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I've never seen a "smart" compiler as you put it, though there are systems where the programmers can explicitely parallelize a loop.

Oh, because you've never seen it, it can't exist? Great logic there, I hate to think what your code is like. See here and here and here.

actually the admin has been nice enough to copy a page detailing the amount of traffic that the box has put out here, so enjoy the show folks.

Yes: http://www.acm.uiuc.edu/~staffin/reveng.pdf

http://www.acm.uiuc.edu/~staffin/reveng.pdf - Here is the same pdf mentioned above, only on a site that isn't about to get slashdotted (on the same server as the original site, in fact). Have at it!

This. One of the funnier 404 messages I've seen. Take a look at the source for the page so you won't have to wait for the slow version of the text. :)

I remember reports on VR experiments with headtracking from 1968.
Sadly, I haven't yet found a good site on the history of VR.
But this one claims that the idea already existed back in the 1950s.

Hopefully this will make companies realize that the Internet isn't comprised of just IE users.

Well, not quite, but the last time I looked, (which was about 9 days ago) about 95% of internet users used Internet Explorer for their web browser. While that doesn't comprise all internet users, it's close enough to make no odds.

This reminded me of a feature of old Mosaic. I hvae just filed a Mozilla bug (211531).

I'd like that the color of visited links could range from the the color defined for visited links to the color of _un_visited links in proportion to the time passed since last visit.

Go to a page with links, some visited, some not.
The links unvisited would appear, say, red.
The links visited 1 minute ago would appear, say, yellow.
The links visited 7 days ago would appear orange.
The links visited 15 days ago would appear, say, almost red.

Read about it in the Mosaic documentation.

Vote for it. Code for it :)

I think this is a good idea overall. It helps to level the playing field for poorer universities. Also, since there's fairly blatant Napster-like copyright violations done by every researcher and by article repositories (Citeseer), this would pave the way for truly open research content.

Take a look at this email to get an idea of the various battling forces in the academic world.

I agree with your sentiment but I need to correct a statement of fact. Mosaic was free but I don't think it was open source. Remember how they licensed it to a bunch of commercial companies like Spyglass and Microsoft? Mosaic was free to redistribute but the code was not open.

More info:
http://archive.ncsa.uiuc.edu/SDG/Software/Mosaic/L icense/LicenseInfo.html

It was free but not Free, and source was available for Un*x under a BSD style license, I think.

Michael

indeed think sgi allowed it to be downloaded from their site, but I cannot find the link :-( MaxOS X got a bice one here!

We've already got that... just substitute GI Joe for Aquaman.

OpenSSH has also been modified to support the Grid Security Infrastructure (GSI) used by Globus.

Actually, the final result from UIUC was indeed printed as a bone implant using an artificial bone replacement material called hydroxyapatite. See the project website at: Mandible Reconstruction Project

Sorry for the second post, but here's a lot more information on that project, including a picture of the operation itself.

The problem? FDA won't let the doctors leave it in there. They just got to put it in place and take a few pics before removing it again. So the woman still has a weakened jawbone, despite the fact that the technology exists to help her.

Problem 1: What is it good for? Right now Plan 9 has no compelling applications and a dearth of the applications most people use daily. This might be fixed soon as people port things like OpenOffice to it, but don't hold your breath.

it's good for research. an antidote to Systems Software Research is Irrelevant.

Problem 2: It is a research tool, and may never be more than that. Chances are, any truly compelling features in Plan 9 will soon find their way into Linux and even MS Windows.

Judging by how hard it is to bring Private Namespaces to Linux I can tell you that some of Plan 9's concepts will never make it back to UNIX. Some things in UNIX' design are just too hard to fix -- that's why Bell-Labs started this radical new OS (14 years ago).

Problem 3: Overcoming the installed base. It took Linux nearly ten years to achieve name recognition, and it still is running a distant third on the desktop. What does Plan 9 offer that would make me, or you, want to spend time installing and learning it? Especially considerint Problem 2 and Problem 1.

Plan 9 does not want to be a desktop OS but a research one. Its goal is not to crush Microsoft, it simply wants to fix the problems that cannot be easily fixed in UNIX today.

Problem 4: Wrong direction. In my opinion the real important projects right now are ones that are removing the distinctions between OSs. Cross platform tools like Python, Chandler, Mono and Mozilla. Using standards-based DHTML as the UI. Why add another platform to the mix when the real goal is to become platform agnostic?

to quote: "That's the good thing about standards -- there's so many to choose from"...

but of course we can't do that - that'd mean doing some (shock! horror!) nuclear power research, and (no! say it ain't so!) building some brand-new designs. clearly it must be much better to keep building those nuke plants just like they did back in the 1950's and 60's, or better yet, don't build any new ones at all - just keep running the ones they built back then, more or less unchanged.

... in Soviet Russia.

contrary to popular belief Al Gore did not invent the internet. It was a Tim Burners-Lee a lazy Brit. ;-)

Hmm... most of what he talks about has been available in proper languages for decades! I'll even try, as a public service, not to mention LISP :]

Smalltalk has this:

(3/5) class methodDictionary at: #+

which will give you the + method for the Fraction class. From that object (the CompiledMethod) you can get the original source code (if it's available), or a parse tree. The parse tree will give you indices into the original source, in case you should need to do a GUI for your IDE :)

Say you're writing a debugger (which you can actually do, unlike in Java, where the debugger needs to run externally).. the MethodContext knowns at what opcode execution stopped, the parse tree knows which part of the source that represents. This means you can step operator by operator through an exression... no "line numbers".

You can *fake* some of these things in java, but it's not pretty - something like IntelliJ has to use its own special compiler and huge amounts of support code, and it's just plain impossible in Java for a system to debug itself.

Go play: free-as-in-beer-for-personal-use and nice / free, cute, fluffy and sluggish

</preach>

Google starts their webcrawl with the Stanford University home page. (Info based on a talk given by Craig SIlverstein, the directory of technology at Google.)

1. hours of game play
2. sweaty palms
3. decreased skin resistance
4. lethal current?

My university blacklisted hotmail. I wouldn't be surprised if other places did the same.

My university blacklisted hotmail. I wouldn't be surprised if other places did the same.

• The degree you get is euqivalent to the on-campus degree (i.e. there's no mention on your degree that you took it online).
• The teacher actually gives a lecture to compus students. The lectured is recorded and a video of the lecture along with presentations and PDFs documents are posted online for off-campus students no later than one hour after the class.
• UIUC is ranked 4th in the entire country (according to usnews.com).

Their tour graphic, while somewhat lacking on details, places the developer squarely at the U. of Illinois Urbana-Champaign campus. Which doesn't totally surprise me (home of NCSA Mosaic, NCSA Telnet, etc.).

But if they honestly think we believe there'll be that many young, good-looking women logged onto this thing at once, they're utterly insane....

These clusters are not beowulf; they allow access through a general scheduler and have MPI to run programs that use a group of nodes at once. This gives the greatest flexability to the users to create a computational system that can be optimzed for the size and needs of their problem. The size of a cluster that can be supported at a national center allows enough computational power to solve problems that can't be solved elsewhere. Given that a cluster of a 128 nodes is now considered an instituitional asset and within the purchasing power of any university, it makes sense to use federal funds to create systems to handle problems beyond the scale of a cluster that any university might own.

Another aspect of this issue arises in the asumption that cluster computing is so easily accomplished that it might be compared to the setup of a single system. I respectfully submit that the simpliest of clusters is none too easy to deploy and use as of today, not to mention the lack of support one gets for the application of their scientific research to a stock parallel computing platform. The national centers can afford to have consultants and researchers on staff that specialize in these matters, as well as full-time admins.

Note: The opinions expressed here are my own and not necessarily representative of my employer or the federal government. In addition, given that I am employed by NCSA, a slight element of bias may be present in my statements. :)

These clusters are not beowulf; they allow access through a general scheduler and have MPI to run programs that use a group of nodes at once. This gives the greatest flexability to the users to create a computational system that can be optimzed for the size and needs of their problem. The size of a cluster that can be supported at a national center allows enough computational power to solve problems that can't be solved elsewhere. Given that a cluster of a 128 nodes is now considered an instituitional asset and within the purchasing power of any university, it makes sense to use federal funds to create systems to handle problems beyond the scale of a cluster that any university might own.

Another aspect of this issue arises in the asumption that cluster computing is so easily accomplished that it might be compared to the setup of a single system. I respectfully submit that the simpliest of clusters is none too easy to deploy and use as of today, not to mention the lack of support one gets for the application of their scientific research to a stock parallel computing platform. The national centers can afford to have consultants and researchers on staff that specialize in these matters, as well as full-time admins.

Note: The opinions expressed here are my own and not necessarily representative of my employer or the federal government. In addition, given that I am employed by NCSA, a slight element of bias may be present in my statements. :)

Imagine a Beowulf cluster of Playstation 2's!

I just went to the site:

http://www.cen.uiuc.edu/~halm/offline.html

It looks like the MPAA came by and shat all over the project.

Where oh where can I find install links for Bit Torrent now? :(

Not a waste. Read this: Pablo Project

It explains that one of the main purposes of the PS2 cluster is to develop software for parallel computing and gain insight that may improve future game console technology. PS2s seem like pretty cheap hardware to do the development on (especially if they were donated by Sony.)

Sony learns more about their hardware and the research community gets software out of it. I can think of a lot worse ways to spend tax dollars.

We have also investigated the impact of vector size on performance. The EE processor is tailor-made for 4-element vectors, so one could expect performance degradation for longer vectors. In fact, the opposite is found - a consequence of the pipelining built into the VPU. Performance improvement stops once the vectors reach length 16, consistent with the rather shallow pipelines used in the VPU. In Figure 5, we compare the performance of the PIII-600 and Playstation 2 for 32-element single-precision vector dot products. The absolute performance for smaller datasets now tops 150MFLOPS for both the EE and PIII processors. Curiously, one sees a performance hit on the EE once the dataset exceeds 5 million vectors. This is almost certainly a consequence of the small amount of memory available on the PS2.

More info on the processing power of the PS2 as applied to computational chemistry.
Basically, this study shows the PS2 has roughly the computational linear algebra power of a PIII-600 (the then fastest processor on the market).

You might want to reconsider whether or not that camera can tell how you feel...

Emotion Recognition Using a Cauchy Naive Bayes Classifier
Facial features detection and face emotion recognition

Besides being open source and having the C source availalbe, Mozilla contains approx 150,000 lines or 4.5mb (uncompressed) of javascript code. Its object hierarchy is very accessible and can be easily reconfigured. New modules can alter the existing set of javascript in infinite ways.

So, while it's likely harder to tweak Mozilla to exactly suit your needs, in the long run, it's much much more flexible than opera, and because it has a larger marketshare, its features will eventually easily surpass Opera's. Mozilla may always be a step behind in terms of speed, but in terms of features, it definitely won't.

Both types of firewall are needed - and with new ways for malicious apps to piggyback onto legitimate ones like Firehole, an up-to-date personal firewall that can handle DLL injection (I believe the latest ZoneAlarm does as does version 2 of Outpost - currently in beta) should be thought of as a necessary companion to the corporate firewall. An application firewall like System Safety Monitor should also be considered - properly configured this can stop any spyware in its tracks.

Finally, restricting Active Content (ActiveX, Javascript and Java) to only a few "trusted" sites will do a great deal to prevent users from being affected by drive-by downloads, home page hijacking and various other forms of malware. A good reference on these can be found at Eric Howes' Privacy and Security Site.

Maybe I'm pointing out the obvious here, but for those who like the idea of GoboLinux's revised directory structure (as I do), check out the encap package manager. It's not as complete and elegant a solution, but it's along the same idea and it works with your existing Linux distro. I use it for every package I install from source.

in case micsupply.com doesn't last, purely for mirroring purposes....


http://www.ks.uiuc.edu/~kvandivo/micsupply/722.h tm

I have been reading a lot of these threads, please complain but the answer is already out there. Have you looked at encap?. The macosx/stepwise platforms are also excellant systems, and of course there is always the debian system.

The problem has already been solved it's just that the big players refuse to use them.

CAVE Quake

http://archive.ncsa.uiuc.edu/SDG/Software/Mosaic/N CSAMosaicHome.html

I just looked at my public_html directory and noticed that the oldest files in there are from September, 1995. Here's my "favorite sites" from February, 1996.

Later one of my friends went to work for SDG (the NCSA Mosaic group), and I got to know many of the developers there. This was after the Netscape people had already left, although Mosaic development continued for quite a while. As a result of the Netscape situation, releasing software developed here at the U of I has become a big pain. The University wants to make sure nothing gets out that might have value unless they get their cut.

I was familiar with Gopher, but never found it very useful. Usenet News rocked, though.

The celebration NCSA is having doesn't even have one person speaking that had anything to do with Mosaic. Nearly everyone that had anything to do with it's long gone, and the department that created it (and NCSA telnet) was axed years ago.

http://www.acm.uiuc.edu/sigunix/projects/quuxbox/ Is designed to have a very flexible architecture and support multiple multimedia apps at once. You can rip a CD, listen to MP3s and watch your favorite MST3K.

I have now.

They say "gas clouds" like there are known clouds of gas following the earth. I am certainly a neophyte when it comes to astronomy, but I would have thought SOMEONE would have mentioned this to me at SOME point.

> As anyone who studies political science will tell
> you, a democracy only works well when you have an
> educated public.

That explains what Karl Rove (you know, Bush's brain) was thinking when he said, "As people do better, they start voting like Republicans--unless they have too much education and vote Democratic."

You can easily steer the country on the road to fascism all the while calling it "democracy," if your citizens don't know any better. Republicans have made no secret of their anti-academic views (e.g. they want to teach Biblical Creation in science class, and the current president probably hasn't even read a book since The The Very Hungry Caterpillar). Utimately, they want to replace our democracy with a plutocratic theocracy under their brand of Christianity. Sounds a little extreme, right? Well, Bush already believes that he was elected by God to lead this country.

Wow, this post is probably one sentence away from violating Godwin's law. I should have read my sig before posting.

ISO Pascal requires all array accesses do boundary checking (although most compilers let you disable that for performance reasons).

And how exactly would this cabal of scientists get a majority of say climatologists and meteorologists to believe them? A small group could come up with the hypothesis and present it to the scientific community (ala Pons and Flieshmann) but scientists are not likely to just say, "oh global warming, cool I believe that". Theyre going to go out and test that hypothesis themselves, and if the results are the same, then they will "believe" it, although it wont really be a belief at that point, because it will be backed by evidence. Thats how a majority of scientists would come to the same conclusion, not because some small group says so, no matter what they have to gain.

Snip. Okay, my questions were, "How much do all of the factors (including the Holy CO2 factor) contribute to
global temperature?", "Have you measured?", and "Do you even know how to measure them?" I am guessing that
your answers to these questions are, "no", "no", and "no"

me personally? no, i havent measured the other factors. But they are: Global warming gasses, sulfates and aerosols, and solar variability The first two can be produced by humans, as well as by natural events such as forest fires and volcanos. When modeling climate, these factors are taken into account with a wide range of scenarios to test for sensitivity of the climate to other factors, as evidenced here as to the exact persentage each one contributes, that is still being researched, and takes time. A general graph of relative importance of these three factors is shown in this document.

If you weaken powerful companies in America, will America's economy be a) strengthened, b) unaffected, or c)
weakened?

Youre thinking too short term. Small buisnesses grow into large ones, and large ones go bankrupt due to changing economic conditions. Ultimately a decrease in CO2 emissions can create buisness through carbon trading. Buisnesses will be forced to pass their consts onto consumers, which will help to create a market for low CO2 producing goods. SO2 emissions have been under a trading scheme for years, and it has largely been successful. At the time of its introduction, nearly every power plant released sulfates into the atmosphere, leading to acid rain. Nowadays, the trading scheme has reduced SO2 emissions below dangerous levels, without causing massive disruptions to the economy. CO2 trading can be done in a similar manner, with a minimum of economic disruption. And incidentally, president Bush supports this proposal too.

So why do we have to hasten the process?

Well if you dont buy the global warming argument, think of fossil fuels as civilization fuels. If a dark age should ever reappear, and much of the technology we have now goes by the wayside, easily availqable fossil fuels can act as a fuel for a new civilization and a bridge to a lower polluting but more technologically expensive society. Thus if we screw up, if we dont use all the fossil fuels, at least well get a second chance someday. Secondly, there will be fewer conflicts over foriegn energy supplies. Thirdly, the united states will be more energy self sufficient, which will increase our security and stop our economy from being subjet to energy cartels price fixing whims.

Except that I didn't insult anyone, nor is my argument poor

Im insulted, because I am none of those things, yet I support the reduction of CO2 emissions to reduce the effects of global warming. Second, your argument boils down to " Theres a left wing america-hating commie conspiracy to promote glo