Slashdot Mirror

The web site for the opening lists one of the events as a BFG Competition. Apparently, they will be broadcasting the thing around the world. Also, they will record the competition for future viewings. Hmmm . . . only in computer science could they be proud.

The MRCH (Massively Redundant Cheap Hardware) approach is BOTH cheaper and more reliable. Sun IS screwed.

Google spent... oh, roughly $100m in software development getting to the point that they were saving enough money by using the distributed low cost low reliability PCs. That is a huge barrier to entry on such largescale clusters.

And Google is in a business where a little data loss in the searches is not going to seriously harm anyone. So they operate slightly lossy. They admit this pretty explicitly; one of their people, Anurag Acharya, was an invited speaker at the second Evaluating and Architecting System dependabilitY symposium in 2002.

Neither the software investment to make reliable distributed apps nor the lossy data model are acceptable to typical business software. Do you want your bank losing 1-2% of your deposits, or having a consistency check error balancing your account at the end of the month? How about Amazon randomly deleting or inserting a few things from your orders...

And even where there is off the shelf distributed software like Oracle RAC, it's such a management and performance hit that people typically go back to buying larger single system image servers after testing it out... ask Oracle what percentage of their sales are RAC versus straight Oracle 9 some time.

There are applications... web farms spring to mind... where the Google model is a natural fit for the problem set. Strangely, that particular answer was well known five years ago, because people are not stupid.

Until every major business application is naturally and easily distributable larger servers will continue to sell. The software is just plain not there yet. Things are trending that direction; in ten years, the current model is in real serious trouble. Maybe sooner. But now? Don't believe dumb hype.

After I read "How to use Model-View-Controller" which explains very well how the MVC paradigm can be useful, I am not sure that web applications can actually benefit from using MVC. Since it is based on the user making a request, there is no need for the view to be linked to to a model and to update itself. The application can just get or check the data with each request.

Most of the Struts benefits come from the taglib that maps object to html tag.

Furthermore, there are a number of prominent scientists that believe cold fusion is viable, so don't dismiss their claims as crackpot. Any hard evidence of a government coverup, if there is one, is securely locked away for years to come. All people can work on for now is anecdotal evidence. This is not a matter of breaking the laws of physics; it is simply discovering new ones.

I can't find ublix anywhere on the web (although I'm certain I've found stuff before searching for the word ublix). Anyway, an ublix is a non-newtonian fluid. You can make an ublix at home with corn starch and water. It's really fun stuff. It flows like a thick liquid, you can rest your hand on it and it will sink in, but if you hit it with your fist, it will harden in proportion to the force you apply and so your punch will go nowhere. If you let your hand sink in, ball it up, then try to pull it out quickly, the ublix won't budge and your hand will stay stuck. It's a lot of fun, and it is exactly what I thought of when I read the slashdot headline. Here is a link to a short description of the mixture. It's not much help, but I'm hoping someone out there can post a better link.

This poster is entirely correct, except for one part.

imagine flying over Japan and watching North Korea

In truth, very detailed studies have found that the laser weapon the ABL uses, though flying in the stratosphere (above most weather) would be ineffective even though the thin clouds that sometimes form at that elevation. Even on a clear day, the range of the laser is quite limited, necessitating that the airplane fly within surface-to-air (SAM) missile range of North Korea to even hope of hitting any missiles. Iran was the other test case for this system, unfortunately Iran is much larger than North Korea, and the plane would have to be flying over Iran itself to be within range of interior missile sites.

This project is pretty much a handout to the defense industry and vestige of the beam weapon dreams held over from the Star Wars heydey under Reagan.

I happen to have written a semester essay (PDF) precisely on this topic. I wrote the essay for an excillent course that deals with nuclear weapons, ballistic missiles, missile defense, and arms control. The course website contains a host of up-to-date information and links, and is the longest running course of it's kind.

For a much broader and in depth view of boost phase missile defense, please see this APS study on the subject. I reccommend the brief, but informative executive summary. (PDF)

This poster is entirely correct, except for one part.

imagine flying over Japan and watching North Korea

In truth, very detailed studies have found that the laser weapon the ABL uses, though flying in the stratosphere (above most weather) would be ineffective even though the thin clouds that sometimes form at that elevation. Even on a clear day, the range of the laser is quite limited, necessitating that the airplane fly within surface-to-air (SAM) missile range of North Korea to even hope of hitting any missiles. Iran was the other test case for this system, unfortunately Iran is much larger than North Korea, and the plane would have to be flying over Iran itself to be within range of interior missile sites.

This project is pretty much a handout to the defense industry and vestige of the beam weapon dreams held over from the Star Wars heydey under Reagan.

I happen to have written a semester essay (PDF) precisely on this topic. I wrote the essay for an excillent course that deals with nuclear weapons, ballistic missiles, missile defense, and arms control. The course website contains a host of up-to-date information and links, and is the longest running course of it's kind.

For a much broader and in depth view of boost phase missile defense, please see this APS study on the subject. I reccommend the brief, but informative executive summary. (PDF)

Sounds like white boxes instead...

"In the current implementation, the WebCrawler builds an index at the rate of about 1000 documents an hour on a 486-based PC running NEXTSTEP."

"The full-text index is currently based on NEXTSTEP's IndexingKit [NeXT]"

- from Experiences with Webcrawler

I think Webcrawler used CERN's WWW library, but I can't say this made it's way into WebObjects.

I'm not sure exactly what Dreamweaver library files are (you might want to explain that in your article next time, hint hint), but I'm assuming they are used to make templates and dynamic content. In that case, do not use proprietary tools; use either SSI or a scripting language (go PHP!).

Here are the tools I use for web design:

Source editing: Crimson Editor, a freely available text editor that supports syntax coloring and just about anything you'd ever want in a text editor. Somewhat well-designed GUI and very small (fits on a floppy).

PHP editing: Crimson Editor (listed above), and Zend for larger projects

Page design: Photoshop/Imageready and (for more content-oriented pages) Illustrator

HTML Editing: Adobe Golive CS. I know I'm sounding like an Adobe fanboy here, but GoLive really kicks ass. It has a steep learning curve, in that it's slightly harder to pick up than Dreamweaver, but after spending a few hours with it, you'll love it. Free trial available, I believe.

Of course, this is all proprietary software, and that's how things are in the design world. With development, you have a little freedom, but with design, you're locked into the Big Four (Adobe/Macromedia/Corel/Quark) and the last two are on its last legs.

UIUC (number 4) posts this publicly on their site (hint: the numbers listed are monthly salaries)

For the 03-04 class a CS grad with a BS got offers averaging $4037/mo = $48444/yr.

--
Kyle

I just got curious, so I combined a little grep, wc, and gnuplot to produce this plot showing my email history over the past few months. No significant change in the past week.

Maybe if someone could read this book and combine Mozilla with Trailblazer we would have the best browser ever.

And don't suggest me. I'm far too lazy. ;-)

Hmmmm.... from what I read of "A Brief History Of Time" (ABHOT), your typical black hole is made up of an event horizon ( the spherical boundary inside of which light cannot escape out of ) and a singularity, which sits smack bang in the middle of that bounday.

From outside the event horizon, we cannot ( in thermo terms ) extract any energy from it. We cannot measure the orderliness of it ( indirect theoretical measurements are proposed ). The singularity is a different matter. ( ...lots of complicated stuff about infinitely dense materials etc ... ) we have maximum entropy at that singularity.

However, if that singularity was really heavy, like say, the mass of the present universe, then the event horizon would be a very long way from that singularity ( if it even exists ).

Hence, it could be imagined that we are inside the event horizon of the universe and not even be anywhere near the singularity in the middle ! Does the universe have a middle ? Well if it's now decided to be the shape of a funnel, maybe it does !

What does this mean in the big picture ? Don't buy real estate on the outer fringes. The view is lousy. IANATPP

A good parallel to understand is if you were an ant living on the surface of a basketball. Your travels can go in any direction at any point, as if you were on a plane. If you had no memory, you may not noticed that when you travelled you were visiting places you had already been and you might think that you lived on a plane. In fact, the outside observer can see that your universe is curved.

If you haven't read Flatland it is a gem that illustrates these notions of higher-dimenstional space wonderfully. It was written in 1888 and is in the public domain now, availble free online through Project Gutenberg or for a buck or two as a physical book.

A wonderfully-done video is The Shape of Space, produced at the Geometry Center and uses nice animations to make these points. If you haven't see the Shape of Space or two of its Geometry Center sibling videos (Not Knot and Inside Out) you are seriously missing out.

It's called the Bernoulli Principle. Zip drives used to be called Bernoulli drives for the same reason.

doesn't this CTO of cray remind you of someone?
"There IS no Linux in high-performance clusters."

"There IS no Americans in Iraq."

OMG! It's the former Iraqi mis-Informed-ation minister!

Especially when 2004 has been dubbed the year of the penguin, it's wreckless to claim that Linux can't be used in HPC's.
Hell, just look at the current top500 list. There's no Cray in the top 10 but there are two Linux based clusters there (and one based on OSX [FreeBSB based]).

Here's a few:
NCSA's IA32 Linux cluster
NCSA's IA32 Linux cluster
Space Simulator Clust at Los Alamos (SS51G based; makes me proud as I have a SS51G too)
Beowulf - used in many Linux clustering projects
Linux clusters at Los Alamos (they seem to have more than one)
Virginia Tech's Supercomputer X

doesn't this CTO of cray remind you of someone?
"There IS no Linux in high-performance clusters."

"There IS no Americans in Iraq."

OMG! It's the former Iraqi mis-Informed-ation minister!

Especially when 2004 has been dubbed the year of the penguin, it's wreckless to claim that Linux can't be used in HPC's.
Hell, just look at the current top500 list. There's no Cray in the top 10 but there are two Linux based clusters there (and one based on OSX [FreeBSB based]).

Here's a few:
NCSA's IA32 Linux cluster
NCSA's IA32 Linux cluster
Space Simulator Clust at Los Alamos (SS51G based; makes me proud as I have a SS51G too)
Beowulf - used in many Linux clustering projects
Linux clusters at Los Alamos (they seem to have more than one)
Virginia Tech's Supercomputer X

Loads of people are still on Internet Explorer 5 today, that was released over five years ago

Actually, most sites that track this sort of thing show about 75% of all users on IE6, but only around 10% on IE5.

Some examples:
http://www.thecounter.com/stats/2004/January/brows er.php
http://www.upsdell.com/BrowserNews/stat.htm
http://www.w3schools.com/browsers/browsers_stats.a sp
http://www.cen.uiuc.edu/bstats/latest.html
http://www.webreference.com/stats/browser.html

Same deal at Illinois.

Electronic switches (transistors) can operate up to about 150Ghz. (in the lab, bleeding-edge.)

This is almost correct only for pure silicon. SiGe and InP devices are WAY faster than this. InP can presently exceed .5 terahertz. Posted on /. a while ago

thanks to LILO, it's all possible

Well, here is a mirror of the full 2mb, 74 page PDF. At least until they make me take it down. Oh wait, I'm the admin of that server so I'd have to make myself take it down....

It's especially interesting to take a look at all of the categories, and not just the overall rankings, in my opinion. And what the heck is the poster thinking, since when is open space or low cost of living important as to whether a state is "best for technology." I'd sooner assume the opposite!

The core has a full mips-3 instruction set, with extensions from mips-4 and mips-5
link

So yes, it is in a way MIPS derived, but the MIPS core does very little of the actual processing, it's more of a bootloader and I/O coprocessor.

Is it anything like Pad++? These ideas aren't exactly new.

Pad++, MosaicG, and others were evaluated to an extent. The focus wasn't to make previous incarnations work in Mac OS X, but to create a solution.

It's most similar to MosaicG. There's a difference between the early '90's and 2004, though. Disk storage has increased immensely. As a result, we were able to make and store the thumbnails with much more useful quality. Also, searching is helpful.

Surprising to many, after real use, one of the biggest features of TrailBlazer is being notified that you've visited a webpage before. This can lead to the user deciding to jump right to the history and finding the destination page right away without trying to make their way clicking through links.

Further information (PDFs) on the early ideas and reasoning are available at our TrailBlazer papers page.

- Josh (TB co-designer-developer)

In my experience, every single attempt to recreate a heirarchical system (be it a file system, database or in this instance a browser history) fails utterly because it doesn't adhere to the K.I.S.S. principle.

Virtual Reality (oh that is sooo 1990s!) systems often make things much more complicated to use no matter what the graphics are like... it's very easy to get lost in VR space, you have no concept of "up" or "down" (no horizon, no gravity) and trying to control your view quickly and effectively using a keyboard and mouse is very tricky, unless you're a seasoned Descent player.

However, arranging the history in a 2d manner (such as the tree view mentioned here) seems a far better way of going about it - everything you need is within your field of view, arrange in a consistent way (eg all rectangles are same size... unlike a 3d view where they appear to be smaller as they are further away) and you can tell at a glance what the relationship is.

2d vs 3d - It's kinda like the view a general gets on a battlefield (2d) versus the rather limited perspective a soldier has of the action (3d)

The Novikov conjecture (or here) is worth mentioning.

IANAP just a technician on Omega so I'm not exactly sure of the intricate details of the problems with computer simulations etc. but from what I gather the computer simulations of ICF targets are notoriously difficult to match with experiments due to the incredibly complex problem of modeling hydrodynamic instabilities in the implosion.

I used to work in the radiation safety field and went on a technical tour of TMI just before the change in owners (current owner is AmerGen).

We were able to visit some aspects of the non-functioning side - the cooling towers (I have photos I took while standing inside one, and here's another), the empty turbine room, and the control room.

Surprisingly standing around the skeletons of the non-functioning cooling towers wasn't nearly as strange as comparing the turbine rooms between the functioning and non-functioning sides of the plant.

Anyone who has seen a turbine room in any kind of large power plant knows how huge they are. The turbine room used for the functioning reactor was hot, noisy, and full of intimidatingly large equipment. The huge emptiness of the unused turbine room was just plain strange in comparison.

IMNSHO, the worst thing about the TMI accident was the lack of communication both inside and outside of the plant. We can only hope that we've learned from our mistakes.

I used to work in the radiation safety field and went on a technical tour of TMI just before the change in owners (current owner is AmerGen).

We were able to visit some aspects of the non-functioning side - the cooling towers (I have photos I took while standing inside one, and here's another), the empty turbine room, and the control room.

Surprisingly standing around the skeletons of the non-functioning cooling towers wasn't nearly as strange as comparing the turbine rooms between the functioning and non-functioning sides of the plant.

Anyone who has seen a turbine room in any kind of large power plant knows how huge they are. The turbine room used for the functioning reactor was hot, noisy, and full of intimidatingly large equipment. The huge emptiness of the unused turbine room was just plain strange in comparison.

IMNSHO, the worst thing about the TMI accident was the lack of communication both inside and outside of the plant. We can only hope that we've learned from our mistakes.

NCSA Mosaic. Even the latest version still has this mention so I guess longhorn is going to their first browser.

BTW, you can change the name of internet explorer to, it just involves lots of ugly registry hacks. Here is a good howto

It's not quite that simple. According to the University of Illinois, since it's in the Atlantic it's called a hurricane. Cyclone is used in the Indian and Southwestern Pacific area.

Heh, looks like you made the same mistake that I almost did. The link on that first page just goes right back to angelfire. The -k option in wget is most useful for these situations

True mirror at: http://netfiles.uiuc.edui/benoc/mirrors/www.angelf ire.com/extreme4/kiddofspeed/

Those pictures are just great at showing the sense of "creepiness" of those places. I can definitely understand why folks are afraid of venturing into the dead zone, even though these aren't terribly large doses of radiation.

Everyone should definitely take the time to look through ALL of the pages. Thanks to the author/photographer for a great photo-essay.

sure.

(I suppose you tell your potential audience to access your site via a Gopher gateway. But is it worth the hassle?)

I also have some issues with the gopher protocol as such. You can't just write a page and stick it on your server. You have to follow a lot of strange little rules for integrating it into the menu structure. These complications have a lot to do with gopher's lack of acceptance,

They're also a big reason web browser support is so poor. The only browser that fully supports the protocol is Lynx. Mozilla/Netscape has a half-assed implementation they inherited from Mosaic, which they never seem to have updated. IE used to have the same code, but has since stripped it out. Opera claims to support gopher if you configure it to use a proxy server-- a concept I don't quite understand and lack any inclination to test.

Should browser vendors support Gopher (better)? Perhaps. Put let's do some prioritizing here. There are a lot of things we need to get browser vendors to do. Better support for W3C specs has to be a major focus Support for legacy protocols that a few enthusiasts won't give up on just isn't worth anybody's energy.

Yes, a real concentration camp is something like Manzanar where we kept those sneaky Japanese in World War 2.

"Concentration Camp" or "Relocation Center": What's in a Name?
by James Hirabayashi, Ph.D.

I grew up in Illinois, next door to your state, and we had more than our share of community colleges and "direction" schools as we called them. Tuition at all of our public schools was compairable, I went to U of I. because it was the best one I could get into. Are you telling me that USI is substantially cheaper than Purdue or Indiana University? Purdue in particular has excelent engineering programs.

Unfortunatly I agree with the parent, during my time at UIUC I saw the CS program (which I was not in, I minored in CS and majored in TAM) get a lot easier at the freshaman level, and now all the kids that were switching to business majors the year I took the intro CS class, were passing, and they are going to start taking advanced classes were they will severly slow the learning of those who deserved to be there, or have to switch majors in their 3rd or 4rth year...

I grew up in Illinois, next door to your state, and we had more than our share of community colleges and "direction" schools as we called them. Tuition at all of our public schools was compairable, I went to U of I. because it was the best one I could get into. Are you telling me that USI is substantially cheaper than Purdue or Indiana University? Purdue in particular has excelent engineering programs.

Unfortunatly I agree with the parent, during my time at UIUC I saw the CS program (which I was not in, I minored in CS and majored in TAM) get a lot easier at the freshaman level, and now all the kids that were switching to business majors the year I took the intro CS class, were passing, and they are going to start taking advanced classes were they will severly slow the learning of those who deserved to be there, or have to switch majors in their 3rd or 4rth year...

- 3DOSX organizes windows into discs, representing files and folders as icons standing upright. Opening folders creates branches of varying altitudes based on depth of directories. Supports 3D glasses for that classy 1950 feel.
[Screenshot] | [Download] (Mac OS X)

- 3DOSX organizes windows into discs, representing files and folders as icons standing upright. Opening folders creates branches of varying altitudes based on depth of directories. Supports 3D glasses for that classy 1950 feel.
[Screenshot] | [Download] (Mac OS X)

- 3DOSX organizes windows into discs, representing files and folders as icons standing upright. Opening folders creates branches of varying altitudes based on depth of directories. Supports 3D glasses for that classy 1950 feel.
[Screenshot] | [Download] (Mac OS X)

I've been writing some articles about OSCAR and some of the projects that are related that are being developed at NCSA and other places. You can find the latest version of this newsletter at the Linux Developer Newsletter site.

Actually, it can be way more than a hobbyist's tool. The University of Illinois has made a supercomputer out of a cluster of them! Laboratory website and press release. 1 GFLOP during matrix multiplication.

Actually, it can be way more than a hobbyist's tool. The University of Illinois has made a supercomputer out of a cluster of them! Laboratory website and press release. 1 GFLOP during matrix multiplication.

Europeans hate america no matter what. It's how they feel good about themselves. If they had to face their own demons they'd probably go catatonic.

1. You are a moron. They did their own research to solve certain problems put forth by the American defense industry, and civil aviation challenges. Such as the all composite 777 tail. But much of Boeing's success stems from the 707 and the mid 50's, and of course the most important plane ever made the 747.

2. Not first for the 100th year in a row! GOOD JOB!

3. Since Asians and Europeans still haven't opened their markets, I fail to see how us doing anything is any kind of and indictment. Our open markets are predicated on your markets being open in return. They are not, and haven't been, so kindly fuck off.

4. God you Eurotrash are ignorant. But if I must. Afew links to disabuse you of certain misconceptions.

CERN did have an important role to play, HTML, we use it still. MOSAIC, and the NCSA gave us img_src, and made the web what it is. You ignorant self-important fucks just make me want to vomit. You're almost as bad as the Frenchman who insisted the Magginot line was built to protect France from invasion in the years following WWII.

The GUI is part of the OS now. If we're talking about one people use. One might even observe you could do the GUI on chip and subtract windows in software to provide arithmatic functions. Why I even had a GUI bios for my pentium 60 back in the day. The job of an OS is to intrepret highlevel instructions to low level interpreters for hardware, manage the flow of data in, and out, and I would add describe itself and the data it is responsible for to user. For universal kinds of data, html, text, common picture formats, common archive formats, common audio and video formats, the OS should know what they are, and be able to describe them appropriately.

All an OS ever was, was a place to put jobs. "Entertain me with this common file", is just a valid a task as "do what this punch card tells you."

And now we know why linux doesn't rule the desktop. The developers don't look serving the users. They look at building just the part of the widget they're responsible for, someone else will fill in the gaps.

Those guys at Xerox knew exactly what the hell they were doing. Too bad their superiors had no idea. Nice to see linux still trying to catch up.

Europeans hate america no matter what. It's how they feel good about themselves. If they had to face their own demons they'd probably go catatonic.

1. You are a moron. They did their own research to solve certain problems put forth by the American defense industry, and civil aviation challenges. Such as the all composite 777 tail. But much of Boeing's success stems from the 707 and the mid 50's, and of course the most important plane ever made the 747.

2. Not first for the 100th year in a row! GOOD JOB!

3. Since Asians and Europeans still haven't opened their markets, I fail to see how us doing anything is any kind of and indictment. Our open markets are predicated on your markets being open in return. They are not, and haven't been, so kindly fuck off.

4. God you Eurotrash are ignorant. But if I must. Afew links to disabuse you of certain misconceptions.

CERN did have an important role to play, HTML, we use it still. MOSAIC, and the NCSA gave us img_src, and made the web what it is. You ignorant self-important fucks just make me want to vomit. You're almost as bad as the Frenchman who insisted the Magginot line was built to protect France from invasion in the years following WWII.

The GUI is part of the OS now. If we're talking about one people use. One might even observe you could do the GUI on chip and subtract windows in software to provide arithmatic functions. Why I even had a GUI bios for my pentium 60 back in the day. The job of an OS is to intrepret highlevel instructions to low level interpreters for hardware, manage the flow of data in, and out, and I would add describe itself and the data it is responsible for to user. For universal kinds of data, html, text, common picture formats, common archive formats, common audio and video formats, the OS should know what they are, and be able to describe them appropriately.

All an OS ever was, was a place to put jobs. "Entertain me with this common file", is just a valid a task as "do what this punch card tells you."

And now we know why linux doesn't rule the desktop. The developers don't look serving the users. They look at building just the part of the widget they're responsible for, someone else will fill in the gaps.

Those guys at Xerox knew exactly what the hell they were doing. Too bad their superiors had no idea. Nice to see linux still trying to catch up.

Brenda Myers, quoted in the CNN article that the slashdot link in the parent links to, said, "Every time you go these places [national electronics retail stores], they think women don't know anything, and they don't you the same features as they would when my husbands goes with me."

Was he joking? Neither my wife nor I could tell, so we decided right there that the University of Illinois was not for us. It didn't help their case that they didn't even bother to respond to her requests for appointments. We found our way up the road to Purdue University where she and I are working on our doctoral degrees in Electrical Engineering and Computer Engineering, respectively.

The moral of this story: Don't be surprised if this happens to you at University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

Spybot has the immunize feature. But better than that: Spyware Blaster and even Ie-spyad can help with that.

Check out LLVM: http://llvm.cs.uiuc.edu/

It gives the advantages of bytecode compilation (linktime & runtime optimization, JIT compilers, etc) to both C and C++ (using the GCC parsers). In addition it has a powerful interprocedural optimizer, so it generates code that truely thwomps GCC in some cases. :)

-Chris

Check out LLVM: http://llvm.cs.uiuc.edu/

It gives the advantages of bytecode compilation (linktime & runtime optimization, JIT compilers, etc) to both C and C++ (using the GCC parsers). In addition it has a powerful interprocedural optimizer, so it generates code that truely thwomps GCC in some cases. :)

-Chris