violates the First Amendment of the United States Constitution and article I, section 2, subdivision (a) of the California Constitution. We conclude it does not."

The opinion says that this is a narrow decision.

"Today we resolve an apparent conflict between California's trade secret law (Civ. Code, [sec.] 3426 et seq.) and the free speech clauses of the United States and
California Constitutions. In this case, a Web site operator posted trade secrets owned by another on his Internet Web site despite knowing or having reason to know that the secrets were acquired by improper means. The trial court found that the operator misappropriated these trade secrets in violation of section 3426.1 and issued a preliminary injunction pursuant to section 3426.2, subdivision (a), prohibiting the operator from disclosing these secrets. Accepting as true the trial court's findings, we now consider whether this preliminary injunction violates the First Amendment of the United States Constitution and article I, section 2, subdivision (a) of the California Constitution. We conclude it does not."

Its interessting to reflect a bit on current technology when discussing "science fiction" like this.

Reseachers at Berkely have developed a single chip sensor node called the spec . Although this node lacks sensors, it clearly demonstrates the potential of the approach, even using existing technology and implements the basic platform for a sensor node in 5 mm (thats 2.379E-5 cubic furlongs for the metricly challenged). This node have very low power requirements and are capable of communication of more than 10 meter at 19kbps.

This year the ACM holds its first international conference on sensor systems, SenSys 2003. A number of problems will most likely be adressed by this conference, moving the sensor network research forward.

Personally I think the visions are quite viable. It is correct that power sources (esp. batteries) are a major trouble, but there are many sources to be investigated, and solutions will be found. The worst problem with sensor networks are probably privacy (you thought RFID's were bad? How about sensors that you can not see, that communicates encrypted on unknown random spread spectrums freqs?) - Vernor Vinge have written a couple of (science fiction) books, where sensor networks are used in ways that will be a bit scary to the average privacy-aware slashdot reader....

I got these sites from:
http://door.library.uiuc.edu/edx/rank_biblio.html

A message from stanford to US News to stop publishing their shit:
http://www.stanford.edu/dept/pres-provost/presiden t/speeches/961206gcfallow.html http://www.stanford.edu/dept/pres-provost/presiden t/speeches/970418rankings.html

This an article from an education consultant:
http://www.washingtonparent.com/articles/9712/rank ings.htm

This article goes over the false assumptions about rankings:
http://www.sls.lib.il.us/reference/por/features/99 /collrank.html

A page from petersons declaring college rankings irresponsible:
http://www.petersons.com/about/ranking.html A page on the ucla server giving tips on choosing a university:
http://www.gseis.ucla.edu/mm/cc/info/choosing/eval .html

Articles from the chronicle:
http://chronicle.com/free/v44/i02/02a06701.htm http://chronicle.com/free/v44/i11/11a00101.htm

Article from columbia:
http://www.columbia.edu/cu/21stC/issue-1.1/vying.h tm

Slate articles:
http://slate.msn.com/id/34027/ http://slate.msn.com/id/34278/

A law school's article on rankings:
http://www.fplc.edu/tfield/usnwr.htm

A law school association to ask to stop ranking:
http://www.aals.org/ranknews.html http://www.aals.org/validity.html

Law school admission counsel:
http://www.lsac.org/LSAC.asp?url=lsac/deans-speak- out-rankings.asp

AMU's response to their high ranking:
http://www.tamu.edu/new/vision/where.html

Marc Smith, the sociologist, who invented this tool has been at this for a while. He has done great work in mapping cyberspace. This project and tool was part of the doctoral dissertation he wrote about communities in cyberspace. Here is the book he co-edited on the topic

Marc Smith, the sociologist, who invented this tool has been at this for a while. He has done great work in mapping cyberspace. This project and tool was part of the doctoral dissertation he wrote about communities in cyberspace. Here is the book he co-edited on the topic

...that just happened to be made out of the same or similar compounds that the current Space Shuttle solid rockets use as fuel. It wasn't intential. I forgot the properties they were looking for in the paint (stiffness, lightweight?), but it was difficult for them to replace that paint with something else when the designers discovered the "problem".

Some quick links to a description of the real cause of Hindenburg:

ucla.edu
clean-air.org
hydrogenus.com

Enjoy.

I'm not sure, but I think you may be suffering from a misconception that the Big Bang started with a bunch of matter concentrated within an otherwise empty space, which then exploded into the void. Rather, the Big Bang was when all of space itself was compressed, and subsequently expanded. The Big Bang happened everywhere, so to speak, because all points in space were once concentrated in the same place. Space itself has been filled uniformly with matter/radiation from all time -- it's not a "shock wave" of matter propagating out into empty space, it's existing matter that's growing farther apart.

See also this FAQ.

Ooops. This FAQ.

Some more link whoring ...

Postal Theory: Mail Sorter Acted as Mill for Anthrax

Read down towards the bottom:

Potentially telltale mail was identified using masses of computer data recorded as each letter entering the highly automated sorting centers is scanned for an address, given identifying bar codes recording its time and place of posting, and sent on its way.

The data include digital images of almost every hand-addressed envelope, which optical scanners cannot easily read, postal officials said.


The big question is: will the post office stop delivering mail that doesn't have a valid return address?

In the time of the Unabomer, the PO stopped delivering mail that weighs over one pound and came from a collection box. Mail that weighs over one pound has to be brought in person to a post office.

The post office OCR's the mail and keeps the scans. They also apply a unique bar code to each piece of first class mail. Then they record all this information and save it for a while.

Tracking of Anthrax Letter Yields Clues

I also remember reading that they save the sender's information as well. It was in an anthrax story that said they went to all the curbside mailboxes where all the pieces that were close to an anthrax-related piece had been sent.

5/10LBS of bio or chem is not going to do anything. Jesus you've been reading the Dept. Homeland Defense propaganda again, haven't you?

Right. And your experience with these types of weapons is what, exactly? How many people will a pound of blister or nerve agent affect in a standard western city at noontime?

For years, all through the ColdWar, the US and the fUSSR deployed various chemical and possibly bio weapons. Some of these included small, battlefield use, artillery shells. Payload no more than a very few pounds.

"Ken Alibek, a former top official in the Soviet germ weapons program who is now president of Advanced Biosystems, a consulting company in Manassas, Va., said that it was routinely possible to create dry anthrax that contained 100 billion spores per gram and that, with some effort, 500 billion was possible."
"The infectious dose," Dr. Alibek said, "can be quite large."

Seeing as an infectious dose can be as little as 10,000 spores and seeing as 5 lbs at that concentration is 11 trillion spores...you figure it out.

Nerve agents are even worse. 70 mg. min/m3 can be fatal to all but the most resistant. 70 milligrams. How much is 5 lbs of that?

The best chemical weapon is one that has a large percentage of pb. Injected at over Mach 1.

Sure, one on one. For a widescale terror weapon, though...a bullet is somewhat ineffective, unless you're the target "one".

Interestingly, it's clear why they're picking on kindergardeners. At age 7 and above, the rules require the informed consent of the subject. If the kid says no and the parents say yes, that's a no. And there can't be any penalty for saying no. But below age 7, the parents alone can "consent".

If they tried this on, say, teenagers, they'd probably be blown off, unless they paid out some serious money.

So this analyses binaries and will find all issues where the code will halt and will exceed its resource requests, thus eliminating the need for testing...

I call Snake Oil.

For those who don't know about the Halting Problem or Busy Beaver Problem then you should really know about what computers can or cannot do.

I dare say these people have some basic pattern matching, but this is NOT a reason to stop testing.

A handheld is made to play games. The gap between handheld and laptop is really disappearing with this product: the size of the screen, the different capabilities, etc.

What I'd like to see next is a faster processor and a little more RAM. Oh, and I'm sure we would like to have an OS to mess around with. That would be a great product for Sony to make! Wait, that market would already be covered by Dell or Gateway.

Isn't the point of a handheld to be able to play simple games like Tetris? When you get tired of these, just plug in your laptop for some high powered gaming.

An interesting corollary would be Bentham's/Foucault's idea of a Panopticon- a prison in which all prisoners would be watched by all other prisoners. The idea would be that everyone would control their behavior according to the norm because of the possiblity or likelihood that someone/everyone is watching.

Although I'd be surprised if the societal reaction to this kind of thing would be of sudden or increased desire to play by the rules, I'd be equally surprised if the powers that be aren't already aware of the concept.

IANAL, but if I'm reading the bill correctly, I think what they're trying to do is ammend the law to the point where putting a file on a P2P network is equivalent to a level of traditional copying already defined as a felony.

This is correct, as long as you realize that the "traditional" level was set in just 1997

Also, the act doesn't even use the term "P2P network." Any network accessible to the public qualifies.

A little browsing and...
according to this site, there is
an area of about 361 million sq km for the worlds oceans. According to this source, deuterium is one part in ten thousand of the hydrogen in water .

Now a little math... 361,000,000,000m^2*0.01m = 3.61 billion cu meters used in 10,000 years. total volume of the worlds ocean ( again from the first site ) is 1,347,000,000 cu km or 1.347x10^18 cu meters. So the first divided by the second gives percent of the ocean used, about 2.7x10^-9 ( avery small fraction of the ocean) Now we must process 10,000 times that much to get the deuterium, so about 3 thousandths of one percent of the total volume of the worlds oceans.

A very good ball park figure, but hardly enough to worry about. Further the original rate reference was talking about the growth of the the consumption rate, not the consumtion rate itself. I don't think that the consumtion rate will grow a thousand times. If anything, between ten and a hundred, times the current consumption rate, with an initial increase and a return to the regular rate as technology advances. Just because there is more power doesn't mean that we wont strive for effeciency. For instance, throwing more wattage at a CPU is not a viable means of improvement. As another poster claims, the biggest will come from metallurgical and chemical processes, not consumer use (are we all gonna be driving our electric cars around with giant drogue chutes hanging off the back end?).

I forgot to include this in my earlier posting: STS-113 pre-flight and picosat launch photos

Enjoy!

In the way of background, note that Gold is the same Gold of the Bondi-Holye-Gold steady state cosmological model, proposed in the 1940s and 1950s as an attempt to "fix problems" with the big bang model, and has long held non-conventional views on light. Gold and others invoked "tired light" -- photons which became redder from their point of emission, even though doing so contradicted momentum-energy conservation. It's a archetypical example of a theory trashing a fundamental principle in order to exaplain last week's cosmological observations. We should always be wary of our assumptions, but all too often, cosmological theorists will attempt to make a splash by abandoning them in favor of explaining very tenuous and often incorrect observations.

Gold has always been an outsider in the astrophysics community, but has done some very good work over the years; including some seminal work on pulsars. He was Peter Goldreich's (major figure in theoretical astrophysics, for those not familiar) Ph.D. advisor.

Those interested in the history of the steady-state model, including attempts to resurrect it, and the many errors it commits, can check out this page.

No Java, no JSP man. Simply use PHP for web development.
Forget Java man and go to PHP!

PHP is 4 times faster than Java technology 'JSP' (Java server pages).
This tallies because compiled "C" program is 4 times faster than Java.

Moreover, PHP is getting the object oriented features of Java language.

The real usefulness of Java is 'Java applets' which run on client browsers but on the server side you simply use PHP.

PHP is a very lightening fast object oriented scripting language. PHP is 100% written in "C" and there is no virtual machine as in Java. Nothing can beat "C" language ("C" is a language which never dies!!)

(Java is just another language. The PHP project needs millions of Java programmers who can add the Java's language features like inner classes, static, private, protected and others to PHP. PHP already has some of java' features).
Java programmers will really "LOVE" PHP as PHP class is identical to Java's class keyword.

Read the benchmars of Java JSP and PHP. PHP tops in the speed!!

Read the doc here and mirrors at [1], [2], [3], [4].

No, no. That would be an appleseed.

Excellent post, and I largely agree.

You may be interested in this fine lecture by Judea Pearl that discusses the relationship between correlation and causation. It IS possible to speak meaningfully about causality.

That's exactly how it's supposed to work. They developed a system, and now have a monopoly on their system. You want one? Fine - design your own.

If it's their system, then why do patent protections run out? You don't suddenly stop owning your car after 5 years. Ideas can't be owned.

Also, it's probably costing the economy billions upon billions of dollars for these people to have their monopoly. It's inefficient and state granted.

Here are some good papers on exactly how economically inefficient patents are. Their arguments are somewhat different from mine.

• Boldrin & Levine: Case Against Intellectual Monopoly
• The Theory of Innovation without Intellectual Monopoly
• And, and article in that bastion of rationality, "Reason": Creation Myths does innovation require intellectual property rights?

All, hard, well thought ought analysis of why IP in general is a bad idea, and why patents actually stifle innovation instead of encourage it.

Yeah, and that's why video sucks so badly under Linux.

Funny, it's fine for me, even Windows Media files.

Yeah, and you are technically infrining on several patents using half those programs. Fear of liability is why RedHat doesn't bundle mplayer with their system. The only reason those programs exist is because their existence serves other purposes of the creators of the format, and there's nobody with deep enough pockets to be worth suing.

Unacceptable to whom? Plenty of startups have managed to create something worthwhile, and benefit from patent protection for it. (Tivo, Real.)

And, just how much have they been actually helped by their patents? It's not as if ReplayTV didn't also exist. Also seems to me that Real's patents have actually hurt them. They'd have widespread adoption if it weren't for patents. They'd be able to make a ton more money installing and setting up servers for people.

That's exactly how it's supposed to work. They developed a system, and now have a monopoly on their system. You want one? Fine - design your own.

If it's their system, then why do patent protections run out? You don't suddenly stop owning your car after 5 years. Ideas can't be owned.

Also, it's probably costing the economy billions upon billions of dollars for these people to have their monopoly. It's inefficient and state granted.

Here are some good papers on exactly how economically inefficient patents are. Their arguments are somewhat different from mine.

• Boldrin & Levine: Case Against Intellectual Monopoly
• The Theory of Innovation without Intellectual Monopoly
• And, and article in that bastion of rationality, "Reason": Creation Myths does innovation require intellectual property rights?

All, hard, well thought ought analysis of why IP in general is a bad idea, and why patents actually stifle innovation instead of encourage it.

Yeah, and that's why video sucks so badly under Linux.

Funny, it's fine for me, even Windows Media files.

Yeah, and you are technically infrining on several patents using half those programs. Fear of liability is why RedHat doesn't bundle mplayer with their system. The only reason those programs exist is because their existence serves other purposes of the creators of the format, and there's nobody with deep enough pockets to be worth suing.

Unacceptable to whom? Plenty of startups have managed to create something worthwhile, and benefit from patent protection for it. (Tivo, Real.)

And, just how much have they been actually helped by their patents? It's not as if ReplayTV didn't also exist. Also seems to me that Real's patents have actually hurt them. They'd have widespread adoption if it weren't for patents. They'd be able to make a ton more money installing and setting up servers for people.

A while back, there was a Slashdot article about the Conquest File System, a filesystem for machines with large amounts (gigabytes) of battery-backed RAM. It seems likely, with falling RAM prices, that large quantities of persistent RAM will be a part of fast servers in the future. Do you have any plans to make ReiserFS take advantage of such systems, beyond just putting the journal in RAM?

PHP is 4 times faster than Java technology 'JSP' (Java server pages).

This tallies because compiled "C" program is 4 times faster than Java.

Moreover, PHP is getting the object oriented features of Java language.

The real usefulness of Java is 'Java applets' which run on client browsers but on the server side you simply use PHP.

PHP is a very lightening fast object oriented scripting language. PHP is 100% written in "C" and there is no virtual machine as in Java. Nothing can beat "C" language ("C" is a language which never dies!!)

(Java is just another language. The PHP project needs millions of Java programmers who can add the Java's language features like inner classes, static, private, protected and others to PHP. PHP already has some of java' features).
Java programmers will really "LOVE" PHP as PHP class is identical to Java's class keyword.

Read the benchmars of Java JSP and PHP. PHP tops in the speed!!

Read the doc here and mirrors at [1], [2], [3], [4].

1. Spamassassin scans all my incoming email. It has pretty good hueristics, which get better if you allow it to use bayesian learning. If Spamassassin thinks its spam, a header is added.
2. CRM114 uses a much more sophisticated bayesian approach to check to see if the mail is spam. If it is spam, a header is added.
3. If the sender is on my whitelist (this is a good reference), I put the whitelisted mail in my inbox.
4. If the message is not on the whitelist and does not have a spam header (from either Spamassasin or CRM114) put the message in my inbox.
5. Otherwise, the message is spam and put it in my spam folder.

That is basically it. When one gets through, I put it into the false-negative folder, and a cron job has CRM114 learn it. If a good email winds up in the spam folder, I put it in the false-positive folder and CRM114 learns it as non-spam, and I add the sender to my whitelist.

Fortunately, both types of errors are *VERY* rare. The system just works.

A lot of /.ers just dismiss the idea that the problem can be solved. It can be solved. There are even ways my approach can be made more accurate. If I find more than an error or two a month, I may work on it (think: turing test confirmations for spammy email).

I put up a page describing my efforts. This is a problem which can (and has for many) been solved!

This article tells the story of a defector who had served in the North Korean army. Their barracks didn't have electricity, so they tapped into a nearby electrified railway. They got eggs on only holidays and meat only on Kim's birthday.

All that, of course, is a huge step above what the rest of the people have to endure. In this article a prison camp survivor talks about picking the corn out of cow dung.

I don't know about "overhyped"- "misunderstood" might be a better word. Using OpenMosix, jobs aren't automatically run in parallel across all your computers - that's a different kind of clustering and requires individual applications to be programmed for that capability. Rather, OpenMosix will "load balance" your jobs if you run a number of CPU-intensive processes simultaneously.

For typical home users, there's probably little benefit. Your web browsing won't benefit. Email, nope. Music playing, nope. Office suite-nope. The only thing I can think of that might benefit would be music/video related encoding.

But this is a big deal for environments such as mine, where you have to deal with lots of users running lots of CPU intensive jobs that take days/weeks/months and you want to efficiently use the CPU resources available.

I'm sure others can think of other scenarios where this can be actually useful.

-h3

And for every study linking THC to stopping cancer there is a study refuting that.

Bullshit. Here are the studies I know of.

Here's a study.

Here's another study.

And another.

And then of course there is Dr. Guzman's work itself.

Now you show us the studies that refuse these.

UCLA says smoking weed leads to lung cancer and that THC supresses anti-tumor immune responses.

Thanks for the link. Were you perhaps referring to this study? The study that was funded by the federal government, i.e., the study where if they don't report what the federal government wants to hear they'll lose their funding? Well that was put to rest by a research at Johns Hopkins Medical School who concluded in effect that no such risk exists. UCLA was doing bogus science. Indeed, if you read their report carefully, you'll note that cancer was never caused by the THC; that they simply thought it would occur based on the higher concentrations of certainl chemicals marijuana smoke shares with tobacco smoke, forgetting the whole time that a marijuana user inhales far, far less smoke than the average tobacco smoker.

Of course they had to say something though. Remember that this came out shortly after Dr. Guzman's work in Madrid.

Criminalizing IV drugs spreads AIDS? Is that like criminalizing cats spreads mice?

No, not at all. According to the logic put forth by our drug policy, heroin is a menace because once addicted the user loses the ability to choose (nevermind the fact that tobacco and alcohol are more addictive than heroin according to the NIDA.) So if these addicts have no choice but to use drugs, the only people with the opportunity to make a choice as to whether they transmit deadly diseases or not are those who stand in the way of these addicts using their drugs safely.

In other words, we know they're going to use heroin, and they want to use heroin safely, but we won't let them. We would rather see them spread deadly diseases than let them use clean syringes.

Like I said. Barbaric.

The fact is that the majority of AIDS/HIV transmission comes from sex and from infected mothers giving birth, not drugs.

The fact is that most people die of natural causes, so it's OK for us to kill? Your logic is rephrehsible.

These "indisputable" facts are easily disputed. There is zero evidence that THC would be a magic cure for the hundreds of cancers.

I've just given you four links that say otherwise.

And there is no way that anyone can blame the US for the 6 million cancer deaths world-wide.

It's our drug policy. And thanks to our economic and military might, we've seen to it that this policy is exported throughout the world. Get put on our list of "uncooperative" nations and watch your economy go into the shithole. Stand accused of aiding or abetting drug traffickers and watch our military kill hundreds if not thousands of your citizens.

And by the way, the figure is closer to 300,000,000. From cancer alone that is. Or at least, that is the number of lives that at best we've recklessly endangered. 30 years * 10,000,000 @ year = 300,000,000.

If it's so indisputable, then the Ministries/Departments/Directorates of Health of the other 200+ nation-states on Earth and the World Health Organization are equally guilty.

Do you read the news at all? We were voted out of the U.N. Committee on Narcotics last year! The world is chomping at the bit to institu

Thank you, I was looking for a place to mention the significance of regulation. You did it better than I could have :)

Sitting here working for the TB proteome project, I find it amaizing that even after the structural biologists finish the lion's share of their work on the mysteries of sequence to structure mapping, we still won't have a solid grasp of organism systems' protein interaction until the regulatory sites are found and thoroughly studied.

From what I've seen on PBS, and other magazine shows, the Human Genome Project people are misrepresenting what they've accomplished (I'm not taking anything away from them, it's truly amainzing). They keep talking about the medical marvels that are now possible and how we understand everything about humans without mentioning the titan effort it will take to understand the translation and interaction.

My hat's off to the statistical genetics people for all they're able to do with prediction of traits from marks, kinship coefficients and pedigrees, but won't break out the champagne until the system (systeome?) project is done.

Thank you, I was looking for a place to mention the significance of regulation. You did it better than I could have :)

Sitting here working for the TB proteome project, I find it amaizing that even after the structural biologists finish the lion's share of their work on the mysteries of sequence to structure mapping, we still won't have a solid grasp of organism systems' protein interaction until the regulatory sites are found and thoroughly studied.

From what I've seen on PBS, and other magazine shows, the Human Genome Project people are misrepresenting what they've accomplished (I'm not taking anything away from them, it's truly amainzing). They keep talking about the medical marvels that are now possible and how we understand everything about humans without mentioning the titan effort it will take to understand the translation and interaction.

My hat's off to the statistical genetics people for all they're able to do with prediction of traits from marks, kinship coefficients and pedigrees, but won't break out the champagne until the system (systeome?) project is done.

I think that a couple of false allegations are a small price to pay to save even one child from such horrors.

How many?

The problem is not that we are missing ninety percent of the Universe. The problem is that our formulae are wrong. I mean, scientists have been crunching the numbers and all, but they just haven't figured it out yet. Because it doesn't add up, they have to lump in the whole dark matter bit. And, you cannot use the Chewbacca Defense.

Perhaps we have to come up with better theories that explain the observations rather than say that the observations are wrong. Maybe the reason why we only account for ten percent of the Universe is because that's all there is.

Perhaps, even The Big Bang Never Happened . Or, perhaps not.

I'm glad there's a topic on /. I feel like helping with.

I helped to start an run ours for four years. 97-00

The Forest Lake Area Technology Team (F.L.A.T.T.)

Here are my suggestions:

First, find and talk to several teachers who may be interested in helping, by staying after, helping you deal with school politics. (Physics teachers, CS teachers, ours was actually a Assisted Learning teacher)

Second, get a room, or some place to store your equipment, hopefully a back corner of a said teachers room. This helps A LOT!

Third, ask around for used equipment, explain who you are, what your goals are. We scrounged lots of 386/486 machines this way. And installed Linux on them.

Fourth, hold regular meetings, recruit members, post flyers up around school, get in the school paper if you have one.

Fifth, Come up with some goals, we did everything from compete in computer contests, tinker with Linux, Solaris, and NT betas, and even created an AppleSeed Cluster link

Sixth, Have fun! I learned so much spending those hours after school, programming with friends, discussing the latest software and hardware.

Other things that might help is just helping the school. We did some troubleshooting for our ONE tech person, helped them out took the load off, we got some network cables from the deal as well.

For fund raising we sold mouse pads with our group name on them as well.

Feel free to e-mail me for more info if you need.

-Eric

For those who are not PS worthy.
The paper
Looks like a great server side file system. This is finally a step away from this whole "file" madness. All storage and IO should be memory mapped, and all execution should be in place. Anything else is just silly.

There's a lot of research going on in this area. In particular, there's a newly completed Ph.D. thesis studying a persistent memory/disk hybrid filesystem for linux, named conquest. The performance is quite impressive, although the reports are that it's nowhere near ready for use - the term 'researchware' gets tossed around a lot.

Basically, by storing metadata and files smaller than 1mb in memory, the typically accessed information is much more convenient, and the larger files left on the disk are typically in their 'best case' (it's much more common to read large files than to write them, and typically they're read in some near-linear order: if you watch a moving, you may skip once or twice, but then it's sequential reads). The combination seems to work quite well: We compare Conquest's performance to ext2, reiserfs, SGI XFS, and ramfs, using popular benchmarks. Our measurements show that Conquest incurs little overhead compared to ramfs. Compared to disk-based file systems, Conquest achieves 24% to 1900% faster performance for working sets that fit in memory, and 43% to 96% faster performance with working sets larger than the memory size. .

The point was you can do both an important job and a less important job at the same time. You don't devote all of your resources to a single task while you neglect other tasks. And, the new SARS virus looks like it may be related to the common cold.

I'm down with modern-day new-fangled design strategies, but sometimes a table does exactly what I need, with a minimum of effort. Am I evil?

No, but if you're going to use them (on say ... your /. link) you should probably make certain they don't explode at font-sizes other than the one on your development platform (for example, on say ... your /. link). :p

I'm down with modern-day new-fangled design strategies, but sometimes a table does exactly what I need, with a minimum of effort. Am I evil?

No, but if you're going to use them (on say ... your /. link) you should probably make certain they don't explode at font-sizes other than the one on your development platform (for example, on say ... your /. link). :p

The Apple Newton is, in my opinion, a great example of technology living beyond its expected lifetime and abilities:

There's a very strong and active user community, plenty of help, and gobs of software. An incredibile amount of work has been poured into the device with addons like wireless networking, CompactFlash ATA support, Shoutcast and MP3 playing, web serving, and desktop synching. All this adds to the Newton's built in PIM, notetaking, and email support.

I use my Newton for a telnet client, guitar tuner, notepad/to-do lister, and MP3 player.

The first usable Newton was put out in 1996 and the most powerful and expandable Newton was released middle of 97. The thing's lived a long life and looks like its gonna keep on chugging for a long time more, expecially since they can be found for just over $100 on eBay and the continued support of the Newton community. I know I won't ever ditch it.

• A trademark is a word, phrase, symbol or design ... that identifies and distinguishes the source of the goods of one party from those of others.

Apple has better than Beowulf, they have Appleseed. All the power of Beowulf but with the ease of Apple; 1 page manual for Appleseed, 200+ pages for Beowulf. As for the Win32 layer, Apple used to have a PC Compatibility card, which was an x86 CPU/RAM/Video board for certain models that allowed you to run Windows on your Mac. I think it's time Apple reintroduced this option.

More information about the villa and the Philodemus Project, including some pictures of the scrolls is at The Philodemus Project

I used to believe that IP was the right thing for almost all networked applications, but I have since learned better. IP may be too heavyweight a protocol stack for sensor networks.

If you look at the challenges for untethered sensor network devices, you'll quickly realize that "every bit transmitted brings a sensor a little closer to death." That's not my quote - I heard it from Deborah Estrin of the new Center for Embedded Networked Sensing at UCLA.

I agree that crypto is important, but for anything other than a periodically-wired transmitter like a laptop, or a device with a power source of extreme energy density, power budget is a consideration that often directly affects network stack optimization.

If any of you receive the Research Channel on the DISH Network, try to catch Professor Estrin's sensor talk. It's a great summary of the issues involved in making this stuff scalable.

In this case, it would be an Appleseed cluster surely.

At UCLA's math department, the applied people have a QUIST related research program that uses Fortran77 and shell scripts, and C++ for various parts of their code to implement the Level-Set method to simulate the growth of thin films (atom by atom construction of electronic devices). The language choice seems to be due to legacy reasons: the grad student that started it so long ago used it, and the code has continued to grow ever since(ie. legacy reasons).

Although I wouldn't call it *math* research, here at MBI, bioinformatics programs run on the cluster *seem* to be written in C or C++ for the most part. I thinks it's more of the former because that's the interface for a number of bioinformatics libraries that we have licenced. Also, these things tend to be mixed heavily with shell and perl scripts; so the language is only for ease of integration with support libraries.

For most all of my undergrad work, I saw everyone use matlab, mathimatica, and their relatives for their work. In grad school, it seems to depend more on the class and the religious leanings of the mathematician involved.

There's a class on scientific computing that uses VC++ with fortran libraries from netlib (leveraged by f2c) solve some math implementation problem (tends to vary from year to year). Prof Anderson tends to by a junkyard warrior when it comes to math code generation. But then he's the mathematician's MacGuyver. (side note: Prof Anderson is a wonderful teacher and researcher - check out his page for some handy software tools and papers. Also, look at 270B for tidbits of linear algebra optimizations).

The benifit of matlab-ish programs is that you can usually implement your math structure quickly. The down side is that if you want to use any advance optimization then it near impossible. On the other hand, if you don't have a numerical analysis background, then many of the things you try to do to optimize your code in more mundane languages are probably going to be *much* slower then matlab, et al.

All of this is assuming you'r doing numerical analysis. If you're interested in abstract algebra , then I think you're stuck with maple. good program, but I don't have a review on it since I did most of my work by pencil and paper. I did use it for one of my crypto classes and found its implementation of Z_n groups very nice... although I ended up just coding it in C++ anyway :)

Also, check out the R project as it is GNU matlab.