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Heh, some universities (cough*mine*cough) don't care if there are legal uses. We were the subject of this wonderful article from the beginning of the year about schools to avoid.

Basically all file sharing programs are blocked, along with all bittorrent (say goodbye to Linux ISO's and any other legitimate use) and most recently they've blocked off IRC. Yes, all of IRC. It still works on the campus wireless network, but you can't get any wireless signal in the dorms where these restrictions take place. As much as I love the dorm life, I'm getting an apartment next year.

So legal uses or not, if someone thinks it'll solve a problem, they don't care what else gets in the way.

I'm a Junior at UF, and I took a graduate class in robotics this semester, and I've seen the robot a few times sitting at it's docking station in one of the rooms on the 3rd floor of Benton. It was also supposed to be demonstrated at this semester's demo day for our class (even though it wasn't part of the class, they just like to show what all the robots that the Machine Intelligence Lab is working on) but it had broken the night before. It does look pretty impressive in real life though just sitting there, but I wish I could report back how it acted in person.

I'm a Junior at UF, and I took a graduate class in robotics this semester, and I've seen the robot a few times sitting at it's docking station in one of the rooms on the 3rd floor of Benton. It was also supposed to be demonstrated at this semester's demo day for our class (even though it wasn't part of the class, they just like to show what all the robots that the Machine Intelligence Lab is working on) but it had broken the night before. It does look pretty impressive in real life though just sitting there, but I wish I could report back how it acted in person.

See, this document reveals that although this project is ahead of schedule, the prototype won't even be done until August. :)

Conformal surface parameterization allows you generate a geometry image from an arbitrary mesh. The geometry image is a parameterization of the mesh on a uniform grid where the (r,g,b) coordinates are considered to be (x,y,z) spatial coordinates. You can now use the image format of your choice, lossy or not.

Friendly News Release

ICARUS FAQ (check out question #12)

A news story covering ICARUS

And lastly, The Slashdot story covering it.

But how do I feel about ICARUS? When there's a will there's a way, that's what I say. It's a pain but hey. As an RA I get people continually banging on my door about no internet connection problems. It was HORRIBLE the first two weeks when people were moving in cause NO ONE knows what they have on their computers. Kids would come, plug in their computers and within 30 seconds their port would be killed and they needed to call the Help Desk. Help Desk was overloaded with calls but they'd finally get their ports on again and they know how to clean their machine (or didn't care) and BAM! kicked off again. AND WHO DO YOU THINK THEY COMPLAINED TO!?

ICARUS = devil

Friendly News Release

ICARUS FAQ (check out question #12)

A news story covering ICARUS

And lastly, The Slashdot story covering it.

But how do I feel about ICARUS? When there's a will there's a way, that's what I say. It's a pain but hey. As an RA I get people continually banging on my door about no internet connection problems. It was HORRIBLE the first two weeks when people were moving in cause NO ONE knows what they have on their computers. Kids would come, plug in their computers and within 30 seconds their port would be killed and they needed to call the Help Desk. Help Desk was overloaded with calls but they'd finally get their ports on again and they know how to clean their machine (or didn't care) and BAM! kicked off again. AND WHO DO YOU THINK THEY COMPLAINED TO!?

ICARUS = devil

...University of California at Los Angeles, one of the nation's largest universities with 37,500 students...

erm, my school, University of Central Florida has 42,000ish and we're only the second largest in the state, right under the University of Florida.

Whine, whine, whine. Do you even know how many access points are on campus? Nearly 300. I'd imagine that the total coverage is more than the next 10 schools ranked higher all totalled. It just happens that UF is a huge school so compared to the total number of students it might be smaller.

Little Hall has a fair amount of coverage from the external antennas. Most of library west has coverage from all the surrounding APs (CSE is, not so surprisingly innundanted), and library east is being shut down anyway.

Vision-Guided Flight for MAVs

Looks like these little blighters can be tricky to fly, they are using a computer to track the horizon to help keep them level.

Robert

It seems that you are a student of Friedman, who, among other things, said that "The only social responsibility of a corporation is to deliver a profit to its shareholders."

This is a valid point of view, although I certainly do not support it. The main problem that I have with it is the classic one that shareholders are focused only on short-term, narrow interests. A truly moral, socially responsible world-view is one that takes a broader view of things.

Of course, management is driven by the shareholders and has their duties to fulfill towards them. Modern capitalism creates an enormous amount of pressure on every individual to succeed (i.e. profit) at any cost. As long as something is legal, and makes you money RIGHT now, it is right. And of course, it IS right under the rules of the game.

But again, I prefer to define 'right' more broadly. It is an extremely elusive term; there's no denying that. But it is certainly more than just fulfilling the interests of a (relatively) small and homogenous group of people. It is about taking the full consequences of your actions into account. This is, of course, a very, very hard thing to do in modern society, and perhaps any society, but it is an ideal that I believe we should all try to achieve.

To bring this post finally on topic, I will say only that outsourcing is (surprise surprise) a complex issue that has many sides to it. It certainly does lower the standard of living in the richer countries, by creating unemployment and resultant lower wages. It probably tends to raise it slightly in the poorer countries that get the outsourced jobs, but it's a devil's bargain. But, perhaps these people don't mind receiving lower wages and fewer benefits than their Western counterparts, as long as they are better than what they could get before.

In an ideal world, local corporations would spring into existence in the poorer countries to compete with the foreign ones, thus driving up the standard of living there so that everyone would profit in the end.

Well, I might as well wish for a pony too, right?

I don't know if subliminal messages actually work, but I do know for a fact that it's used pervasively by the advertising industry and artists. See
W. Bryan Keyes "Subliminal Seduction". While doing a project on subliminal advertising, I found this easy to spot example. Look at the red glass on a diet coke can. What do you see? Given that diet coke is predominently marketed at women who are weight conscious, it's easy to see that the message is - "Drink me and you'll look like the little red glass."

I remember replacing the bubble sort with a shell sort to get the sort time down to something like 15 seconds

ehm.. ever heard of quicksort ?

Three or four years ago, when I worked with the University of Florida's MAV team , we were regularly flying 7 inch planes powered with small IC engines. Last I saw, they were down to a little more than 4 inch electric planes, including video. They need to be piloted, as opposed to the MAVs described in the article, but as I understand it, they're close to integrating GPS/waypoint autonomy on slightly larger planes. They've been throttleable since they went electric, and a good pilot could pretty easily fly through a medium sized window and down a hallway in good conditions (I don't think the planes mentioned could do this on their own either).

The school I'm going to, University of Florida has been having it's headaches with spam for this same reason. It sends out a weekly newsletter about what is going on in the university, important dates, events, that kind of thing. It's sent out to everyone's university appointed email address (foobar@ufl.edu) but people can then have that forwarded to their AOL address.

Now some people don't like this weekly thing (which is somewhat important so students get needed information, but whatever. When you're a student here, you get the email.), and so they mark it as spam when they get it, or else they do the accidental spam report thing. AOL then sees all these "spam" mail coming from ufl.edu addresses, and promptly blocks ALL email from any ufl.edu address. This has happened 3 times now, and each time the university system adminstrator has had to go through a ton of hoops to get it back in the clear. Meanwhile everyone using an AOL account doesn't get teacher emails, club announcements that they signed up for, and any sort of personal mail that someone sends from their ufl.edu account.

Hopefully AOL will get it's act together. In the meantime they're trying to get people to stop having their mail forwarded to AOL accounts, but of course even college educated people want to use AOL, for whatever god forsaken reason.

This is definately the case. I am a combined degree Computer Engineering student and I am now going to be attending law school following the completion of my MS in Comp Eng

In my case it is a combination of current trends along with my realization that I really don't want to be a traditional engineer anymore. The real problem is that there aren't that many interesting problems to solve in the field. The majority of the work for graduating engineers is life-less Database Applications or some other horribly boring nonsense. Even traditional hardcore engineering isn't that attractive to me anymore. The nature of the work is no longer dynamic, and I feel as though I stopped learning some time over a year ago. Everything is just a permutation of something I have already seen/mastered.

I also agree with the statement that many of our graduating EE/CE people don't know what they are doing. I certainly saw enough of that through TA and tutoring.

It is really unfortunate, but it seems like an entire generation of very talented folks got into Computer Science/Engineering and EE but ended up finding out that at the end it really isn't as challenging in the everyday job. As a result, people like me that are at the top of their class and have lots of experience are looking for other options to avoid the horribleness of the employment situations.

Read on past this rant if you can.

# begin rant # Seems to me like this guy likes to take the sensationalist approach more than the straight facts approach, and shock us out of our right minds. But that's to be expected from a human author. # end rant #

Did anyone else read this and get the impression that he wanted us to think that these horrible, awful scourge-of-mankind diseases ORIGINATED from this facility? I'll post about the origins of two big names he drops here.

Lyme Disease is actually named after a town in Connecticut where it was first documented in the 1970s. That town's name? Old Lyme. I go there every year for a vacation, so I know about it very well. It spreads to humans by ticks - exactly the kind of thing you'd expect Plum to have inside. However, it is easily treated, has a decent grace period before complications occur, and is not debilitating until it gets really bad. You can read more about it here. If this easily curable disease was indeed the result of an experiment at Plum Island, then it was probably the crappiest and least effective bioweapon ever invented.

Now, about West Nile Virus. According to this document: Unless new information comes to light, the first case of West Nile virus to be subjected to scientific study was brought to medical attention in December 1937 at Omogo, West Nile district, Northern Province of Uganda. That case (and the subsequent viral characterization process) was documented by members of the Yellow Fever Research Institute, Entebbe, Uganda in 1940. I seriously doubt they created West Nile in a laboratory that long ago.

The Plum Island laboratory (Link 1 Link 2 got any more links?) has been around plenty longer than Lyme Disease has been known according to this document, but it is newer than West Nile. Directly copied from that site: In 1946, a disease laboratory was built at Fort Terry by the government. Fort Terry was closed in 1948 because we were no longer at war, and it was no longer needed. Fort Terry was reopened to research new ways to go to war, and for the development of chemicals to kill animals.

Draw your own conclusion, here's your sketch pencil.

Attendance was about the same today except it didn't appear that there was as many media representatives present. Again temperatures were in the 90's. I acquired a media pass today and was allowed access to almost every area of the speedway including the pits and the start line. This will allow me to film each entry up close and interview members of the teams. DARPA is also publishing the daily events here and here.

Vehicle inspections on the rest of the field were performed today. DARPA is reacting as fast as they can to modify the rules and give every opportunity to each of the teams in hopes they will be able to qualify. DARPA is now allowing the teams as many appearances on the Q&D course as requested by the teams. The Q&D that was scheduled today became an opportunity for teams to iron out their problems on the track.

The Blue team with the CyberRider (the motorcycle entry Web Site) was the first on the Q&D course. It traveled about 20 feet when it fell over and exposed it's greasy side.

Team ENSCO Web Site traveled to the first major turn and failed to navigate the first sharp turn. This is also the same place Team TerraMax web site failed today and the Sci Autonics web site team.

The first turn appears to be difficult for the vehicles that make it there.

The ASI/Florida State Web Site had two more runs today. They disabled all of the perception systems and successfully ran about 1/3 of the course. The first run, the vehicle was driving like a "drunk sailor" according to a member of the team. Florida State took the recoded path data to tune their vehicle controller. ASI reported the vehicle tracked much better on the second run. I get the impression that a few more Q&D course test runs will be performed before the vehicle is ready to qualify.

Team Caltech Web Site made two more runs on the Q&D course. Well, both runs were consistent, but not as good as yesterday. Both times, cleared the start line and banked hard left as if it were going to the last way point. I hope to find out today what happened.

There were several other teams that attempted the Q&D course today with similar or worse results.

The highlight of the day was CMU's Red Team web site. As anticipated they made it to the finish line of the course and electrified the spectators and increased pressure to the rest of the field.

That's the highlights of the second day of Q&D testing.

Thirty spokes meet at a nave;
Because of the hole we may use the wheel.
Clay is moulded into a vessel;
Because of the hollow we may use the cup.
Walls are built around a hearth;
Because of the doors we may use the house.
Thus tools come from what exists,
But use from what does not.

The Tao Te Ching, Chapter 11

Actually I read somewhere that the whole pepper genus evolved specifically to disperse seeds through birds alone. A bird has a much shorter less-acidic digestive tract than a mammal. A bird also has no teeth. So the bird can disperse the seeds, whereas a mammal's teeth and digestive tract would destroy, or at least sterilize, the seeds. So as a plant, how do you get birds to eat your seeds and not mammals? Simple, you "evolve" a compound that mammals find totally unpalatable, but that birds don't mind at all. Hence capsaicin.

AFAIK all birds are totally immune to capsicum/capsaicin. They can chomp through a pile of habeneros and not notice anything even zesty.

So all of us hot pepper lovers can thank birds for the very existence of hot peppers!

If they really want 'realism' what they need is a SMODEM (Smell Modulator Demodulator) that takes the smell from one user and sends them to another user.

Here at Florida computer science is through liberal arts and computer engineering is through engineering. The distinction between the two is like most people have said, ie engineering core etc.. The computer classes are essentially the same, but engineering students are required to take Digital Design and Mircoprocessor Applications. These two course are very valuable in my opinion, and I wouldn't want to have just the computer science degree from here. But, the again Robert Love is studying computer science and math. So what do I know.

As far as jobs and interviews, I have never had trouble with that. I destroyed the undergraduate program here (Summa cum laude) and I am currently destroying the graduate program. The biggest thing now is the flashy companies like IBM, Microsoft etc.. aren't hiring all that much. So if you want a job you probably have to work for Harris, Lockheed, Northrup etc... Traditionally these are the jobs that the less qualified graduates get from here. There will always be jobs for the well educated and talented engineer/science person who has done well at their university. It is just a matter of whether you want that job or not.

They've implemented it very well at the University of Florida. As email is received, a message is accepted only if it does not contain a self-replicating virus. Messages with other types of viruses are accepted, but the attachments are modified to prevent automatic execution and a notification is added to the body.

It probably slows down the SMTP server a bit, but is that really so bad? It effectively limits the throughput of the mail server, should anyone on campus decide to send out a huge number of messages at once (i.e. spam or virus).

See http://open-systems.ufl.edu/services/virus-scan/.

It could have come from the meteor, but I think that volcanic activity might be more likely. I'm not sure though, I'm straining to remember my college geology courses, but the important thing to put this in context is Bowen's Reaction Series (explanations from U. Florida, U. Oregon, Skidmore, Florida State U., Google). Basically, this model describes (quoting from the U. Oregon page):

Bowen determined that specific minerals form at specific temperatures as a magma cools. At the higher temperatures associated with

mafic and intermediate magmas, the general progression can be separated into two branches. The continuous branch describes the evolution of the plagioclase feldspars as they evolve from being calcium-rich to more sodium rich. The discontinuous branch describes the formation of the mafic minerals olivine, pyroxene, amphibole, and biotite mica. The weird thing that Bowen found concerned the discontinuous branch. At a certain temperature a magma might produce olivine, but if that same magma was allowed to cool further, the olivine would "react" with the residual magma, and change to the next mineral on the series (in this case pyroxene). Continue cooling and the pyroxene would convert to amphibole, and then to biotite. Mighty strange stuff, but if you consider that most silicate minerals are made from slightly different proportions of the same 8 elements, all we're really doing here is adjusting the internal crystalline lattice to achieve stability at different temperatures. Really no big deal.

At lower temperatures, the branches merge and we obtain the minerals common to the felsic rocks -- orthoclase feldspar, muscovite mica, and quartz (the banana slug of the mineral world).

So basically, the assumption begins by pointing out that the Earth's crust mainly has eight elements present. By mass, they are oxygen (46.6%), silicon (27.7%), aluminum (8.1%), iron (5.0%), calcium (3.6%), sodium (2.8%), potassium (2.6%), and magnesium (2.1%). I suspect, but am not positive, that the proportions of elements in this cocktail will be similar for most of the solar system's rocky planets, so Mars should more or less obey the same rules.

Those of you that remember your high school chemistry will notice that, of these top eight elements, all but oxygen are metals or metalloids, so they all will want to bond with a non-metal -- and hey presto, there's plenty of oxygen to go around. As a result, nearly all of the minerals in the Earth's crust are composed of oxygen bonded to one or more metals. But which? This is where Bowen's reaction series comes in.

Given a roughly uniform cocktail of the top eight elements present in a magma flow, you have a range of different minerals that can form as the magma cools & solidifies. If the magma was very hot, it will solidify into olivine, which has a complex crystalline structure. If the magma was cooler, it would solidify into some simpler mineral, down to quartz for the lowest temperature magmas.

Moreover, Bowen's reaction series also sheds light on how materials will break down over the course of millenia of weathering -- basically, they'll tend to keep breaking down into simpler & simpler minerals, until eventually you just have quartz. A

MHD Disk is the latest in video encoding for Media requiring a High-Definition format. It is superior to the other formats that are being fought over right now, including certain DVD initiatives that were discussed here recently. MHD is the only high-definition encoding that supports VCR, as the article judiciously illustrates.
The initial prototype comes with a dual-tray system that allows you to load two MHD disks at the same time, and makes a smart use of different color cables to facilitate connections with your Audio/Video receiver.
And it runs BeOS, too.

Actually, some runners drink coffee before racing to improve their running times. Check this link for example.

Most estimates seem to put the number of birds killed by windows at somewhere around 100,000,000 per year.
Here's one reference: http://edis.ifas.ufl.edu/BODY_UW054

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

Well it's a good thing you don't use a TI-86, then... =o)

Here's a couple more links...
http://psifertex.nerdc.ufl.edu/iso/phlak/phlak-0.2 .iso
ftp://ftp.iasi.roedu.net/pub/mirrors/ftp.phlak.org /pub/phlak/0.2/phlak-0.2.iso

and...
MD5sum: 828ae6707ee53991e442009e75067d09

And I believe I saw a torrent on suprnova.org but I'm not allowed to view that site at the moment.

Obviously you haven't experienced UF's amazing one-party (oops...unified) student government system. The opposition party, whose name changes every year, usually gets 1 or 2 seats out of about 70 (last election they didn't grab a one) because of stuff like this

This SG also thinks Sugar Ray is the hot new thing resulting in the lamest Gator Growl ever. We've still got football...er...damn!

I prefer NERDC.

You should be able to figure out how it is supposed to work from the following PowerPoint presentation:
Enterprise Campus Security: Addressing the Imploding Perimeter (especially slides 23-27)

The existence of the leader who is wise
is barely known to those he leads.
He acts without unnecessary speech,
so that the people say,
"It happened of its own accord".

The Tao Te Ching

The existence of the leader who is wise
is barely known to those he leads.
He acts without unnecessary speech,
so that the people say,
"It happened of its own accord".

The Tao Te Ching

"The research comes at a time when computers are estimated to consume as much as 10 percent of electricity in the United States"
http://www.napa.ufl.edu/2003news/efficientcomputer .htm

So I guess reading the article makes me an asshole on /., eh? D'oh!

Frank ... or Frink?

You can find more information about Dr. Frank's research on his homepage.

I used to work at the Machine Intelligence Laboratory at the University of Florida. Back the mid '90s we developed a couple of robots that would wander around, avoiding walls and the like, and when their battery power got low, they would seek out a charging station we set up. Well, one of the robots had stronger motors on its wheels than the other. The smaller robot was on the charger, but the bigger robot pushed it off because it needed to charge. The smaller robot was too puny to retaliate, and its batteries ran out. This may well be the first documented case of robot murder. I nominate Grazer, the bigger robot, for induction as the first ever robot murderer!

I used to work at the Machine Intelligence Laboratory at the University of Florida. Back the mid '90s we developed a couple of robots that would wander around, avoiding walls and the like, and when their battery power got low, they would seek out a charging station we set up. Well, one of the robots had stronger motors on its wheels than the other. The smaller robot was on the charger, but the bigger robot pushed it off because it needed to charge. The smaller robot was too puny to retaliate, and its batteries ran out. This may well be the first documented case of robot murder. I nominate Grazer, the bigger robot, for induction as the first ever robot murderer!

There are a few research projects already looking into that, where you could "sell" your CPU online and get instant money for trading your unused CPU power for various scientific projects that corporations/universities would like to run. So this would help set the market value on how much it costs you to run these CPU sharing programs, so you would know at least a minimum of how much to charge.

... because we all know how difficult it is to write a P2P system. [/sarcasm]

Methinks it is time to switch careers!

I don't think that's true at all. I'm the syadmin for the CARRIER cluster at the High-performance Computing and Simulation Research Laboratory at the University of Florida. There are a few high-performance SANs (System Area Networks) out there that use true globally accessible shared memory, like SCI. The G5s in the VT cluster have Gigabit Ethernet, which has no built-in shared-memory features. Then, there are some environments like Unified Parallel C which abstracts a shared memory space in software, and can be run on top of either a shared-memory architecture or a message-passing architecture.

In general, parallel computers like SMPs have a shared memory space, but distributed computers, like a cluster, use message passing to communicate.

I don't think that's true at all. I'm the syadmin for the CARRIER cluster at the High-performance Computing and Simulation Research Laboratory at the University of Florida. There are a few high-performance SANs (System Area Networks) out there that use true globally accessible shared memory, like SCI. The G5s in the VT cluster have Gigabit Ethernet, which has no built-in shared-memory features. Then, there are some environments like Unified Parallel C which abstracts a shared memory space in software, and can be run on top of either a shared-memory architecture or a message-passing architecture.

In general, parallel computers like SMPs have a shared memory space, but distributed computers, like a cluster, use message passing to communicate.

I don't think that's true at all. I'm the syadmin for the CARRIER cluster at the High-performance Computing and Simulation Research Laboratory at the University of Florida. There are a few high-performance SANs (System Area Networks) out there that use true globally accessible shared memory, like SCI. The G5s in the VT cluster have Gigabit Ethernet, which has no built-in shared-memory features. Then, there are some environments like Unified Parallel C which abstracts a shared memory space in software, and can be run on top of either a shared-memory architecture or a message-passing architecture.

In general, parallel computers like SMPs have a shared memory space, but distributed computers, like a cluster, use message passing to communicate.

I don't think that's true at all. I'm the syadmin for the CARRIER cluster at the High-performance Computing and Simulation Research Laboratory at the University of Florida. There are a few high-performance SANs (System Area Networks) out there that use true globally accessible shared memory, like SCI. The G5s in the VT cluster have Gigabit Ethernet, which has no built-in shared-memory features. Then, there are some environments like Unified Parallel C which abstracts a shared memory space in software, and can be run on top of either a shared-memory architecture or a message-passing architecture.

In general, parallel computers like SMPs have a shared memory space, but distributed computers, like a cluster, use message passing to communicate.

Here's an article showing that ICARUS was actually originally deployed waaaay back in the Summer semester. This isn't brand-new.

Official DHNet webpage with policy on filesharing and such. Use that to get your facts straight.

Some Students react in the DHNet forums.

More student ractions

Here's an article showing that ICARUS was actually originally deployed waaaay back in the Summer semester. This isn't brand-new.

Official DHNet webpage with policy on filesharing and such. Use that to get your facts straight.

Some Students react in the DHNet forums.

More student ractions

Here's an article showing that ICARUS was actually originally deployed waaaay back in the Summer semester. This isn't brand-new.

Official DHNet webpage with policy on filesharing and such. Use that to get your facts straight.

Some Students react in the DHNet forums.

More student ractions