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I worked as a SysAdmin and programmer at the University of Connectuicut's Optical Fiber Research Manufacturing Labratory for two years. Our graduate students, some of which were programmers, wrote their numerical models exclusively in F77. Our reasons were:

* The base model had been written in F77 and the majority of relevant literature was also written for F77

* Easily understood by other researchers; increased chances of getting published

* Trivial to port and run on a Cray, Sun Workstation, or a Linux cluster [which we had].

* Variety of parallel programming packages available: HPF, MPI, PVM

* The professor said it was The Way To Do It. ;)

I personally spent almost a year writing F77 code with PVM. While F77 had some unpleasant limitations which have already been covered, I was glad to have the experience.

We used The Portland Group's compilers exclusively, and my benchmarks against g77 showed significant preformance gain.

As part of my continuing work with the lab I am developing a parallel version of an extremely long [5 days on a dual AMD 1900+ !] and CPU-intensive algorithm, using MPI and F77. I have no doubt that F77 and F90 will be around and it use for a long time.

Joshua Thomas
formerly University of Connecicut
email: jthomas at poweronemedia dot com

Scientist 1: "How can we make these docile, yet territorial honey bees make more honey?"

Scientist 2:"Let's cross breed them with these here harder working, yet more agressive African bees. We'll get harder working honey bees!"

Scientist 1: "Did you just pinch my ass, or was that a ..."

Of course, what we got instead were hyper-agressive, territorial bees; not harder working honey bees. Or something like that.

So what happens when we create this super organism that eats carbon dioxide and craps out twinkies? Nothing bad, of course!
Side effects are inconceivable!
Those obedient microorganisms would never take their behavior beyond what we want. There's no way they would go on to consume too much airborn carbon, ending the greenhouse effect, and tumbling the Earth into a devastating iceage, now would they?

I'm tired of shortsighted technogeeks peddling pseudoscience that could alter the earth's entire ecosystem; never seeking to fully understand the complexity of the issue at hand. The same caution that prevented us from using nuclear bombs to create commerce in Alaska applies here.

Let's just end internal combustion and leave these undersea critters where they belong.

I do not have any experience with their products, but the solution offered by this company seems simple and functional. Their system consists of an apparatus that turns pages of your book automatically, scans, turns, scans, turns. The result you can naturally pass to OCR.

Now, if I was to digitize all my books, I would try to create te the 4DigitalBooks kind of solution myself. The only tricky part is to find a cheap enough way to turn pages automatically, see also Kris Mckenzie's automatic page turner, still the best start is this document which is a proposal and overview on how to create an automatic page turner from pieces, the total cost is $459.

my former school (just graduated) uses the packetshaper (i believe it's made by packeteer, not sure on the model), but what it does is allow the admins to do a higher level of filtering and bandwidth limiting. they can program it so that it limits incoming or outgoing traffic based on packet type rather than the port. this allows them to limit applications that use the same port as other common apps (i know there's a mp3 search thing out there that uses 5190 which is the aol instant messenger port) or applications that use random ports. basically the guy doesn't want the school to be a huge file server for the internet so he highly limits all outgoing p2p traffic so that connections are dropped but students don't care because they just want to download which is also limited but not nearly as much. he also has it setup so that at certain times the limits are removed or lightened a bit. so at off-peak times the bandwidth to those apps is higher than during times of peak usage. he also used this device to talk to our network traffic logs and used it to enforce a bandwidth policy that says "if you transfer too much in a certain period of time, your personal bandwidth is dropped to 64kbps". i don't know what the actual limit is anymore, it used to be like 5 gigs in a week. the packeteer is a great device and took a huge load off of a lot of people's backs because of what it did. there was a severe lack of bandwidth at one point, but all is well now.

this device may very well be what you're looking for, unless the budget is not there for it, in which case, limiting traffic to ports is probably what you want to start doing.

also, you might want to consider talking to the board of education for the district you work in and see about setting up some kind of policy that bans the use of p2p apps on district owned machines. maybe even setup the machines so that teachers can't install anything themselves. it's a thought. this way you won't have to worry about the problem or limiting it or anything.

We have a pair of S/390 here that will run OS/390 as a guest OS under VM/CMS.

For the love of God, or Webster, or both Funk and Wagnalls, it's Arctic, not Artic.

A little review...

Artic

Arctic

Artic

Arctic

Sheesh.

Here is a cool picture of Mallett. He's got a little time machine model right there.

Its too bad the Boston Globe article was the only one posted in this story. It does not go into any detail on his actual ideas. I suggest reading:
USA Today
ABC News
Mallett's Personal Homepage

What a lame-ass!? He's wearing a stupid T-shirt and is in a stupid pose, AND he uses AOL.

Die, lamer, die!

Incidentally, here's the actual paper, the one referred to from the guy's own web site (minimal), published in Phys. Lett. A... Gravitational Field of Circulating Light Beams.

Beware; it's a little drier than the Boston Globe would like to make it...

I say the actual paper; in fact, this particular paper naturally doesn't make any suggestions of the "Hey, look, this research gives me a way to go back in time and save my father from the evils of cigarettes" type - if it did, it would never have made it into any serious journals. Mallett mentions two papers on his site, one on Bose-Einstein condensation and dark matter, one on this...

He has done other work - this , for example, not to mention work on Hawking radiation and probably a bunch of other stuff. His newest one is apparently "Gravitational Perturbations of a Radiating Spacetime", which looks relevant, not to mention full of terrifying maths. "The principal aim of our study is to understand how gravitational waves are scattered by a background radiating spacetime".

One of us has got to dress up like Ronald Mallett-- all out, with a mask and everything, plus a scorched labcoat and frizzy hair-- and show up at his doorstep.

His probable reaction: They will discover a cure for my baldness!!

Mallett's homepage

On his homepage I found this:

Gravitational Field of Circulating Light Beams

In Einstein's general theory of relativity, energy as well as matter produces gravity. This means that the energy of a pure light beam can gravitationally affect matter. A portion of my current research deals with considering the gravitational field produced by a single continuously circulating beam of light in a unidirectional ring laser. It is predicted that a spinning neutral particle, when placed in the ring, is dragged around by the resulting gravitational field (Mallett, R.L. 2000. Weak gravitational field of the electromagnetic radiation in a ring laser. Phys. Lett. A 269: 214).

Another aspect of this research explores the effect on time of the unidirectional circulating light beam. It is shown that an increase in the intensity of the beam of light results in the formation of closed loops in time.

The story was unveiled on September 10, 2001 ... that would have been a great day to have a working time machine.

look at the picture on the guy's homepage.

not a nut. riiiight.

Usually it is a question of time, effort, and liability. For example, at my university, residential (dorm) connections are supported by students. We have approximately 15 technicians for 6800+ people. We do tier 1 and 2 support (anything short of hardware or infrastructure issues). At the beginning of the fall semester we run approximately 200+ trouble tickets per day which goes down to approximately 0-20 by the end of the semester. At the start of spring semesters, we tend to average more, usually because of new students arriving, and old students who get new computers for xmas.

When we are heavily loaded with support calls, there are things that we would not support as readily as others, because our primary goal is to get people an IP (at the minimum) and to make sure they can use a browser. Other issues such as not being able to get netbios name resolution is usually shifted to lower priority. During these times, we follow the "treat 'em and street 'em" rule in order to keep response times to a sane level. In addition we have to go and fix people who get trojan'd or otherwise cause trouble for the network. Even though we can not swap out hardware, most issues have to deal with funky win32 tcp/ip issues. We have 1 mac expert and 1 unix tech as the population of these users are low. We spend a lot of time on win32 issues, but when and if it comes down to partial reinstalls of the tcp/ip stack or registry reconfigurations, we always must make sure that we have supported all the people with the "easy problems" first. It is easy to install drivers or configure IE to stop dialing AOL, so support must go to those people first, because again, the overall goal is to as many people working as possible in the shortest time possible. During peak demand, any client taking over 30 minutes to fix will probably be deferred because in those 30 minutes you could probably get to 5 other people with relatively simple problems (or making sure the voicemailbox stays clean). Also, any client taking over 30 minutes to fix over the phone would be getting a room visit since it is probably more effective to figure out what is going on instead of relying on the client to try to describe the problem.

If it came down to distributing anything, we'd probably distribute site-licensed NAV and a driver CD, so we could walk through people easily when installing drivers. Every brand of NIC driver disk has a different layout which makes it hard to tell people what directory to go to (win9x, NT, 2k, mac?) and what .inf to select etc.

Usually it is a question of time, effort, and liability. For example, at my university, residential (dorm) connections are supported by students. We have approximately 15 technicians for 6800+ people. We do tier 1 and 2 support (anything short of hardware or infrastructure issues). At the beginning of the fall semester we run approximately 200+ trouble tickets per day which goes down to approximately 0-20 by the end of the semester. At the start of spring semesters, we tend to average more, usually because of new students arriving, and old students who get new computers for xmas.

When we are heavily loaded with support calls, there are things that we would not support as readily as others, because our primary goal is to get people an IP (at the minimum) and to make sure they can use a browser. Other issues such as not being able to get netbios name resolution is usually shifted to lower priority. During these times, we follow the "treat 'em and street 'em" rule in order to keep response times to a sane level. In addition we have to go and fix people who get trojan'd or otherwise cause trouble for the network. Even though we can not swap out hardware, most issues have to deal with funky win32 tcp/ip issues. We have 1 mac expert and 1 unix tech as the population of these users are low. We spend a lot of time on win32 issues, but when and if it comes down to partial reinstalls of the tcp/ip stack or registry reconfigurations, we always must make sure that we have supported all the people with the "easy problems" first. It is easy to install drivers or configure IE to stop dialing AOL, so support must go to those people first, because again, the overall goal is to as many people working as possible in the shortest time possible. During peak demand, any client taking over 30 minutes to fix will probably be deferred because in those 30 minutes you could probably get to 5 other people with relatively simple problems (or making sure the voicemailbox stays clean). Also, any client taking over 30 minutes to fix over the phone would be getting a room visit since it is probably more effective to figure out what is going on instead of relying on the client to try to describe the problem.

If it came down to distributing anything, we'd probably distribute site-licensed NAV and a driver CD, so we could walk through people easily when installing drivers. Every brand of NIC driver disk has a different layout which makes it hard to tell people what directory to go to (win9x, NT, 2k, mac?) and what .inf to select etc.

Try this. Get 1 Watt amplifiers, 24dBi directional antennas, and 50' of LMR400 cabling from Hyperlink Technologies as a kit. Get two kits. Then, get two Orinoco ROR-1000 bridges and Orinoco's 802.11b gold pc cards. You should be able to stretch that distance. We are using the same equipment, but with 15dBi wide angle and omni antennas for a ship to shore connection. We get about 10-15 mi. (we're using lower gain antennas than the 24dBi directionals.) You can check it out here. If you just need a point-to-point solution, using the Hyperlink 24dBi directional / amp kit and Orinoco ROR-1000s may be the way to go.

The biggest problem here is that we really don't know who to believe. Given the choice between believing a U.S. district attorney and some slightly scummy small-time crook, we really don't know which to take. The U.S. government has a long history of bad behavior. (Think about the secret experiments (also here and here) in the '50s, in which people were exposed to radiation ... the ones for which the government began making restitution recently, when reports began to emerge. Think about J. Edgar Hoover's FBI. Think about the entire Justice Department over the last eight years. Think abou the IRS since its inception.) There just isn't any room to automatically assume that a responsible government employee isn't trying to cover up a mistake at West's expense, just because he can.

The good scenario here is that West is a petty crook who's getting a break because it's his first offence. The bad scenario is that the DA realised that if he dropped this, he'd look like an idiot, so he's threatened a poor innocent guy into pleading guilty to a crime he didn't commit, just to save the DA some embarassment. And it looks as if we'll never be sure.

There are a lot of people in Jail. Around 2 million Americans are currently in jail.

Reference Mother Jones. For a starting place, I recommend reading "How we got to 2 Million".

I'm not endorsing this. I hate it.

We put people in prison because someone is making money off of it. Be it via the people who build the prisons, or those who run them (Private for-profit prisons!).

Remember, this is America... profit IS the bottom line. We lead the world economy for a reason.

Just to clarify the headline: Intel is not "warning" people that using the VIA chipset is dangerous -- that it might harm their Pentium 4 processors -- but rather that they wish it were illegal. A quote from the article:

"They are not licensed to sell products that are compatible with the Pentium 4," Intel spokesman Chuck Mulloy said.

Mr. Malloy and his superiors apparently believe that they have "intellectual property" not only in their patents, but also in devices they may have never seen which interoperate with their patents. I believe that this idea was settled in Nintendo v. Galoob, the "Game Genie" case, in which Galoob's right to create a device that interoperated with the NES game console (and which modified the behavior of the latter, no less!) was upheld.

You sound like a stereotypical caricature of a republican: don't give a fuck, long as it makes a buck. Sad, because some republicans care.

A single childs footprint in a 120x120 piece of real estate... Wow, that's small... No. The ANWR is huge. The result is a big-ass footprint. And unlike a child's shoe tread, this footprint is going to be a stinking, filthy, contaminated cesspool of pollution, disrupting the lives of wildlife all around. So I wouldn't see much human presence. How much would I hear? Or smell? It doesn't take much drilling to be drilling the fuck out of something.

And what makes you think it will stop there? Considering that the amount of drilling there is now zero, I observe an alarming trend. And since the oil industry has done such a great job with the coastal plain, I'm sure they'll do a great job preserving the AWNR.

Not that you'd give a shit, and neither would Neal Boortz. Well, I would. I've been to Alaska. I've been to the refuge. And when I go back, I don't want to see a damn oil drill there. How long till someone finds something valuable in Yellowstone?

I'm sure the locals would love the jobs. If I knew a way to give them jobs without drilling, I would. I don't. Sad. But this isn't just about them. I'm not telling them what is best for them. It isn't, in the short term anyway. But what, you think they are the only ones this decision will affect? I'm not saying what's best for them. What I'm telling everyone who will listen is: "Hey, cut it out, or we're all fucked."

What's the lesson of California? Have you ever been to LA? You ever been a few miles out of LA, and not been able to see the damn city? It's fucking disgusting. Or Gary, Indiana, which you can tell when you are driving past by the smell. And it had to get that bad before they started to open their eyes and say "gee, this is kinda fucked."

The answer isn't to expand "present" energy sources. Those sources will be gone soon, ANWR drilling or not. We need to change our methods, and attitudes, or we will be living like our ancestors. And like or not, you will be too.

In order to bring this back on topic, for other slashdot readers, I'll repeat CmdrTaco's observation, that using devices like the vest for "teledildonics", is a very safe form of sexual expression. More on this below.

In case the anonymous poster really did get the bad news that they are HIV positive -- you have my sympathy.

Should you go around and tell everyone who might be infected? Yes, you absolutely must do this.

How do you look someone in the face and tell them you might have infected them? Well, maybe it will help if you remember that it might be the other way around. They may have been the one to infect you.

If you are not close to you family, if you think the pain they will cause you is greater than the support they will give you, don't tell them.

Depending where you live the public health department may be willing to contact your former partners for you, if you can't bring yourself to do so. You must tell them in case they were the one who infected you, and they don't know they are contagious.

"Teledildonics" was the term Ted Nelson coined when he first speculated about computer intermediated sex in his 1974 classic "Computer Lib/Dream Machines" . Technically, I can't help wondering whether hooking the device up to the audio out is the wrong approach. Shouldn't internet sex toys hook up to the MIDI port? MIDI instruments can be daisy-chained, can't they? Allowing for multiple toys. Galvanic skin response, pulse, blood pressure, temperature?

The University of Connecticut, while known for it's basketball team throughout the country, is also 1 of 2 Carnegie-Mellon Research One Institutions in the northeastern United States that is a public university. Here's what our student conduct code has to say about academic dishonesty:

Part VI: Academic Integrity in Undergraduate Education and Research, Section A, Para 1 states:
"A fundamental tenet of all educational institutions is academic honesty; academic work depends upon respect for and acknowledgement of the research and ideas of others. Misrepresenting someone else"s work as one's own is a serious offense in any academic setting and it will not be condoned."
Para 2 states, quoted: "Academic misconduct includes, but is not limited to,"..."presenting, as one's own, the ideas or words of another for academic evaluation; doing unauthorized academic work for which another person will receive credit or be evaluated; and presenting the same or substantially the same papers or projects in two or more courses without the explicit permission of the instructors involved."

Research is based on taking pre-published information and using that background knowledge to explore and create new conclusions and ideas. In computer science, as in any other science, research is primarily involved in creating a new hypothesis, and the majority of the time spent in research is building the experiment to test the hypothesis. This isn't a lab course; experiments are created from scratch, since your experiments are original. About 75% of the time spent in research is in the lab trying to collect data. In computer science, data is collected by writing programs. However, it is logical that if someone has already created a protocol for an experiment and taken years to perfect the experiment, why should you, as someone trying to explore *new* ideas, be forced to recreate the wheel? Thus, you search in the literature, and you find that so-and-so had a similar setup and they used a set of components to build it. Because the best science is based on quantitative data, parameters are published, *for the express purpose of repeatability*.

The scientific method states that for a conclusion to gain acceptance based on experimental data, the experiment must be repeatable in the exact way it was published, and that if I would to go to the lab tommorrow and replicate an experiment using all the published parameters, I should get similar results.

In computer science, experiments are in the form of running analytical computer programs. Thus, in order to prevent reinventing the wheel, you can and SHOULD use pre-published code. However, YOU MUST GIVE CREDIT WHERE CREDIT IS DUE. Since almost everyone here on /. is a proponent of open-source, I think you can easily identify with crediting authors of code when you use them in your own projects. Published scientific data is NOT copyrighted, that is, you do NOT have to ask for permission to use the data. This is why, in EVERY formal paper, any information that was not the author's own ideas is cited. A typical research paper has around 30 citations or more; even background information needs to be citated. Otherwise, in addition to credit, how is accountibility and authenticity ensured? If I don't say where I learned that newly discovered fact X, and someone who doesn't know much about fact X reads my paper, they won't know if it's really true, of if I'm just pulling stuff out of my ass.

The University of Connecticut owns any invention conceived by its employees in the performance of customary or assigned duties involving the use of University facilities, staff, or any other University resources.

Employees are required to disclose any and all inventions to the University of Connecticut Research Foundation, which is responsible under the State statues for the disposition of patent rights. Under these statues, a minimum of 20% of the amount of net proceeds from the sale, licensing, or other disposition is to be shared with the inventor. At present, the inventor's share is 33.3% of net proceeds."

Also, just as an example, you might want to read through the UConn's Policies & Procedures Governing Sponsored Projects, which covers things like copyrights on music, art, and software. That's all under the "Technology Transfer" secion.

The U.S. gave up on a project to blast a harbor into park of Alaska using nuclear explosives.

http://arcticcircle.uconn.edu/VirtualClassroom/Cha riot/chariotindex4.html

But seriously, they already have mechanical 'noses' that can detect things like drugs in luggage, or the ones at UConn or CaltTech that can diagnose some ailments.

From the text
The windows-menus-mouse "desktop" interface, invented by Xerox and Apple and now universal, was a brilliant invention and is now obsolete. It wastes screen-space on meaningless images,

Meaningless? Now, if he was talking about OpenWindows where every damn icon says "/bin/tcsh" on it regardless of what that shell is doing, I'd agree... but the whole point of icons was to distill meaning into a simple, easy to identify image that would take the place of a dozen words. Gee, that icond looks like a hard drive... I suppose it's my hard drive. Meaning transmitted. Mission accomplished. Yale guy wrong.

fails to provide adequate clues to what is inside the files represented by those blurry little images, forces users to choose icons for the desktop when the system could choose them better itself,

If it's blurry, you need a better monitor. My millions-of-colours icons (MacOS 8.5+) are very crisp. If Mr. Yale (oops, Dr. Yale) has a problem with getting appropriate info out of pictographs I weep at the thought of him navigating an airport. Pictographs are far more intuitive and easily understood than written linquistics. All of the original writing systems were based on pictographs and only evolved into alphabetic systems when the need to communicate non-concrete objects became a burden (give me a pictorgraph for "obligation"... sheesh). However, in the OS environment, just about everything is a noun. Nouns lend well to pictographs. If an OS needs to transmit info that doesn't lend itself well to pictographs, there's still text. I don't get what he means by "when the system could choose them better itself". When the system choses stuff for me, I usually get upset ("no, no not Internet Explorer you stupid system!")

and keeps users jockeying windows (like parking attendants rearranging cars in a pint-sized Manhattan lot) in a losing battle for an unimpeded view of the workspace -- which is, ultimately, unattainable. No such unimpeded view exists.

Well, if no such unimpeded view exists, then why dis the desktop metaphor? By his own admission his goal is unattainable. Hm. Yes, window clutter is a serious problem, however it is far from paralyzing because:
1. Screens are big now. My work screen is a whopping 21". The first Mac had a nine inch screen... and that idea managed to catch on.
2. Window management techniques are pretty good. The reduce-to-icon idea (a la CDE or, for a bad example, OpenWidows), the Doc (NeXT and, soon, OS X) and the Window Shade (Mac OS 7.1+ and KDE if you turn it on) all allow for multiple windows to be prioritized and deprioritized nicely.
3. There can only be one focus item at a time. Period. His issue seems to be that finding the item you want to focus, focusing it and keeping it in focus is too tough. Well, as data grows and the number of potential tasks increases, this problem will only increase... typing cd /usr/export/home/foo/ is no easier than playing window-hunt.

As a side note, the single-window mode on OS X (a la DP4) seems a fine way to ameliorate this problem. For a guy who speaks so highly of the Mac OS it seems like he doesn't really look at it.

Now go look at Ted Nelson's stuff....

The article seems to make him sound like a crackpot obsessed with the power of the nuclear weapons he worked with, trying to use them for everything from geographical engineering to defense. The project chariot thing really disturbed me, though. If the account at the link above is true, then I worry that maybe he is a crazy scientist.

On the other hand, maybe this was his way of coping with a truly awful weapon that he had a hand in creating. Finding a successful peaceful use might make him feel better.

Sujal

Andreessen has just purchased Merriwood, Jackie Kennedy's childhood Virginia home on the bluffs overlooking the Potomac River. He spent $17 million and according to the papers, he plans to devote his semi-retirement to restoring the mansion and its grounds to its former splendor. Merriwood is across the road from Fort Marcy, the park where the murdered body of Clinton aid Vince Foster was dumped on July 20, 1993. Coincidence? I don't think so ...