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(Dislaimer - I'm a wikipedia administrator, arbitrator, and the "featured article director" -- I choose the featured articles you see on the main page every day)

Last week I was a guest speaker for a group of education graduate students about Wikipedia (the course was on technology use in education; wikipedia was part of the curriculum). Before the lecture, sent them a few items I thought they should read - objective studies of Wikipedia's accuracy done by impartial, outside organization. Here's what I sent them:

----------
1) "A group of students in the Graduate School of Library and Information Science at the University of Illinois has published a paper entitled "Information Quality Discussions in Wikipedia" (PDF format). The focus of the paper was on assessing the IQ of Wikipedia featured articles -- in this case, IQ stands for "information quality" -- when compared to other samples from the project, including featured article removal candidates, pages marked as NPOV disputes, and a selection of random pages. According to the paper, the study showed how seriously the Wikipedia project views issues of article quality. The authors concluded that as a quality standard, the featured article process "is not ideal, but it does seem relatively rigorous." They also noted that the process is not as resource-intensive as other possibilities, such as blind judging." - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_S ignpost/2005-08-01/Featured_content
PDF of research paper can be found at: http://www.isrl.uiuc.edu/~stvilia/papers/qualWiki. pdf

2) An article comparing the WP to Brockhaus and Encarta has appeared in issue 21/04 of C't, a major German computer engineering magazine. It is titled /Lexika: Wikipedia gegen Brockhaus und Encarta/, starting on p. 132 - http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_vs_Brockh aus_and_Encarta
Full survey results can be found at: http://mail.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikipedia-l/20 04-October/035339.html

3) "As publicly editable sites, Wikis are vulnerable to vandalism. We've examined many pages on Wikipedia that treat controversial topics, and have discovered that most have, in fact, been vandalized at some point in their history. But we've also found that vandalism is usually repaired extremely quickly--so quickly that most users will never see its effects." - IBM study of Wikipedia - http://researchweb.watson.ibm.com/history/results. htm

4) Computer Science professor (and minor geek rockstar) Ed Felton (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Felten) posted in his blog about a
small-scale survey he did of Wikipedia: http://www.freedom-to-tinker.com/?p=674
-----------------

As far as my personal interactions - as featured article director, I can say first-hand that we've been hitting really hard on the need to have inline cited sources in the article text. It's been an explicit requirement for featured articles for some time now (9-12 months or so). In many ways, this makes our content much more trustworhty than most other information sources.

Furthermore, purely from personal experience, I can say there's something to be said for the expert-hobbyist. For example, the "best" writer on wikipedia (in terms of number of featured articles written) is a 17 year old from New Jersey who writes long, thorough, well referenced, accurate articles on, erm, British and the Bri

several times all those combined?

http://www.crhc.uiuc.edu/~mahesri/classes/project_ report_cs497yyz.pdf

go to page 8, get edumacated.

This shouldn't really surprise anyone. His opinion is reflective his "hacker" roots, and of the care-free attitude of the Linux movement.

This is a program for hackers by a hacker
- Linus Torvalds

Zappa has beaten Shredder in competition, but not during speed chess. Five days later, Zappa was named the 2005 World Computer Chess Champion.

Download earlier Zappa engines from here

No. That would be "Where the Buffalo Roam"
by Hans Bjordahl. "Where the Buffalo Roam" started in 1991, and had its
own Usenet group long before Doctor Fun came along, and is still
running on the web.

Was Doctor Fun the first cartoon on the World Wide Web?

There you go! You've got it - Doctor Fun was the first cartoon on the World Wide Web.

Here's the announcement from NCSA. (Of course, that link to the cartoon doesn't go anywhere now.)

I'm certain it would work, just not sure for how long

Teragrid is a mixed bag... A lot of out clustered needs don't scale much beyond 16-32 nodes. And we need 16-64 GB per node to handle the data sets. And we need fast storage, since the data sets we use are huge. With Teragrid, we'd get bogged down just uploading the data.

Just look at:
http://access.ncsa.uiuc.edu/Releases/09.19.05_Berk eley_L.html

I mean, the Berkeley geophysics people had to build their own. So they called on NCSA people to help build them one.

If you have a limited budget, NSF fundig for most of your projects, and a small data set with lots of processing needed, then TeraGrid is TeraGold. .

The easiest way to do it is to just not go wireless in the first place. Once you get rid of this criteria, wiring a lecture hall with the cable for a connection really isn't that difficult.

The subjects in which clickers are mainly used (physics, engineering), everyone already has a graphical calculator, and they're generally of either HP or TI variety. Thus you only have two (ok maybe 3, TI-85 line is quite different from 83's), but then you have no mandatory extra cost to the student, since everyone in these disciplines has a suitable calculator already.

No hardware issues, no support issues, you basically just wire a minijack to every seat, and you're set.

I know the physics program at uiuc has experimented with this about 5 years ago, prior to them becoming the new fad. You probably want to check with their physics education group http://www.physics.uiuc.edu/research/per/
about the plus/minuses with it. IIRC they eventaully went with commercial clickers -- I'm pretty sure there's a good reason why, you probably should check with them.

Unlike the majority of these posts that you're going to read from /., these guys actually did the experimentation, are intellectually capable of rolling their own project had they desired, and made a decision based on their experiences. They're very nice people and will probably share their experiences with you, particularly prof. Mats Selen, who afaik headed the project.

My local public radio is still invaluable to me. Granted, you're not going to get the top 40 hits and all that trash, but then... I guess that's not necessarily a bad thing, is it? For that alone, I find it worth having a radio.

Damn, man - I don't like vegetables either but that's going too far...

http://www.urbanext.uiuc.edu/veggies/chard1.html for the humour-impaired

The source code is available from UIUC, even though the AMNH/Hayden website doesn't seem to offer it.

The first x86 processor to feature 32-bit registers and addressing was the i386 released in 1985. Support for the new 32-bit features of the chip was added to Windows slowly starting with Windows 2.1 in 1987(also known as Windows/386), and provided support for virtual memory and somewhat improved multitasking. The 32-bit features in Windows were optional right through to Windows 3.1 in 1992, infact Win3.1 runs fairly well on a 286/AT with 2MB of memory. Although Windows included some 32-bit code as early as 1987, it did not provide a 32-bit API for applications until the introduction of the Win32 API with Windows NT 3.1 (1993) and Windows 95. There was also a free update released for Windows 3.1 called Win32s that provided a subset of the Win32 API for Windows 3.1 amd Windows for Workgroups 3.11, though it provided rather poor compatibility; major features like comctl32.dll and a real registry were not provided.

The first version of Windows to offer a complete 32-bit kernel and drivers was Windows NT 3.1. It provided proper support for the 32-bit funtionality as early as 1993, but it was not used much outside of a corporate environment. Home users had to wait for Windows 95, 10 frickin' years after the release of the 386!!! Even then, Windows 95 still contained a large ammount of 16-bit code!

Anyhow, I find it funny that people With Athlon64's are complaining about having to wait a year or two for a version of Windows that can make proper use of the processors. At least users now have the option of running 64-bit Linux or BSD, but alternative operating systems for the 386 didn't become available until 1993 with the release of BSD/386 and OS/2 2.0, neither of which were free.

Well, enough of my rambling. Hope that answers your question :)

this is a bit wrong, because water never turns into gas, water can be heated up in air to turn into steam, but it never turns into a *gas*. so it can't be a greenhouse gas.

You're really not helping yourself. When water boils, it goes from a liquid form to a gaseous form. Steam is just vaporized water. But just in case you don't believe me, you're welcome to check these sources for validation.

ofcourse it's responsible for the heating effect in the sunlight, we wouldn't be chatting here in slashdot if we had no air with water around us, we'd freeze to death.
If it's a gas that captures and holds the heat from the sun, warming the ambient temperature above that which it would be without an atmosphere, then it's acting like a greenhouse, and such is a greenhouse gas.

but if you define water as a responsible material for heating up earth in the sun, you should add oxygen and nitrogen too and every other thing that you see.

I'm sure they contribute to some extent, but not nearly to that which water, methane, and carbon dioxide do.

but you should try to look over the border of your "great" country and see that other people use cars that need 6 litres of gas for 100km

Not sure where you are, but that's 39 miles per gallon, and while it is higher than the average car mileage, we have plenty of vehicles that get that kind of mileage and higher. One of my cars (the one I use for leisure) gets about half of that, and the one (the one I drive to work and which is now about 12 years old) gets 75% of that. Not too terrible.

a local heat station running 9 months a year produces far more co2 than cars over here for example
Judging by your e-mail address, you live in Estonia, which has a much colder climate than the average US resident has to protect against, so it's not surprising that you put more into heating than you do into transportation. That does not negate my position that a significant fraction of emitted CO2 is released by vehicles. It may not be that way for you, or for Lithuania, or Finland, but it is that way for many other nations.

power stations may be more effective, but the still shoot out massive amounts of co2, even the electricity that is used to make me type here is produced by burning the old goold coal.

Yes, they do, which is why I am far more comfortable with nuclear power. In fact, some of the electricity I'm using comes from a nuclear power plant, which means that there is zero CO2 being released. During the day, some of the power comes from a solar plant, and perhaps some from wind. Most of the rest for me comes from methane-fired power plants, which are even more efficient than coal.

The "browser war"? Netscape was a commercialization of Mosaic, which was developed in Switzerland.

The "browser war"? Netscape was a commercialization of Mosaic, which was developed in Switzerland.

http://www.acm.uiuc.edu/~fstratto/

Snapshot of IRC convo. Unable to update in realtime yet, ssh-keys busticated. Maybe someone else can setup similar.

Now, we move onto the portable I/O. The vast majority of scientific software (which is, in turn, the bulk of MPI-based software) uses the Heirarchical Data Format. There are two versions worthy of mention - HDF5 and Parallel HDF. Both support MPI in operations. Compile HDF5 with MPI support, and you have something that will support platform-independent atomic and compound data types.

Of all the options, HDF5 (from the NCSA) is the most widely used. I would say that the majority of scientific and distributed software out there that uses platform-independent typing uses HDF. So does the grid computing system Globus. The other platform-independent complex data typing libraries, CDF (from NASA) and NetCDF (from UniData), are rarely used. Indeed, the next generation of NetCDF - version 4 - will be built on top of HDF5. There's a link to the development site and the source code on Freshmeat.

Less-widely used, but still very significant, is the Transparent Parallel I/O Environment. I am not 100% sure if this supports MPI, it's been a while since I've used it and I never put in the dependencies on Freshmeat for it.

Depending on what is being done, PETSc may also be worth checking out. This supports MPI-based differential equations.

Globus can use MPI for communication and then handle the I/O directly. This means you only have to write your interface for one API, not one API per type of operation. Main problem is that Globus has a fairly large footprint, so you might not want to do that unless the project is large enough to warrant that kind of sophistication.

Once someone is using a PS2 ... for primarily non game playing purposes, then they can be considered something other than a game console.

Ahem... *cough*

Perhaps he believes that a move like that would not be consistent with the Spirit of Linux.

Yeah seriously, its horrible. I mean honestly:

"Each time a different colored cell is charged, this charges the atoms and converts them to ions and facilitates the release of UV photons due to the ionic collision. The inside wall of the cell is meted with a special treatment of a phosphor coating. This is done to exploit the phosphors property of giving out light when it comes in contact with other light."

Ughh, barf, don't even bother to RTFA, not worth it. This is a FAR more fascinating and in depth view into the workings and history of plasma displays.

'So, what exactly is plasma? Plasma by definition is one of the four states of matter (apart from solid, liquid and gas) and consists of positively and negatively charged particles, which are added in roughly the same quantity.' This obviously makes the gas more or less inert but ensures that the charged particles are free to conduct electricity.

"Makes the gas more inert?" Those guys should stick to writing about case mods.

Plasma panels have actually been around since the 1960s, as neon-red displays. The early concept was that a sustaining voltage applied to all pixels kept them lit if they were on, and an X/Y array of wires could be used to turn individual pixels on and off. Thus, the display itself had memory, back when having enough memory to refresh the display was expensive.

Color, intensity variation, and speed took a long time to achieve. Now there are transistor drivers behind every pixel, and the panel is built in what's effectively a big wafer fab. But that's not the toughest part of the manufacturing problem. All the electronics is on the back glass, while the phosphors are on the front. These two big pieces of glass have to be welded together with subpixel precision, held in contact only by millions of tiny ridges that have to match up. That's the most difficult step, and the one that limits display size.

The Music Recommendation System for iTunes from the University of Illinois doesn't solve your problem because it requires you to rate most of your own library. However, it might be an interesting step on the way to solving the problem you raise.

Ok,

Weighing in with my two cents worth, for what it's worth, I'd like to brain dump what I would consider worth while options for your needs. All of these are solutions I either have used in the past successfully, or am currently using for various purposes. So bear in mind that this is not just the causal musings of a thread cruiser, but actual tried and proven solutions ;-)

First some basic assumptions:

1) You want to run some form of Unix or Unix like system ( i.e. Linux ) - you've noted you currently use your Apple PowerBook laptop, so one has to assume you're running Mac OS X 10.x.x natively ( more power to you ).

2) You want complete control over the system including "root" access 24/7 - this is of course the whole point of having your own system, you can beat it up, break it, rebuild it, and all that jazz.

3) The system should be able to be run remotely, even if just headless on your LAN, or perhaps more ideally remotely from some external 3rd party in a hosted solution so you don't end up having to host it behind your link at home ( also making it easier for you to provide access to other parties should you want to either share it with friends and family or if you just want to make it world visible for whatever reason - i.e. your own mail and web server et al ).

4) You want an "always on" solution, so this should be something that, as you state, should not suck too much juice power wise, is able to be built with a "standard build" style hardened platform, which in the case of power loss would ideally recover nicely, quickly, and be back on line ( I'll touch on this later as standard builds are going to make your life so much simpler and fun ).

5) The performance of the system ideally should be such that it will cope with the key elements you've noted in your post, such as:

a) remote access such as remote sessions via SSH won't kill the system

b) able to run a web server such as:

thttpd: http://www.acme.com/software/thttpd/
Apache: http://www.apache.org/
mathopd: http://mathop.diva.nl/
Roxen: http://www.roxen.com/
Boa: http://www.boa.org/
Jigsaw: http://www.w3.org/Jigsaw/ ( written in Java )
Acme.Serve: http://www.acme.com/java/software/Acme.Serve.Serve .html ( written in Java )
CERN: http://www.w3.org/hypertext/WWW/Daemon/Status.html
NCSA: http://hoohoo.ncsa.uiuc.edu/
Netscape FastTrack: http://home.netscape.com/ ( not sure if it's still available )
Netscape Enterprise: http://home.netscape.com/ ( not sure if it's still available )
Zeus: http://www.zeus.co.uk/

source: http://www.acme.com

I don't think this would work as a RAID for power reasons. Unless some new battery technology really takes off... how could this be viable? I couldn't imagine if both drives were used at the same time. My laptop is normally plugged in (that's when I use the 2nd HD). But unplugged... it would be a nightmare.

Do you have any evidence to support this? Here ( http://www.crhc.uiuc.edu/~mahesri/research/PACS_pa per.pdf) is a fairly thorough paper with the breakdown of laptop component power consumption, and the HDD rarely breaks 5% of total battery consumption. I would gladly double that hit to prevent losing everything in the middle of a two week business excursion.

Someone please correct me if I'm wrong; but I believe that moths actually have a natural "radar detector" for sensing their predator's (bats) pings.

Yup, although it's a purely passive system. There's a fairly extensive overview of how moths detect bats' echolocation pulses. The behavior is kind of interesting... If the moth hears a weak sound (indicating the bat is far away), the moths will just turn around and fly away. If the sound is moderate, the moth will start looping around or stop flapping its wings and flutter down like a leaf. If the sound is really loud, indicating that the moth has a few milliseconds before it becomes bat food, the moth will suddenly fold its wings in and dive down as fast as it can.

One of my profs mentioned that if you make really high-pitched noises around moths, you can initiate the various evasive maneuvers. I can't remember how to make the noise... maybe something like rubbing aluminum foil together could do it.

There's also a similar page on the neuroethology of bat echolocation.

Someone please correct me if I'm wrong; but I believe that moths actually have a natural "radar detector" for sensing their predator's (bats) pings.

Yup, although it's a purely passive system. There's a fairly extensive overview of how moths detect bats' echolocation pulses. The behavior is kind of interesting... If the moth hears a weak sound (indicating the bat is far away), the moths will just turn around and fly away. If the sound is moderate, the moth will start looping around or stop flapping its wings and flutter down like a leaf. If the sound is really loud, indicating that the moth has a few milliseconds before it becomes bat food, the moth will suddenly fold its wings in and dive down as fast as it can.

One of my profs mentioned that if you make really high-pitched noises around moths, you can initiate the various evasive maneuvers. I can't remember how to make the noise... maybe something like rubbing aluminum foil together could do it.

There's also a similar page on the neuroethology of bat echolocation.

The Main Library does contain the majority of bookstacks at the university, and these stacks- what people are referring to when they say "the stacks"- have restricted access for undergraduates- undergraduates can of course request any volume from the stacks at the circulation desk, but permission is needed in order to enter the stacks and browse. This policy is spelled out here. As you can see, UIUC provides preferential treatment to faculty from other universities over its own tuition-paying undergraduates, which is something I'm not in agreement with. It's not difficult for undergraduates to obtain access to the stacks, but it is still permission that must be granted.

While this policy does not limit undergraduate access to materials, I think browsing endless shelves of books offers a chance at serendipitous discovery that a computerized catalog (or a Web search engine, for that matter) does not.

Of greater concern is the creation of the Oak Street Library Facility, which will pack away several million volumes of the university's collection in a warehouse, where all will have to make the sorts of requests for materials that undergrads have to make for stacks materials now. It's like inter-library loan- from your own library! On the one hand, I definitely understand the rationale- UIUC's library system has 10 million volumes, many of which have never been requested by patrons, ever, and in the controlled conditions of an archival facility, it will be much easier to prevent the deterioration of materials than on bookshelves. Indeed, in an age of inter-library loan and online resources, the utility of having physical access to a billion pieces of paper is diminished. On the other hand, this basically eliminates browsing- sure, you can easily find any book in the library with a computer search, but you can no longer go find that book, skim through it, find it to be not what you wanted, and then spy another volume that you didn't even know existed on the next shelf and realize that one is the book that needs to be in your hands. It will be a sad day when we are able to search for anything, and find only what we were looking for. -UIUC '04

The Main Library does contain the majority of bookstacks at the university, and these stacks- what people are referring to when they say "the stacks"- have restricted access for undergraduates- undergraduates can of course request any volume from the stacks at the circulation desk, but permission is needed in order to enter the stacks and browse. This policy is spelled out here. As you can see, UIUC provides preferential treatment to faculty from other universities over its own tuition-paying undergraduates, which is something I'm not in agreement with. It's not difficult for undergraduates to obtain access to the stacks, but it is still permission that must be granted.

While this policy does not limit undergraduate access to materials, I think browsing endless shelves of books offers a chance at serendipitous discovery that a computerized catalog (or a Web search engine, for that matter) does not.

Of greater concern is the creation of the Oak Street Library Facility, which will pack away several million volumes of the university's collection in a warehouse, where all will have to make the sorts of requests for materials that undergrads have to make for stacks materials now. It's like inter-library loan- from your own library! On the one hand, I definitely understand the rationale- UIUC's library system has 10 million volumes, many of which have never been requested by patrons, ever, and in the controlled conditions of an archival facility, it will be much easier to prevent the deterioration of materials than on bookshelves. Indeed, in an age of inter-library loan and online resources, the utility of having physical access to a billion pieces of paper is diminished. On the other hand, this basically eliminates browsing- sure, you can easily find any book in the library with a computer search, but you can no longer go find that book, skim through it, find it to be not what you wanted, and then spy another volume that you didn't even know existed on the next shelf and realize that one is the book that needs to be in your hands. It will be a sad day when we are able to search for anything, and find only what we were looking for. -UIUC '04

National Center for Supercomputing Applications, a research branch of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

Their claims to fame include having four supercomputers of the 50 fastest in the world, and creating Mosaic, the first graphical web browser.

If you have doubts about the influence of Mosaic, load up internet explorer, click "Help" in the menu, then click "About Internet Explorer" and read the blurb....

National Center for Supercomputing Applications, a research branch of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

Their claims to fame include having four supercomputers of the 50 fastest in the world, and creating Mosaic, the first graphical web browser.

If you have doubts about the influence of Mosaic, load up internet explorer, click "Help" in the menu, then click "About Internet Explorer" and read the blurb....

From http://vburton.ncsa.uiuc.edu/indexsize.html:
"The following study was completed by two of Professor Vernon Burton's students at the University of Illinois. Though one of the students previously worked with Professor Burton at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA), the study was done outside the scope of any NCSA core projects. When first published online, staff at the NCSA noted several issues with the study, and some revisions have been made to the document to reflect several of these concerns. Changes are detailed at the bottom of the following page.

Please note again that this study is not an NCSA publication and was not conducted as part of any NCSA project or under the supervision of NCSA.

A Comparison of the Size of the Yahoo and Google Indices "

From http://vburton.ncsa.uiuc.edu/indexsize.html:
"The following study was completed by two of Professor Vernon Burton's students at the University of Illinois. Though one of the students previously worked with Professor Burton at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA), the study was done outside the scope of any NCSA core projects. When first published online, staff at the NCSA noted several issues with the study, and some revisions have been made to the document to reflect several of these concerns. Changes are detailed at the bottom of the following page.

Please note again that this study is not an NCSA publication and was not conducted as part of any NCSA project or under the supervision of NCSA.

A Comparison of the Size of the Yahoo and Google Indices "

For those with a brain who like to read the original sources instead of the popular media's hack job of the summaries here are (I think) the two opposing studies.
Dmitri Williams (University of Illinois, Urbana)
"Internet Fantasy Violence: A Test of Aggression in an Online Game" Communication Monographs Vol. 72, No. 2, June 2005, pp.217-233, (this is a pdf) which says there's no link

AND in the other Corner

Well, no one paper, actually. The APA "Committee on Violence in Video Games and Interactive Media" appearently did a metastudy of several papers on the topic and come up with a resolution (pdf) and press release. At the end of the resolution is a bib of the papers taken into consideration. I certainly don't care enough to plow through all those - but William's paper isn't in the bib. I suspect there was lots of group thought going in that committee -lots of the papers were written by members of the committee.

I suspect that you can't make a blanket statement on video games. Folks with a predisposition for violence might be pushed over the edge to real life violent acts from habitual video play; whereas there are, I'm sure, many more level-headed people who understand this is all fantasy and escapism and can easily dissociate the video playing with real life. At least I hope so. Otherwise you all better run away from me. Fast.

A similar study has won an Ig Nobel Prize in 2004:

http://www.improb.com/ig/ig-pastwinners.html

PSYCHOLOGY
Daniel Simons of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and Christopher Chabris of Harvard University, for demonstrating that when people pay close attention to something, it's all too easy to overlook anything else -- even a woman in a gorilla suit.
REFERENCE: "Gorillas in Our Midst," Daniel J. Simons and Christopher F. Chabris, vol. 28, Perception, 1999, pages 1059-74. DEMO: http://viscog.beckman.uiuc.edu/media/ig.html

There is a very interesting online java demo available here http://viscog.beckman.uiuc.edu/grafs/demos/15.html that gives a great example of "sustained inattentional blindness". It is provided as a supplement to a paper published in "Perception. 1999;28(9):1059-74." In the video, the audience is told to count how many times the white team passes the ball. During the video, a man in a gorilla suit walks by, and most people fail to notice him. I have spoiled it however, and now you will NOT be unable to notice him.

It's hard to say what exactly you mean by filtering by that sentence.. but.. I would guess it's more a problem of expasion rather than contraction.

Google will often return pages that had the query word in or around a link on another page that points to it. The query may not resemble anything in the document in any way, shape, or form, but since someone else referred to the document that way, it's returned. There are lots of very good and valid reasons to do this. A simple way to correct for this behavior would be to check how many of the returned results actually have your query in them.... and maybe use a decent word stemmer to be more reasonable.

I was kind of surprised that this had UIUC's name attached to it until I looked at the PhD listed. "Professor of History and Sociology". "Burton's research and teaching interests include the American South...". Okay.. so maybe his statistics aren't as strong as they should be. Or maybe they are and he just doesn't know enough about the implementation issues to do a proper statistical analysis. Perhaps he should talk to some of the AI and Info Retrieval guys on campus before he pops something like this up on the web though.

While the Perl script is both nice and readable: http://vburton.ncsa.uiuc.edu/compare.txt

The log results are shown here: http://vburton.ncsa.uiuc.edu/searchresultlog.txt

For instance, the following queries were supposed to give 5+ results on Google and no results on Yahoo, so let see if that actually works...

Sometimes you get no results on Google "on the first tries" go figure... "that server is down/busy?!"

If you get any results they are the same repeating over and over ispell dictionary word list!

I don't know about you but that's pretty useless...

Also, the fact that both search engines limits to the first 1000 results, that's pretty useless, how can we know for sure there is 100000+ results for apple if after page XYZ, results are truncated?

Here's some queries:

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=carbolization +clambers
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=anecdote%27s+ displosion
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=centerable%27 s+heterolecithal
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=unobservable+ Oistrak
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=misanthropize s+multiplications
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=buttonmould+g radated
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=myocardiograp h+overheard
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=pinions+plati tudinize
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=sloppiness+co educationalizes

While the Perl script is both nice and readable: http://vburton.ncsa.uiuc.edu/compare.txt

The log results are shown here: http://vburton.ncsa.uiuc.edu/searchresultlog.txt

For instance, the following queries were supposed to give 5+ results on Google and no results on Yahoo, so let see if that actually works...

Sometimes you get no results on Google "on the first tries" go figure... "that server is down/busy?!"

If you get any results they are the same repeating over and over ispell dictionary word list!

I don't know about you but that's pretty useless...

Also, the fact that both search engines limits to the first 1000 results, that's pretty useless, how can we know for sure there is 100000+ results for apple if after page XYZ, results are truncated?

Here's some queries:

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=carbolization +clambers
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=anecdote%27s+ displosion
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=centerable%27 s+heterolecithal
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=unobservable+ Oistrak
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=misanthropize s+multiplications
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=buttonmould+g radated
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=myocardiograp h+overheard
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=pinions+plati tudinize
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=sloppiness+co educationalizes

While the Perl script is both nice and readable: http://vburton.ncsa.uiuc.edu/compare.txt

The log results are shown here: http://vburton.ncsa.uiuc.edu/searchresultlog.txt

For instance, the following queries were supposed to give 5+ results on Google and no results on Yahoo, so let see if that actually works...

Sometimes you get no results on Google "on the first tries" go figure... "that server is down/busy?!"

If you get any results they are the same repeating over and over ispell dictionary word list!

I don't know about you but that's pretty useless...

Also, the fact that both search engines limits to the first 1000 results, that's pretty useless, how can we know for sure there is 100000+ results for apple if after page XYZ, results are truncated?

Here's some queries:

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=carbolization +clambers
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=anecdote%27s+ displosion
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=centerable%27 s+heterolecithal
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=unobservable+ Oistrak
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=misanthropize s+multiplications
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=buttonmould+g radated
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=myocardiograp h+overheard
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=pinions+plati tudinize
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=sloppiness+co educationalizes

Perhaps this is biased? An American Civil Liberties Union supporter with a personal interest in "race relations" must certainly have a nitpick with Yahoo after the law suits of the organization against Yahoo, and what with nazi memorabelia being posted and so forth. Perhaps that was the motive behind the slant in this research?

It sounds like you're talking about monitoring your network for application performance and watching for telltales that precede degredation. You might check out a product from this company:

NEXVU Technologies

Because that's exactly what they do :)

Unlike a general packet sniffer or network monitor, they aim exactly at your kind of problem.

Disclaimer: until I entered the glorious realm of academic programming, I was employed by NEXVU, and I still have stock and stock options. Even though they no longer benefit from my obvious genius, I think they have a great product. If enough VoIP administrators agree, then those options may be worth something in the future!

Linky

I presume that's the paper you're talking about.

I read it quickly (not exhaustively) and I don't see material there that would reject the patent's claims. I'm playing devil's advocate here (aka the attorney, you get to be a patent examiner (yay!)). This is a small sampling of what you'd be up against.

I don't see the paper mention the creation of a "dynamic Web page". It appears to discuss dynamic generation or caching of GIF images, but everybody knows that a Web page is more than a simple GIF image. The paper doesn't teach anything about "routing said request from said Web server to a page server", which is a critical piece of the invention. In fact, the paper to be more directed toward a graphics retrieval optimization, not a dynamic Web page load balancing invention like claim 1.

In fact, the paper even teaches away from the claimed invention in stating "The final compression operation which produces a GIF image unavoidably consumes processor time." The entire purpose of the invention is to save processor time. The paper goes on to suggest that uncompressed image formats are undesirable because most browsers don't support them. This just goes to show how the paper does not address dynamic creation of a "Web page". The paper neither discloses (35 USC 102 - novelty) nor suggests (35 USC 103 - non-obviousness) the invention of claim 1. It would be overkill to address the other claims.

(Now, speaking as a non-lawyer, I see your original point perfectly. Your actual presentation and your implementation might be exactly the same concept as this patent, but that doesn't mean a thing. If you don't have the evidence, it won't hold up in court. Have a great evening.)

The Army and the airlines know that gaming affects behavior, as evidenced by the $ millions poured into simulator training. Decades ago they learned that time in the simulator has a measurable effect on a person's behavior in a real situation.

But, some will say, those are immersive 3-D environments, not games! Well what is modern gaming FPS gaming but a 3-D immersive environment? Sure you don't have the Cave in your living room (although I know you want it), but are you really paying attention to what's around you when you're gaming? No, you're immersed in the environment presented on your screen(s).

When I go for a drive immediately after a long session on GTA, I definitely notice a difference in my attitude toward obstacles and maneuvering. I'm not saying I'm looking for big jumps or carjacking cops, but I do think it's disengenuous to say that gaming has no effect on behavior.

We were allowed ten pounds total-payload weight, including antenna and batteries and enclosure. We wanted to transmit on 20 MHz, the same frequency as the Sputniks, so we needed a long antenna, on the order of 3.75 meters, to get the best possible efficiency. It had to be confined to the Lockheed-supplied box during launch, and to erect itself upon signal after orbital injection. The Air Force suggested a design for a pin-puller, an explosively activated latch which could release a spool, upon which the antenna could be rolled during the launch phase. The antenna itself was a steel tape, with a lengthwise crimp to give it some stiffness. We just walked down to the neighborhood hardware store and bought a carpenter's tape measure. (When an Air Force engineer asked why our antenna had inch marks, I told him it was to measure the mean-free path in the ionosphere.)

They did that with PS2's. It was on slashdot awhile back see PS2 cluster . You would probably see a ps3 cluster than a XBOX one because of the fact that the PS3 will probably have linux ported to it already.

Holodeck doesn't work. Not for anything except sitting on your ass and watching the action.

Well, I beg to differ.

Quite a few years ago I had the chance to visit the VR-cube at the Royal Institute of Technology (KTH) in Stockholm, Sweden. And there's no sitting on your ass watching the action when you're in there. You're free to move around and observe from any angle you like. Sure, it's not solid projections like you get in a StarTrek holodeck, and it's quite a bit smaller than a holodeck, but other than that, the similarities are right there! But I must say that playing Cave Quake in there can be quite disorienting! =)

(I always wondered how the crew managed to walk around as much as they did on the holodeck without hitting a wall all the time...)

http://cave.ncsa.uiuc.edu/about.html

i've heard of them playing counter-strike and quake on it

...his Smalltalk programming language was a predecessor to Sun Microsystems' Java

Reading memories of others, it remind of of installing win32s on windows PC in order to use Mosaic.

The higher wages of multinationals, of course, does not come from their own generosity, or even out of concern about anti-sweatshop group, but from the simple fact that they are more productive than smaller, less advanced domestic producers in developing countries.

The literature is rich with studies that show higher wages of multinationals:

'Technological competition' causes U.S. multinationals to pay more

Even critics of Nike, whose wages and working conditions have become a cause celebre on college campuses, concede that the footwear giant pays higher rates than those prevailing in Asia, where their plants are located. The same pattern is found among multinationals with factories in South America and Eastern Europe.

"The wage differences between multinationals and domestic firms," writes Dan Bernhardt, a University of Illinois economist, "far exceed the differences in rental payments for buildings and land, or prices paid for domestic raw materials by foreign firms compared with their local counterparts."

Effects of Multinational Company Investments

For example, considering the charge that foreign investment leads to depressed wages and thus exploits "host country" workers, Lipsey finds that the opposite is true. "Within host countries it has been abundantly shown that foreign-owned firms pay higher wages than domestically-owned firms"

The Effects of Multinational Production on Wages and Working Conditions in Developing Countries

This evidence indicates that multinational firms routinely provide higher wages and better working conditions than their local counterparts