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Filed: August 23, 2004

Umm, that was more than a decade after the published HTTP standards included the PATH_INFO environment variable, which gives the program everything past the file pathname portion of a URL. This was essentially defined as a string that the invoked CGI program would interpret however it wishes. If this doesn't qualify as "prior art", what would? Note that the last-updated timestamps on these specs are in 1995 and 1996.

So Amazon is merely patenting a part of NCSA's published HTTP CGI-invocation standard.

This mostly shows that the patent examiners are totally ignorant of HTML and related Web standards, and are thus unqualified to say anything about the patent application.

Filed: August 23, 2004

Umm, that was more than a decade after the published HTTP standards included the PATH_INFO environment variable, which gives the program everything past the file pathname portion of a URL. This was essentially defined as a string that the invoked CGI program would interpret however it wishes. If this doesn't qualify as "prior art", what would? Note that the last-updated timestamps on these specs are in 1995 and 1996.

So Amazon is merely patenting a part of NCSA's published HTTP CGI-invocation standard.

This mostly shows that the patent examiners are totally ignorant of HTML and related Web standards, and are thus unqualified to say anything about the patent application.

It's called PATH_INFO. I've been using it since 1996 to implement hierarchical indexes and implied searches for internal websites where I've worked. Most people have never heard of it, because they haven't read the CGI spec, they've just cargo-culted something from the examples directory or, worse, copied a CGI from someone who didn't understand CGI, either.

The structure of a CGI URL in NCSA HTTPD and Apache is:

(http|https)://servername/scriptname[/path_info][?query=string]

(#anchors aren't passed to the server, they're used in the browser only.)

So, you can use /path_info if you like, instead of ?query=string. It makes it nicer if you can represent something hierarchically, like .../toolindex/autoconf/2.53/ gives you the meta-info page on how and why autoconf 2.53 got on to our servers. But .../toolindex/autoconf/ just tells you what versions are there.

Combine with ScriptAlias / or SetHandler, and you can do it from the root of the server.

It's a little more work if you want to allow some known paths to go to regular static pages and not the CGI-or-equivalent.

Are you really naive enough to think that current crop plants are "natural" in any way?

Hint: they aren't.

"Natural" corn (maize).

"Natural" cabbage (also "natural" cauliflower, mustard, turnip, broccoli, Brussels sprouts, and canola. Yes, these were all essentially the same thing at one time -- they all came from a group of closely-related species).

"Natural" carrot.

"Natural" apple.

"Natural" wheat looks like a lawn that's gone to seed. "Natural" squash, pumpkins, and melons are egg-sized or smaller.

Oh, and your "natural" olive oil? Did it come from olives the size of a pea? And how about that "natural" butter? Did it come from cows that this or ones that looked like this?

We've been Frankensteining food for millenia, my friend.

Ever notice how the "natural food" freaks are invariably brutally ignorant of the fundamentals of biology and the history of agriculture? In fact, I'd bet money that you've rarely been off pavement in your life.

Oh God... I can't believe this actually made news. In. Such. A. Horribly. Skewed. Fashion. But this is /. You can watch the presentation HERE - http://www.acm.uiuc.edu/conference/2007/videos It was ONE of MANY presentations given as part of the ANNUAL UIUC ACM-hosted conference. Please actually watch the presentation and STFU. Please. All it shows is that Microsoft is working on fixing what it considers to be mistakes in the design of its NT system. That is it. It's work as part of Win7. It is _not_ Win7. Listen to the questions that students asked Eric about MinWin. Listen to the answers.

The latest version of VMD uses CUDA to speed things up by 100 times or more. VMD is released under the UIUC Open Source License.

http://www.ks.uiuc.edu/Research/vmd/

Linky!!
http://arrakis.ncsa.uiuc.edu/ps2/index.php

The University of Illinois offers a mathematics sequence, beginning at pre-calc, which uses Mathematica. It's basically directed self-study. You work w/ Mathematica notebooks, there is no text. http://www.netmath.uiuc.edu/ Also you might read-up on foundational mathematics - e.g. these topics http://sakharov.net/foundation.html

http://www.crhc.uiuc.edu/~mahesri/research/PACS_paper.pdf (pg 5) 3D Mark brings a 1.3ghz pentium with a 14.1" screen just over 30W

There was a Spreadsheet made for the CIA by Xerox that would easily be the Nerds Nerd of spreadsheets as it enabled full access to the underlying programming language, Smalltalk.

Here are some links to the old version and newer developments.
http://wiki.cs.uiuc.edu/VisualWorks/The+Analyst
http://www.mojowire.com/TravelsWithSmalltalk/DaveThomas-TravelsWithSmalltalk.htm
http://www.sunless-sea.net/wiki/SmallTalk
http://www.google.ca/search?num=100&hl=en&newwindow=1&q=%22the+analyst%22+xerox+smalltalk&btnG=Search&meta=

If you go to the source, you can compare the southern and northern anomolies. Those graphs show that while the antarctic ice coverage is about 1.25 million square kms higher than the 1979-2000 mean, the artic ice coverage is over 2 million square kms lower than the 1979-2000 mean. The antarctic increase is not making up for the artic decrease: there is a net loss of ice worldwide. This data points to higher average temperatures and more extreme seasonal variations. Neither of those are good news.

If you go to the source, you can compare the southern and northern anomolies. Those graphs show that while the antarctic ice coverage is about 1.25 million square kms higher than the 1979-2000 mean, the artic ice coverage is over 2 million square kms lower than the 1979-2000 mean. The antarctic increase is not making up for the artic decrease: there is a net loss of ice worldwide. This data points to higher average temperatures and more extreme seasonal variations. Neither of those are good news.

If you go to the source, you can compare the southern and northern anomolies. Those graphs show that while the antarctic ice coverage is about 1.25 million square kms higher than the 1979-2000 mean, the artic ice coverage is over 2 million square kms lower than the 1979-2000 mean. The antarctic increase is not making up for the artic decrease: there is a net loss of ice worldwide. This data points to higher average temperatures and more extreme seasonal variations. Neither of those are good news.

See http://arctic.atmos.uiuc.edu/cryosphere/ for the details.
Swings and roundabouts.

...Apple's team simply borrowing ideas from other people without contributing anything back.

unless they intend on taking over their own fork of GCC (a monumental task which would substantially harm their ability to support BSD itself)

A fork of GCC would still be licensed under GPLv2. Don't you think FreeBSD should use a compiler with a BSD-style license? And maybe one whose architecture is a bit more modern than gcc?

Luckily, the back-end already exists, and the front-end is already under active development.

The "vaccine origin" theory has pretty much been shown to be impossible. There were too many HIV strains already around at that time for it to have originated at the Winstar trials in Congo. Winstar supposedly also went back and found some of the original monkey cells that the vaccine was grown in and upon testing showed that they did not contain any HIV and that they were actually Macaque cells which can't be infected by HIV. Plus add in that HIV1 and HIV2 are believed to be derived from different SIV strains which infect different primates, which further makes that impossible.

http://www.avert.org/origins.htm
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hiv#Origin_and_discov ery
http://guava.physics.uiuc.edu/~nigel/courses/598BI O/498BIOonline-essays/hw3/files/HW3-Villa.pdf

Actually the four gospels recorded in the Bible (Matthew, Mark, Luke and John) are primary sources, as they are first-hand accounts of the life of Jesus and what He did and said, written by eye witnesses (check the history on that). Many other primary sources on the life of Christ and His disciples exist and are extant today.

Also, your 4th option doesn't work, since Jesus claimed to be God and all His disciples claimed He was God, and Christians today still believe Jesus is God. If he were really not God, but claimed He was, He wouldn't just be a "guy with bright ideas" - he'd be a liar or a nutcase. Not to mention, most of His teachings wouldn't be very popular today i.e. "the way to life (heaven) is narrow and the way to death (hell) is wide" or "blessed are you when men hate you and curse you on account of Me".

A definition of primary source (from http://www.library.uiuc.edu/village/primarysource/ mod1/pg1.htm):

If you are seeking to learn about the past, primary sources of information are those that provide first-hand accounts of the events, practices, or conditions you are researching. In general, these are documents that were created by the witnesses or first recorders of these events at about the time they occurred, and include diaries, letters, reports, photographs, creative works, financial records, memos, and newspaper articles (to name just a few types).

To give just one example of a primary source for a particular research question: If you were interested in learning about how the Freshman Rhetoric course at UIUC was taught in the late 19th century, the papers students wrote for that course would be considered primary sources for this research project, because they were created at the time of the institutional practices in question by direct participants in those practices.

Primary sources also include first-hand accounts that were documented later, such as autobiographies, memoirs, and oral histories. However, the most useful primary sources are usually considered to be those that were created closest to the time period you're researching.

We've been doing that kind of stuff at Illinois for a while.

Crowther's original was a game, and you can play it for yourself. Matthew Russoto tweaked the recovered source code so that it will compile under g77.

http://www.russotto.net/~russotto/ADVENT/ ... and David Kinder published a Windows executable.

http://www.ifarchive.org/if-archive/unprocessed/ad v_crowther_win.zip

That file will move eventually... you will probably be able to find it from here:

http://www.wurb.com/if/person/2

There are also photos of the inside of the real Colossal Cave, including photos of what's left of the famous brick building (just a foundation, sadly) the famous rock with a Y2 on it, and even a rusty axe head and an iron rod.

http://brain.lis.uiuc.edu:2323/opencms/export/site s/default/dhq/vol/001/2/000009.html

or

http://www.digitalhumanities.org/dhq/vol/001/2/000 009.html

... PS2 clusters have been used for calculations by the NCSA. And supooosedly (insert grain of salt) Saddam Hussein was buying up PS2's to get around those pesky export restrictions to build a computing cluster for a weapons program.

But it makes sense. There are a lot of parallels between scientific and game/graphics computing, intense mathematical operations namely. So it would make sense that a processor optimized for gaming would be good for scientific research. Look at the folding at home project, for example.

A real scientist looks at all the factors, where a hack looks at just one.

Today, the Northern Hemisphere sea ice area broke the record for the lowest recorded ice area in recorded history. The new record came a full month before the historic summer minimum typically occurs.

http://arctic.atmos.uiuc.edu/cryosphere/

Ice is melting, coral is vanishing, temperatures are erratic, and so one NASA study means nothing. You can't take nourishment from a system for centuries, grow your population a millionfold, and dump toxins back into it without replenishing it and NOT have some effect. Give me a break!

As far as UIUC is concerned, they have some top notch people who are pushing computing to the limits with long time-scale molecular dynamics runs. And their not doing it to model a few atoms either. Klaus Schulten has been doing some very impressive work on simulating protein dynamics. Take a look at http://www.ks.uiuc.edu/Overview/KS/research.html.

So I have a feeling that the new machines are going to be humming right along

From this page: http://van.physics.uiuc.edu/qa/listing.php?id=1145

In the 1950's, Joe Kittenger, a high altitued ballon test pilot went up to over 102,000 feet where it's virutally space and it is very close to vacuum, his glove malfuntioned and lost pressure.. His hand swelled up a bit and he lost movement and function. But his hand did not explode. Once repressurized, everything was normal.

Not to mention that that extra dollar cost may push a Mac over the line into capital equipment where overhead isn't charged. My first laptop for work ran into that issue: I picked a nice model for ~$1800, and was told I wasn't spending enough. As it turned out, the $2600 ibm was cheaper, because the lower cost one came with 50% overhead attached.

You could have also ssh'd into a real cluster, or built a Mac cluster for a price similar to an Opteron system, and just quietly integrated it with your desktops (how my lab runs now). They just work, and they just work smoothly. It's also nice that tools like VMD come in native form, and run very smoothly. It's nice taking VMD, GAMESS, and Amber on the road with you, running in native mode the same way they run on the big clusters back home, just in case. (yes, I know about the windows ports or cygwin, but they always feel somewhat clunky)

Finally, sometimes the commercial software really does just work better, and fighting a journal over file formats is an exercise in futility.

Linux.

All the meaty goodness you could want, along with links to everything mentioned in the article (including the news groups, and all that other random crap).

As well, if you do a Search for "linux history" (with or without the "), you get Linux the big picture, Linux History and a much better history then the one in the article, History of Linux (though not the first from the search result).

Basically, the article is rehashing stuff that is very easily found, presenting it in a format that isn't even very interesting (a short blurb at the beginning and then a copy of all the other stuff..., sounds hard to do!) and leaves out a bunch of relevant information (such as all the GNU stuff that made it usable...)!

The NCSA What's New index does not seem to be archived any longer at UIUC, but rather at Netscape. That's puzzling to me, since I think it's an absolutely essential part of the history of the growth of the web.

Apple already has released the source for it, under the standard LLVM BSD license:
http://lists.cs.uiuc.edu/pipermail/llvmdev/2007-Ju ly/009817.html

Yes, Abe uses Lustre. As the other commenter suggested, GPFS is also in use.

You might try looking here: http://www.ncsa.uiuc.edu/AboutUs/Employment/

When Castro dies, his brother Ramon will take over.

I thought his brother was Raul?

I'm sure it was Ramon, Hans's father. After all, the killer filesystem was developed for a communist OS ;)

At my school, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, MAC spoofing was rather common. The reason for this was that university housing gave us 10mbps links, but only allowed us to transfer (up+down) 750MB per floating 24hr window without our bandwidth becoming significantly reduced (That's 10 to 15 minutes of full pipe transfer, FYI). Details here. Of course, this limiting was tied to MAC Address, as each room only had one port to the router. So to circumvent the limiting, people would look up MAC addresses and IPs on the network and spoof their network card to them. This caused weird things to happen when two computers with the same IP and MAC are on the same network, but in essence you could steal someone else's bandwidth. With such a practice in use, how can they possibly say that one person or another was the person that IP+MAC combo belonged to? They have records of what room the MAC was in use in when, but how can they be sure that it wasn't your roommate spoofing your MAC address?

Let's start with a Slashdotting of NASA...

• Scalable Dynamic Chimera Methods for Unsteady Aerodynamics is one of those packages mere mortals like us will have either no use for or will have to just drool over.
• Fully Unstructured Navier-Stokes 3D is a nice Fortran-based CFD, requires some hefty paperwork to obtain, and may need you to use G95 rather than GCC's GFortran, due to compiler bugs.
• OVERFLOW and related CFD software.
• Three Dimensional Multi-block Advanced Grid Generation System is the component that actually lets you do a lot of the necessary grid work for CFDs.
• Viscous Upwind ALgorithm for Complex Flow ANalysis is the hardest of the CFD codes at NASA to obtain, but if you want to work on anything hypersonic, it's the best place to start. Do Not Use hypersonic airflows for CPU cooling.

• Astrophysical Thermonuclear Flash Simulator - well, you never know.
• Geant4, for the subatomic nuclear physicist in your life...
• Open Field Operation and Manipulation is a nice open-source CFD package.
• Parallel Basic Local Alignment Search Tool gives you a parallelized search engine for nucleotides and proteins.
• Stanford Exploration Project provides some nice parallel geophysics applications and tools.
• Tachyon Parallel Raytracer is a nice example of what you can do with parallelism and graphics.

• Kerrighed is an up-and-coming clustering system for Linux. I saw it demonstrated at SC|05 - and was less than impressed. It needed a lot of work at that point. However, it looks like it has improved a lot since then, and it would be unreasonable to not mention it.
• MOSIX is the second-oldest clustering technology to gain a fan following to rival Star Trek. It's very good, though hard to get if you're not in academia. Arguably for entirely fair reasons.
• OpenMOSIX was originally a fork from MOSIX but is now essentially its own clustering technology. Development is nowhere near the speed I'd like, it does need far more eyes, but is well-known and highly regarded. Moshe Bar is also one of the coolest developers I've encountered.

• DAKOTA is a program for profiling parallel applications and should be useful in telling you where you are gaining and losing.
• HPC Toolkit is another toolkit for profiling HPC applications.
• is yet another profiler for parallel software. Between this and the others I've listed, you should have more information than sequential programmers ever get to work with.
• Performance API is a facility used by most of the profiling software to provide an architecture-independent view of performance counters. I have it on good authority that some (now former)

...with more information, pictures, and a little video. Oh! And a link to a PDF of the actual article.

http://www.mvac.uiuc.edu/network.html

Wipt is an apt-like tool that uses MSIs and a repository; might be useful as a starting point.

Some of the ACM guys at UIUC had the idea already: http://www.acm.uiuc.edu/projects/Wipt

"Since your eyes can only detect about 16,000 colors, it's a moot point..."

Did you simply make that up? From http://www.geom.uiuc.edu/events/courses/1996/cmwh/ Stills/basics.html

"The human eye can discern between roughly 2^24 different colors (this number obviously varies greatly from person to person and depends a lot on viewing conditions), so a 24-bit image is needed to represent the full range of colors that we can perceive."

2^24 = 16,777,216 colors, which is just slightly bigger than 16,000.

Network coding is far from a brand new idea. It is introduced in a paper by Ahlswede http://pdos.csail.mit.edu/decouto/papers/ahlswede0 0.pdf published in 2000 and has ever since been a very popular research topic in the networking world (http://www.ifp.uiuc.edu/~koetter/NWC/index.html). These "clues" are linear equations where actual packets can be retrieved by applying a gaussian reduction on the equations. Its most obvious applications are with multicasting where utilization of network links can indeed be increased in an informational theoretical perspective. The tradeoffs are increased CPU load on the intermediate and end nodes. The research so far is a bit from getting into the practical stages but it has promise. As for "99% of internet traffic being unicast"; even though that might be true, one needs to think outside the box. If it turns out that multicasting will be much cheaper than now (multicasting is now in most cases basically multiple unicasting), broadcasting TV through packet networks might become much more efficient and this proportion could change. Finally, don't forget that research is still in early stages. I believe there are some years, even decades (if ever), until we will see any of this in practice. Maybe it turns out to be useless for computer networks, who knows. Even so, the basic principle might still prove useful for other applications such as routing inside solid state chips.

Okay okay, SOME lights are cool. The Connection Machine for example http://archive.ncsa.uiuc.edu/Cyberia/MetaComp/Imag es/CM5_lg.jpg is very cool. And the IMSAI 8080 was damn cool because it has lights AND switches. http://www.imsai.net/ Now that's a computer. On the other hand, all those damn goofy PC mods with lights on the stupid fans and all is bogus.

Itanium and Itanium 2 can rock scientific, floating-point heavy applications with easy-to-determine memory access patterns (tight for loops and large arrays). But for general integer code (i.e. pointer chasing data structures like linked lists, trees, hash tables), all these compiler optimizations for an in-order architecture like Itanium are still worse than letting an out-of-order superscalar do its thing while an cache miss is being serviced. To compensate, Intel had to put 9MB of L3 on the Itanium die to hopefully make most datasets fit into the cache, but that turned out be expensive and unwieldy.

It's not that the compiler research wasn't there, it's that integer applications are a bitch for in-order processors.

Why does everyone assume that anything with the term plastic in it is non-degradable? Besides, it's not like doctors are allowed to just stick things in a person's body on a whim.

Take a step back from the knee-jerk, luddite reaction to technology and think for a second about what the article is talking about here: an emergency supply of blood that is easier to store, transport, and perhaps even acquire (cheaper than drawing blood?). Complications from a foreign substance in your body are pretty minor compared to dying from blood loss, and the kinds of places where transfusions are needed are not always well-suited to the storage of spare blood (like in a medic's fieldpack in 100+ degree heat in Falluja).

</rant>

It's likely they've thought of this and chosen their materials accordingly. Even if the body isn't able to dispose of the artificial hemoglobules itself, it's likely that they could be transfused out (or possibly simply bled out, since you noted that these probably don't denature and clot like platelets). Furthermore, adding stuff to the blood stream does not necessarily stop the body's natural blood production, and it's not like they're claiming their artificial blood is ready for use yet, anyway.

Solaris tar sucks. It can't handle long filenames and renames them to some weird looking thing that reminds me of Progra~1 fugly-ness. Just what the doctor ordered a piece of backup software to do. A few random samples of people on the net complaining about Solaris tar:

http://www.mikehan.com/rant/solaris-tools.html
http://twistedmatrix.com/trac/ticket/1750
http://42.pl/postfix/postfix-2.2.2/examples/chroot -setup/Solaris10
http://www.idevelopment.info/data/MySQL/DBA_tips/I nstalling/SOLARIS323_2.shtml
http://lists.cs.uiuc.edu/pipermail/llvm-commits/We ek-of-Mon-20040809/017086.html
http://justlinux.com/forum/archive/index.php/t-405 84.html

Heres an earlier I.e.

I get the feeling that you deliberately just chose to cite those articles that claimed to have found a connection between violent video games and violent behavior. However, that article by Williams and Skoric also says right in its abstract (admittedly. I haven't read the rest):

Research on violent video games suggests that play leads to aggressive behavior. A longitudinal study of an online violent video game with a control group tested for changes in aggressive cognitions and behaviors. The findings did not support the assertion that a violent game will cause substantial increases in real-world aggression. The findings are presented and discussed, along with their implications for research and policy.

And actually, in one of your own posts further down you say,

I emphasized the crucial point that the research to date does not prove that video games cause aggressive behaviours. It also does not prove the opposite.

Also, from skimming the rest of the paper, it also seems to say that that small effects simply have not been proven or disproven to exist. In this case, I think we should stay with the old principle of innocent until proven guilty.

So, what is your point?

Your link is journalistic and is not scientific, I am sorry. There are no correct sources, no references, no nothing. No scientist would dare cite that article in their paper.

The articles are complete with statistics. Here are links to some of the scientific articles I have read and/or cited.

https://netfiles.uiuc.edu/dcwill/www/CMWilliamsSko ric.pdf
http://www.lionlamb.org/research_articles/study5.p df
http://www.lionlamb.org/research_articles/study4.p df
http://www.lionlamb.org/research_articles/study%20 1.pdf
http://www.lionlamb.org/research_articles/study%20 2.pdf
http://www.lionlamb.org/research_articles/study%20 3.pdf

Like I said, other researchers and myself do not firmly believe that video games are not the primary cause for aggressive outbreaks.

If you're responsible enough to carry a firearm, you should keep it with you at ALL times.

Never leave home without it. Bring it to school. To church. To family dinner.

If you have one, and can handle it responsibly, there is absolutely no reason why you should risk being caught without it. How would you live with yourself if you'd been present at this, or any other, massacre yet had left it at home that day?

I'd recommend reading "On Sheep, Wolves and Sheepdogs" by Lt. Col. Dave Grossman for the reasoning around this, as well as some other important points. Although I'd also say he's full of shit at the same time. And not just the whole "signing all mail, blog comments, etc. with Hooyah!" thing.

Link: http://hobbes.ncsa.uiuc.edu/onsheepwolvesandsheepd ogs.html

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

The paper above describes the power use of a laptop computer under various conditions. If the system is idling then the lcd can consume a lot more power than the cpu and hd combined. On the other hand, it is easy to come up with a bench mark where both the cpu and hd consume more than the lcd. The lcd is always a significant power user though whereas the cpu and hd aren't always. The most significant user of electricity is "the rest of the system". The component list is fairly detailed so I'm not entirely sure what comprises "the rest of the system" but it is almost always the most significant power user! ... ?