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Bigger problems, and bigger computers to solve them on. This is certainly a fun example, and aesthetically pleasing as well.

Unfortunately, we're still a few generations of supercomputer off from being able to simulate ribosomes (at which point most of the cellular machinery will be suitable for in-silicio biochemical investigation), but this is an excellent step along the way. It's also a good to showcase Schulten's group's work on efficient parallelization of complex simulations. He's had to solve a lot of algorithmic issues in order to be able to run that simulation, so this is not just an example of "wait for a bigger computer". If you check out their web-page http://www.ks.uiuc.edu/, you'll find discussions of the underlying technology, which has required collaboration between biophysicists and computer science. My hat is off to them, especially as they not only achieved the proof of concept (we can simulate a small virus), but also gained biochemical insights (we didn't know they collapsed without the genetic payload). Bully for the Biophysicists!

Note: I don't work for them, but I admire the scale of simulations they do, and their willingness to make available to the community the tools they use.

>>The two new ones are a simulator for pharmaceutical
>>development and a new approach to solid state light sources

In, hmm, 1999 or so I worked for the Bionengineering Department at UCSD for a grant funded by Proctor and Gamble. The BIONOME project sort of went nowhere, really (you can find the hacked apart website still up at bionome.sdsc.edu. Or, wait. I guess it's down now. But there's something of a reference here:
http://cgi.ncsa.uiuc.edu/cgi-bin/General/CC/irg/cl earing/projectAbstract.pl?projid=955

But the point is, as soon as I finished the coding, a manager from P&G flew out, talked with the professor, myself, and the other people working on the project, and flew off with a floppy disk full of source code and a happy smile on his face.

Sure, the UCSD Bioengineering Department was #1 in the nation (maybe still is, I haven't checked recently), but everyone was doing this stuff seven years ago. Maybe he's done something a little different or better (evolutionarily new), but it's not a revolutionary concept at all. Big Pharma is all over computers, databases, and simulations these days. P&G and Johnson and Johnson both wanted to hire me, but P&G is in Ohio, and J&J wanted me to do database stuff, which isn't where my interests lie.

Funny this article came up. The University of Illinois is doing something similar with pig manure... Check it out at http://www.aces.uiuc.edu/news/stories/news3557.htm l The article isn't very detailed, but it is interesting.

I think robotics is cool and all but anyone that thinks that making robots replace people is a good thing should read two stories.

Manna by Marshall Brain
http://marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm

and more importantly The Machine Stops,by E. M. Forester, written in 1909 and extremely prophetic
http://brighton.ncsa.uiuc.edu/~prajlich/forster.ht ml

Altair is NOT double.

http://www.astro.uiuc.edu/~kaler/sow/altair.html

http://www.solstation.com/stars/altair.htm

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Altair

...which survived being dropped from 5 floors up (from the pool deck of the Baltimore Waterfront Hilton, in case anyone cares): http://kriven.mse.uiuc.edu/recent/geopolymers/ACER S%20GP%20mug%20dropping/mug2005.htm And this one won the year before, with a 50-ft drop onto concrete: http://kriven.mse.uiuc.edu/recent/geopolymers/ACER S%20GP%20mug%20dropping/mug2004.htm Note: neither of these had "sacrificial layers" or anything like that - they were a room-temperature cured aluminosilicate ceramic ("geopolymer") with carbon fibre reinforcing, made by the "traditional powerhouse" (TFA's words, not mine) Illinois team.

...which survived being dropped from 5 floors up (from the pool deck of the Baltimore Waterfront Hilton, in case anyone cares): http://kriven.mse.uiuc.edu/recent/geopolymers/ACER S%20GP%20mug%20dropping/mug2005.htm And this one won the year before, with a 50-ft drop onto concrete: http://kriven.mse.uiuc.edu/recent/geopolymers/ACER S%20GP%20mug%20dropping/mug2004.htm Note: neither of these had "sacrificial layers" or anything like that - they were a room-temperature cured aluminosilicate ceramic ("geopolymer") with carbon fibre reinforcing, made by the "traditional powerhouse" (TFA's words, not mine) Illinois team.

Better article. Whoever wrote the other articley looks like they poorly summarized this one. Then the summary for the slashdot posting poorly summarized that. Sheesh.

(Speaking as the person who runs the Featured Article process) You call it crude, but a group of graduate students in library science at the University of Illinois studied the process and concluded that it "is not ideal, but it does seem relatively rigorous." - Here's their paper

sumArray:
sub %ESP, 8
mov DWORD PTR [%ESP + 4], %ESI
mov DWORD PTR [%ESP], %EDI
xor %ECX, %ECX
mov %EDX, DWORD PTR [%ESP + 12]
mov %ESI, DWORD PTR [%ESP + 16]
mov %EAX, %ECX
.BBsumArray_1: # tailrecurse
cmp %ECX, %ESI
je .BBsumArray_3 # return
.BBsumArray_2: # else
mov %EDI, DWORD PTR [%EDX + 4*%ECX]
add %EDI, %EAX
inc %ECX
mov %EAX, %EDI
jmp .BBsumArray_1 # tailrecurse
.BBsumArray_3: # return
mov %EDI, DWORD PTR [%ESP]
mov %ESI, DWORD PTR [%ESP + 4]
add %ESP, 8
ret

There's a basic explanation of the known forces (Strong, Electronmagnetic, Weak and Gravity

There are quite a few ideas kicking about:

scalar-tensor-vector gravity (STVG)

Modified Newtonian Dynamics
General Relativity,
Quantum Gravity,
The http://www.halexandria.org/dward155.htm">Zero-poin t Field,
Superstring Theory,
M-theory,
Inflation/Cosmology,
Yilmaz gravitation, and
Membrane Gravity

Law of Universal Gravitation,

And there's also Intelligent Gravity

Unfortunately, there is no one simple experiment to prove any of these either true or false.

What I've heard is that they have a development environment for the Cell processor (now released) that has at least a working compiler. If that's true, then they've already gone beyond what was available for the PlayStation 2, at least at the level of programming the Linux kit.

Craig Steffen

UAVs are fly by wire but also have limited AI control. AI isn't intelligent enough for missions that such things would fly.

There is a design-build-fly competition, http://www.ae.uiuc.edu/aiaadbf/, that American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics puts on every year that has fluid objectives. As team meet objectives, the next year has more difficult objectives but until it happens, the objectives stand. It's pretty interesting but I don't have the time for it. I think DARPA is even involved but I really don't know enough on it. Perhaps someone else on /. does.

copy( istream_iterator<int>( cin ), istream_iterator<int>(), back_inserter( v ) );

The problem with finding prior art is that you need to find one piece of prior art that covers all the aspects of a claim. You can't mosaic them. The prior art we used in trial was the following:

• A. Fox, E. Brewer, "GloMop: Global Mobile Computing By Proxy", Position paper, (Sep 1995), Used to be available from: http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~fox/glomop.

• Joel Bartlett, Experience with a Wireless World Wide Web client, Digital WRL lab Technical Note TN46

• Stefan Gessler and Andreas Kotulla. PDAs as mobile WWW browsers. Computer Networks and ISDN Systems, Vol. 28, No. 1-2, 1995, pp. 53-59.

• Joshi, Anupam, Weerasinghe, R., Mcdemott, S., Tan, B., Bernhardt, G. and Weerawarana, S., "Mowser: Mobile Platforms and Web Browsers'', Bulletin of the TCOS, IEEE Computer Society.

The general concept was clearly obvious back then. But the patent had some specific details that Inpro claimed were not obvious. I believe they were obvious to someone in the field in 1996. Clearly the judge agreed.

I'm a graduate student in Library and Information Science at UIUC. One professor I had last year has done a lot of research on the Patriot Act and its effect on libraries. (And yes, Leigh is definitely cool.) http://www.uiuc.edu/minutewith/leighestabrook.html

In the previous group that I was doing research (in U of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign), they have a performance modeling tool called Mobius. They publish software using two licenses; one for educational and non-profit organizations and one for commercial users. Given that the software has very specialized uses, it makes a good deal amount of money. http://www.mobius.uiuc.edu/

U.S. copyright was extended to 28 years in 1831 and the option to renew extended to 28 years in 1909.

Film conservation in the U.S. begins with New York's Museum of Modern Art in 1935. Iris Barry: American Film Archive Pioneer "It is estimated that 75% of all silent films and 50% of all sound films made before 1950 are lost." (1992)

In 1942 the only safe and (marginally) practical means for home distribution was 8 and 16 mm projection. A steep step downward from a 35 mm nitrate master. Those of you who remember Blackhawk Films will know the cost of building a significant collection.

"This black list was nothing to joke about. People lost their lives, lost their businesses, lost their homes, and were falsely jailed."

"Give one example?"

Only one?

Suicide:
"On Feb. 9, 1950, in Wheeling, W.Va., McCarthy claimed that there were 205 known communists in the State Department. Later on the Senate floor, he reduced this number to 57. That led to the House Un-American Activities Committee hearings and McCarthy's continued attacks.
In 1951, Hunt noted that "there have been many suicides due to the smearing received either in Committee hearings or from remarks made in the United States Congress." He introduced a bill providing for lawsuits against the United States for those who were defamed by members of Congress. The bill did not receive enough support."
http://www.casperstartribune.net/articles/2004/11/ 01/news/wyoming/8cf263f85d4be99387256f3e0020f92f.t xt [casperstartribune.net]

Lost Jobs:
"Yale Law School professor Ralph Brown, who conducted the most systematic survey of the economic damage of the McCarthy era, estimated that roughly ten thousand people lost their jobs. Such a figure may be low, as even Brown admits, for it does not include rejected applicants, people who resigned under duress, and the men and women who were ostensibly dismissed for other reasons. Still, it does suggest the scope of the economic sanctions."
http://www.writing.upenn.edu/~afilreis/50s/schreck er-blacklist.html [upenn.edu]

Frightened Students:
"In the late 1950s a group of graduate students at the University of Chicago wanted to have a coffee vending machine installed outside the Physics Department for the convenience of people who worked there late at night. They started to circulate a petition to the Buildings and Grounds Department, but their colleagues refused to sign. They did not want to be associated with the allegedly radical students whose names were already on the document."
http://www.english.uiuc.edu/maps/mccarthy/schrecke r6.htm [uiuc.edu]

More:
http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/USAmccarthyis m.htm [schoolnet.co.uk]

Not convinced?
Do a google search on McCarthism + Blacklist

Exactly - the market has determined that all you need for games & TV is 32-bits of accuracy; anything more is superfluous.

By contrast [at least as far as I can tell], the Emotion Engine, with 128-bits of hardware support, is PRECISELY [-er- pun intended] what a scientist or an engineer wants in his platform. Compare:

Scientific Computing on the Sony PlayStation 2
http://arrakis.ncsa.uiuc.edu/ps2/

The Emotion Engine is an absolutely wonderful platform, but [again, as far as I can tell] it was targetted at exactly the wrong market.

What makes this a galaxy rather than just some random swirl in the cosmos?

does this galaxy have a black hole to call its own in the middle?

What happens if a black hole eats another black hole?

Google for "potato battery", you'll find plenty like this.

I remember there was a story about some guys demoing their tiny microcontroller chip (or single-chip webserver, or something) running it off a "potato battery" to show how little power is required.

I guess I should start teaching physics to VCs, charging $300/hour -- will save them a lot in the long run... ;-)

Paul B.

Gravitational waves do not come from inside the black hole. They arise because of disturbances a black holes makes in spacetime _near_ a black hole. But you need either a disturbed black hole or a binary black hole system (or something more exotic) to emit gravitational waves. I recommend http://www2.ncsa.uiuc.edu/Cyberia/NumRel/GravWaves .html for info on gravitational waves, it's old but classic.

I remember when IE mac came out. It was just a hacked version of Mosaic. Yes, they were able to do a lot with that bit of vintage code, but it would just take too much work to bring it up to date.

When Apple abandoned development of its first web browser, Cyberdog, there was a plug-in to get it to use mac IE's rendering engine.

Oh, how times have changed!

Actually, there are 4 fairly major multi-language VM. You missed LLVM, which is also a register based VM. The nice thing about it is that the design allows all GCC frontends to target it directly (whereas no stack based VM can currently be targetted by GCC, unfortunately).

NCSA Mosaic ran on Windows 3.1 (with Win32s) (and later on Windows 95), X-Window and Mac. It was the first web browser I ever used (that was in 1994).

By today's standards it's a piece-of-crap, but back then it was quite a marvel.

It was not an editor, just a web browser. It's still around for historical purposes and if you can get it to work, you'll see just how far we've come.

Anything multimedia wise was handled by "helper" applications that would launch when you clicked on the applicable hyperlink.

Nothing was embedded in a web page (at first). HTML was in it's infancy, so web pages with ordinary fonts with no color and pages with plain backgrounds were the norm (till someone figured out how to make an image file into a web page background, that is - then everyone went nuts with it).

This and this are examples of what your typical web site looked like in 1995-1996.

And who can forget the famous and long-defunct "Trojan Room Coffee Machine"?

NCSA Mosaic ran on Windows 3.1 (with Win32s) (and later on Windows 95), X-Window and Mac. It was the first web browser I ever used (that was in 1994).

By today's standards it's a piece-of-crap, but back then it was quite a marvel.

It was not an editor, just a web browser. It's still around for historical purposes and if you can get it to work, you'll see just how far we've come.

Anything multimedia wise was handled by "helper" applications that would launch when you clicked on the applicable hyperlink.

Nothing was embedded in a web page (at first). HTML was in it's infancy, so web pages with ordinary fonts with no color and pages with plain backgrounds were the norm (till someone figured out how to make an image file into a web page background, that is - then everyone went nuts with it).

This and this are examples of what your typical web site looked like in 1995-1996.

And who can forget the famous and long-defunct "Trojan Room Coffee Machine"?

http://arrakis.ncsa.uiuc.edu/ps2/cluster.php

I think that's pretty useful ;)

Um, no. This is a testbed Linux cluster. The exact same thing could have been done cheaper with commodity PCs lying around. Not to mention the time and energy saved not have to recompile and tweak all your software (which is what this team had to do) because of the wonky architecture. In fact your example perfectly illustrates why the 360 won't be as attractive a hacking/Linux platform as the original XBOX was.

Look at the PS2, Linux on the PS2 is all but useless because of the different architecture.

http://arrakis.ncsa.uiuc.edu/ps2/cluster.php

I think that's pretty useful ;)

National Cyber Security Alliance? Couldn't they at least have picked a different acronym than one that's been used in the computer field for a really long time?

"Has there been any positive news about whipped cream's potential health benefits?"

Yes actually, there are reports it may reduce colon cancer. See:
http://www.traill.uiuc.edu/dairynet/paperDisplay.c fm?ContentID=6564

some beg to differ: http://www.news.uiuc.edu/news/04/0628accounting.ht ml

See the SEAL Reflex project, the OpenC++ project, the PUMA project(now in AspectC++), Arne Adams' reflection library, and XVF by Kurt Stephens. These all work and provide introspection to some degree. There are other projects like Stroustrup and dos Reis's The Pivot and Vandevoorde's Metacode that may make it into future C++ standards to make it easier to provide good introspection support.

SEAL Reflex http://seal-reflex.web.cern.ch/seal-reflex/

OpenC++ http://opencxx.sourceforge.net/

AspectC++ http://www.aspectc.org/

Reflection library http://www.arneadams.com/index.html

XVF http://kurtstephens.com/research/paper/xvf_paper/

The Pivot talks http://charm.cs.uiuc.edu/patHPC/slides/stroustrup- a.pdf
http://www-unix.mcs.anl.gov/workshops/DSLOpt/Talks /DosReis.pdf

Metacode talk http://www.open-std.org/JTC1/SC22/WG21/docs/papers /2003/n1471.pdf

Computer hand tracking is old technology, but using it to make a functional "air guitar" is neat. Check out this paper and this video for older work in this area.

I hate to burst your bubble, but most crop plants achieve only 1 to 2 percent efficiency, with sugarcane being an exception at 8%.
Source: http://www.life.uiuc.edu/govindjee/whatisit.htm

Scientific-grade solar cells are about 15% to 20% efficient with some going as high as 24%
Source: http://www.udel.edu/PR/UDaily/2006/nov/solar110205 .html

Solar Stirling engines achieve nearly 30% efficiency at an installation at Sandia National Laboratories.
Source: http://www.sandia.gov/news-center/news-releases/20 04/renew-energy-batt/Stirling.html

So I'm sorry to say that plants SUCK at converting sunlight into energy we can use. As the first link states, the initial reaction in photosynthesis is nearly 100% efficient, but as biological processes consume that energy, the total efficiency for the system drops significantly. Work is being done to attempt to make "biological solar cells" which use the initial reaction in photosynthesis as their method of light harvesting, but to date nothing has been produced.

Electricity storage for vehicles is a bit of a problem, unfortunately. I haven't got any links declaring that one solved. ;)

"then you have a plugin or file corruption issue"
I check system files often and none are corrupt.
I don't allow plugins on this particular computer.
I have no Real Player, Quicktime, Flash, yada, yada plugins.
I use IE and nothing else on this computer and it has no spyware or any antispyware, no viruses and no antivirus.
I use this computer to read and very little else.

Your using IE to spread FUD, if you were a half-assed competent tech you'd learn how IE works and how to lock it down properly for your clients. You have no comprehension of IE Security Zone settings and what they do. It's fairly obvious to me that nobody really want's to use any other browser, so learn to live with it. IE is safe to use if the Internet Security Zone is locked down properly.
https://netfiles.uiuc.edu/ehowes/www/resource6.htm

Good evidence that we truly never landed on the moon can be found here. Irrefutable if you ask me.

Clustermatic is Scyld-but-free.

Oh, and for kicks, check out our cluster-building workshop.

I was at AIChE 2005 (Chemical Engineering stuff if you don't bother to click the link), and followed the fuel-cell topical. These cells did make a few appearances (also last year in Austin already).

The cell is being researched by professor Richard Masel and his group. It has a relatively low power density, but that's enough for mobile electronics (no, it will not be usable on cars). The reason Masel's group is the only one working on these is that previous results discredited formic acid as a fuel, but Masel's group found out that they were using the wrong catalyst: platinum was being used (as in any other fuel cell), but for formic acid the correct one was actually palladium. Apparently, formic acid has much less problems in membrane permeation than methanol (that is, it does not burn without you using it), and has already passed tests of over 2500 consecutive hours of power production without failure.

Masel actually complained a bit that this very press release had been delayed one week, last week he could have had the press release at the same time of the conference, and could have mentioned the name of Motorola explicitly.

Another curious fact is that probably everybody of you reading has eaten some formic acid (it's in various foods), even if the high concentration at which it is used in fuel cells makes it unsuitable for a snack (it is actually going to be "burn" the skin).

For those interested, here are some abstracts: Present Status of Formic Acid Fuel Cells, High Performing Air Breathing Passive Direct Formic Acid Fuel Cell (Dfafc), Magnetic Resonance Imaging (Mri) Microscopy of Operating Direct Formic Acid Fuel Cell (Dfafc), Formic Acid Electro-Oxidation by Pd: Particle Size Effects. Proceedings are however not free for the taking, and one has to buy the CD (135 $). No guarantee they contain anything more than the abstracts for the given papers, however.

evolution has deep scientific background, despite not being a proven fact.

Evolution is not a proven fact in the same way that gravity is not a proven fact. The word "theory" throws people because the scientific definition is different than the plain English.

In plain English, a "theory" is defined as "An assumption based on limited information or knowledge; a conjecture.". Pretty clearly not something you should put any undue trust into.

In Science, a "theory" is "A set of statements or principles devised to explain a group of facts or phenomena, especially one that has been repeatedly tested or is widely accepted and can be used to make predictions about natural phenomena.". Note the emphasis on being repeatedly tested, and that it can be used to make predictions of natural phenomena.

In short, the Scientific definition of theory pretty closely matches the English definition for fact: "Knowledge or information based on real occurrences". Since a Scientific theory has been repeatedly tested, we can be pretty sure it's pretty factual.

Or, put another way, a scientific theory can never be proven 100% right because we can never be absolutely sure that all aspects of the theory are correct. Isaac Newton cooked up the first mathematically supported theory of gravity, a theory that works perfectly well on Earth and in simple circumstances. But, in space, with extreme velocities and accellerations, Newtonian gravity theory becomes ambiguous and inaccurate.

It was Albert Einstein's Theory of General Relativity that refined the older Newtonian theory and filled in the missing pieces.

If you ever have to deal with ID nuts, see if you can't get them to state that Evolution is "only a theory". Then, being very, very obvious and very quiet, hold out a pen, and let it drop on the table. Then, with the flattest, most rude, deadpan voice you can muster, say "Gravity is just a theory".

Slowly pick it up, and drop the pen again. And again. Let them blab their way to silence. (it might take a while)

Then, go click the lightswitch on and off again. Explain to them that electro-magnetism is more (gasp!) theory, not proven to be 100% true.

Then, ask them why they trust science when they drive their car, and they trust science when they swallow an aspirin, and why they trust science when they fly, or watch television, or drink floridated water, and why they trust science when they drive their tractors, and why they trust science when they drink homogenized milk, and why they trust science when they don their clothes made with nylon, and why they trust science when they talk on the cordless or cellular phone, and why they trust science when they swallow a vitamin pill, and why they trust science when they mow their lawns, and why they trust science when they watch dishes with their dishwasher, and why they trust science to identify the history of events when solving a crime, and why they trust science to identify the rightful father of a baby using DNA testing.

And then ask them why they don't trust science when to identify their other ancestry.

(PS: definitions come from Dictionary.com)

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign online degree program

One little problem with that:

- can you count?

People are not so good at noticing stuff when concentrating on something else...

That seems roughly accurate, although I'm not so sure the .NET equivalent of bytecodes retain as much information as their Java counterparts. This is really a function of implementation and not language. Compiled Java (like GCJ and its commercial predecessors) has been available for years. Running C in a VM isn't commonly done either, but is definitely possible. I'm sure you realize this, I just didn't want people to be mislead by your post.

I think this is more appropriate.

That is an imaginary problem, since standard hardware can support runtime safety, garbage collection, and object-oriented dispatch efficiently.

It can, if we impose a type system on top of it. See LLVM for example. You might be interested in LLVA in fact. ("LLVA: A Low-level Virtual Instruction Set Architecture")

Decomposition is good; using the MMU to decompose a large software system (kernel or otherwise) into modules is often bad.

This is pure speculation. You have no real evidence to support this conjecture.

"My idea" is a system very much like the Linux or BSD kernel but written in a compiled language with garbage collection, runtime safety, well-defined primitives for accessing memory and hardware, and a simple object system. [...] The main benefits would be easier testing, easier extensibility, fewer security problems, and better support for dynamically loadable modules.

I'm still not clear whether you actually have processes, or they're simulated on the kernel VM, whether you use the MMU at all, or rely solely on the type-safe IL and code-generation (ie. the CPU is always in kernel-mode and the entire system is essentially running as one big VM).

Also, I've pointed out a serious problem in this approach: DoS attacks. Perhaps this will be addressed when/if you can answer the above questions, but how do you account for resources and charge them to appropriate entities? Without proper accountability, you open up the system to DoS. The failure boundary for a JVM is the JVM itself. If a malicious object started accumulating memory without freeing it, the JVM would fail. What is the failure boundary in your system design?

Let's say you find a way to handle the above memory accounting issue, what if the malicious object now accumulated garbage and freed it immediately, causing a great deal of work for the garbage collector? How is the CPU time tracked and charged to the object in question? Is each object individually schedulable? Does that now make them active objects, aka Actors? They get their own thread and communicate via messages? That fundamentally changes the JVM computational model. You may need a process model of some sort after all.

Notice, the above accounting issues are all existing problems with just about every popular kernel in existence, particularly UNIX clones. EROS/CapROS has solved all of the above issues and Coyotos will inherit those benefits. I'm less familiar with L4, but I believe it too has solved the all of the issues; L4 is currently simply weak the security department compared to EROS/CapROS.

While the idea of black holes, dark matter, etc seems intringing, it is still a lot of theory. It is nice to see that people haven't given up, but that's not to say that this article is just as much speculation as the next.

With that said, wouldn't it be nice to focus all of humanities efforts on answering the questions we don't yet know the answers for ... instead of killing each other? I know that we already have the answer, but 42 only answers the ultimate question, we can't even answer the simple things like "do black holes exist?"

Without thinking too much about it, the mailing list sf-lovers (aka, morphed into USENET's rec.arts.sf.written) stems from about 1972 or so. When I checked a few days ago, there were still quite a few posters there: http://w3.aces.uiuc.edu/AIM/scale/nethistory.html

The RISKS list dates from 1985 or so: http://catless.ncl.ac.uk/Risks/

The comp.compilers group goes back to 1986 or so: http://compilers.iecc.com/

Moodle and Sakai simply don't do the same things on the same scale as WebCT

Totally incorrect. Other than that, great point!

Moodle is several orders of magnitude easier to use than WebCT, especially for non-techie teachers. And it scales quite well, thanks.

It's even pluggable. It's relatively easy to write multiple authentication/session modules.

Moodle uses pluggable authentication modules (PAM) and can be used with just about any authentication scheme under the sun.

WebCT Vista is a thoroughly engineered modern product.

Sure it is. 8-/

we still got crashes and periods when the service just wasn't available for 3 to 5 days straight.

WebCT is no better.

Install Enough is Enough. https://netfiles.uiuc.edu/ehowes/www/resource6.htm
If all your doing is removing the crapware currently on their computer only to return another day your not providing any value.