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Which you are not supposed to do because it lacks necessary electrolytes, manly sodium, calcium and magnesium.

You should tell this to children's hospitals. Apparently you know something that they don't. Come on, it should be obvious that BABY formula would be fortified at least with sodium, calcium and magnesium.

Maybe you should read up a bit on Mac solutions before you comment- software like Apple Remote Desktop, FileWave, NetOctopus, NetBoot/NetRestore, Radmind, HP OpenView, Deep Freeze and resources like AFP548, Mac Managers, MacOSX Labs, MacEnterprise, and of course Apple itself (I'll leave finding Apple's website as an exercise for the reader ;) make running large Macintosh installations fairly easy. There are plenty of UNIX/CLI tools and scripts out there, and Apple offers professional certifications if you want paper to show a potential employer.

The problem in your argument is the assumption that Apple does not have something that competes in all of those spaces. But Apple has actually had centralized management for much longer than it has been available for Windows, and it is generally an easier-to-administer system. And system imaging is much easier on the Mac side.

Now for the details:

For the AD/GPO side you have MacOS X Server's OpenDirectory and Workgroup Management. The later product stared out in the MacOS 7 days as "Macintosh Manager" and was available as part of AppleShare IP product. You can do an awful lot of locking down on the computer with the point-and-click components, including setting the users to use network home directories (pretty much the same avrients as are available on Windows). A good begining point for this would be Apple's page on MacOS X Server: http://www.apple.com/server/desktop_management.htm l

For imaging you have a number of choices: You can make up a computer as you would like it imaged, then use the free imaging tools that are included with the OS (Disk Utility has absorbed this capability, it used to be part of ASR). Then you can either push it back onto the computer using Disk Utility again, or use the image to NetBoot computers from a MacOS X Server (technically you don't need server, but it makes it easier), use the free NetBoot/NetRestore system to allow you to cause network-based imaging to happen, use the free tool Radmind to keep the image in sync (complex settings possible, and you can update one computer then let the rest follow it automatically), or use any of the other techniques that are out there (LANRev, NetOctopus, etc).

Oh... and an image you make of one computer will boot all computers that that OS supports (computers much older, or newer than the OS won't work), there are a few tricks and traps to that, but not many that matter. And there is currently the caveat that you need 2 images: one for PPC and one for Intel.

And on the remote software install party, Apple Remote Desktop does this wonderfully. It even allows for broadcast installing and leaving a package on a server so that disconnected users will get it the next time they connect.

Oh, and then you can also use AD servers to do all of this management if you would like, either through schema modification or adding a MacOS X Server on the side.

Am I wrong in thinking this is just another implementation of systrace?

http://www.citi.umich.edu/u/provos/systrace/

In 1859 a Coronal Mass Ejection (CME) was observed by Richard Carrington
a British Astronomer. Aurora was observed in Havana and transcontinental telegraph
lines burst into flames...

If one of a similar intensity were to hit us today, it would might
burn out electrical systems hemisphere wide. Our power grids and
transistor based control system could fail.

I would be curious if someone with a statistics background could give
some rough estimate as to the frequency of a CME hitting earth, based upon
the fact that the last such an event (which would severly disrupt our civilization)
happened only 147 years ago.

http://csem.engin.umich.edu/muri/MURIreport2003.pd f

http://www.agu.org/cgi-bin/SFgate/SFgate?&listenv= table&multiple=1&range=1&directget=1&application=s m04&database=%2Fdata%2Fepubs%2Fwais%2Findexes%2Fsm 04%2Fsm04&maxhits=200&=%22SH51B%22

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

http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2006AdSpR..38..232S

Nonsense. Several of the libraries have the contracts posted online. For example University of Michigan: http://www.lib.umich.edu/mdp/ (The contract is listed as "U-M Library/Google Cooperative Agreement")

But unfortunately, not all of the world has access to such wonderful libraries, and specialized research is somewhat difficult, even if your city is one that is blessed with a nice public library. Boy, I loved it when I discovered sites like this, and this, and this, collections to truly warm the heart of a math geek like me. Good luck finding even a tenth of the books and journals in those three collections in your local public library.

>Most companies will not sell you a cup of coffee hot enough to give you 3rd degree burns under any circumstance.

False. Unless the drink is below 120 F it can cause third degree burns. Consult a paediatrician. Hell, consult a website of one. Trust me, at 120 F, all hot drinks generally taste like tepid ass. Or don't trust me and try one yourself. Be honest and post your results.

Before you mention the amount of time, hot coffee lady wore this coffee for 90 seconds. Coffee a shade hotter than 125 F would have caused her serious burns.

>Beyond all of that, McDonalds already had been sued numerous times over the same issue and chose to suppress information on the matter rather than warn their customers or fix the problem.

The majority of which were settled as they were regarding idiot employees dumping coffee on customers, a very different situation. Few to none of the settlements were over customers choosing to wear the coffee instead of drinking it. If there were hundreds of cases of the customers being paid out dumping coffee on themselves, you'd have a good point. As it stands, well, you don't.

What you're saying is that only coffee at the temperature McDonald's sold it at could cause those burns, right?

Well, I guess what all the manuals about not being stupid with babies say about "150 F water causes burns in seconds" is a lie, then?

Or, in fact, are those manuals telling the truth, and the lady would have been seriously burned at any temperature that fresh coffee is served at internationally at all coffee stores.

If the manuals are lying, well, why didn't this lady (and/or other Americans) continue to sue them?

If the manuals are telling the truth, why did she win? It can't be because the coffee caused the burns solely due to the high temperature, as in this case you'd need to agree that all coffee from anywhere could cause them. Perhaps McDonald's coffee had a property apart from the temperature that caused the burns?

As far as the number of complaints goes, 700 complaints over 10 years is 70 complaints a year. McDonald's advertised in 1998 that there were 12,413 restaurants in the USA. That works out to a complaint:restaurant ratio of 0.56% per year. In other words, for even a single complaint to have been registered in your hometown within a decade, you would require 18 McDonald's in your hometown. That means that a McDonald's must operate for almost 200 years before the so-called hot coffee will actually generate a complaint.

I submit to you that if a store can remain in business selling hundreds of a product a day for TWO HUNDRED YEARS without complaint, the product is incredibly safe. Do you disagree?

Unfortunately, as so many people from outside the US will attest, in general the US population never learns math. This shows in the inability of US jurors to use a calculator to recognize the safety of a product that, even when in high distribution, causes safety issues only once every 200 years. As the wikipedia article points out, only one in every 24 MILLION cups of coffee was unsafe. If any other product were to have a safety margin this high, we would commend the effort put into its safety by the company. Imagine if only 1 in 24 MILLION cars had a defect resulting in injury. Just imagine!

But further, the burns this lady received would require 15 seconds of exposure to the coffee (as per the lawsuit). The "safer" temperature of coffee would require 20 seconds for identical burns. If you are in a situation where you would be unable to remove clothes that would present a burn hazard in 15 seconds, would you agree it is highly likely the situation could conceivably be the same 5 seconds later?

Now, wait a second, here is the kicker. Even if you don't agree about the 5 seconds, it didn't matter! Did you know this woman continued to wear her scalding hot clothes for 90 seconds? Yes, this is true, it is documented in the lawsuit. Water at only 125 F

But I'm not done with this yet. Your hot water heater, if it is relatively normal, has a maximum temperature of about 140 F. According to the complainant, this is the hottest coffee should be served at. Again, perhaps your preferences are unusual, but would you reasonably agree that filling a cup with instant coffee from your hot water tap would not present a pleasing tasting coffee? Most people will use a kettle for this purpose, and, if asked if they would use their hot water tap (if the water were assured pure), I think they would say the temperature simply isn't hot enough to enjoy the coffee.

Now, wait a second, here is the kicker. Even if you don't agree with anything I've said, logic still proves me right.

Facts:

- 90 seconds from start of incident to removal of hot liquid
- 140 F liquids burn in 6 seconds
- The plaintiff said that 140 F is the temperature coffee should be served at for safety and continued to prove this in court
- 90 - 6 = 84
- 84 = 93.3333% of 90

The plaintiff, in effect,

170 is hot enough to put you in the hospital with horrendous burns in nearly no time flat. Here is a link of time to burn for LESSER temperature water: http://www.med.umich.edu/1libr/pa/pa_hotwatr_hhg.h tm

170 is a ridiculous temperature for liquids intended for human contact.

Simplicity does not have to mean a lack of features. One object that constantly annoys me with unnecessary complexity is my Comcast cable box. Suppose that the show I'm watching is ending and I want to change to something else. I hit "Guide", scroll through the listings, highlight what I want to see, and hit "OK". Because that show hasn't started yet (it's scheduled for 8:00 and it's only 7:58 right now), the box brings up a menu of choices including "Set a reminder", "Mark channel as favorite", and who knows what else. But "Change to this channel now" is not an option. So instead I have to remember the channel number, hit "Exit", and type "68". Oops, I mean "068" because the box won't accept just two digits.

Shouldn't something as common as changing channels be an easier task than that? It's fine that the box offers reminders and such, but why does it have to tell me about all those options every time I do a common activity?

I believe Google handles searches right. They could have had twenty entry boxes on the main page, each with a different button next to it: "Search for movie", "Search for map", "Search for medication". But instead they have one box and *they* figure out whether your search is likely to be in one of those areas and then offer you a specialized entry in the results page.

I practice simplicity myself in the writing of computer code and the design of games. My random number generator is easy to use -- just declare MTRand r; and it seeds itself from /dev/urandom or time(). You can choose to seed it yourself, but it will go ahead and do what's generally wise in the likely event that you don't need to think about such things. And for my interactive Starcraft maps (authored as TheNevermind) I strive for simplicity in instructions, labels, and mechanisms. I believe the maps are better this way because they are easy to learn but offer great depth upon replay.

It's actually very challenging to design things that look simple. It takes a lot of thought about how they will be used and how different bits of logic might interact. Don't mistake simplicity for lack of richness. I have often been surpised at how complex behavior emerges in my Starcraft maps -- I may not have foreseen the circumstances that the map encounters, but it produces interesting and appropriate actions because the basic parts were designed well.

It's also incorrect to think that a tool with simple controls is not good for complex tasks. Mathematically it's known that all logic operations can be performed with a combination of NAND gates. Likewise, a tool that can do simple operations well can be just as powerful yet easier to use than another tool with a large set of complex operations.

AlpineR

This is hardly a new issue. Back around 1970 I took a course at UCB in the history of science. The text for the course was A History of the warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom (http://www.cscs.umich.edu/~crshalizi/White/), by Andrew Dickson White, first published in 1896. Little has changed since then (either 1896 or 1970, your choice).

The salient and interesting point of White's work is captured in the title. The warfare is between Science and Theology, not between Science and Religion. White's position, strongly defended, was that science and religion, characterized as faith or belief in powers and existence outside the immediate corporeal world, were not at odds, but that theology, as put forth by religious scholastics with a vested interest in convincing the general populace of the value of unquestioned dogma, was completely at odds with science.

It's a tough go, but worth the effort. After thirty-five+ years, I can still cite that book, although I cannot remember the names of more that a handful of the professors I endured or, in a very few cases, was privileged to study with (requiescat in pace, Dr. Pimentel).

Thibodeau and the rest of the people at NARA have been thinking about this problem for awhile, as have other researchers around the world. If you're interested in such things, there are a few places to start looking.

CAMiLEON http://www.si.umich.edu/CAMILEON/
Cedars http://www.leeds.ac.uk/cedars/
InterPARES http://www.interpares.org/
DSPace http://www.dspace.org/

Lockheed Martin won the NARA contract to develop the Electronic Records Archives.
http://www.archives.gov/era/acquisition/option-awa rd.html

After hearing them talk about it at the Managing Electronic Records conference (http://www.merconference.com/), I'd say they have a few things to work out yet... but these are important questions for the preservation of history, culture, and more. These questions also involve authenticity, the value of evidence, and more...

The price of academic journals is a real problem, to be sure---but don't German universities have Interlibrary Loan? (I'm not asking rhetorically, I am curious.) Here in the US, at least, if I need a journal article from a journal my university doesn't have, the librarians will request the material from a peer institution. (If it is an article, I usually get a photocopy; if I need a book, I usually get to check out the book like I normally do.)

Academic philosophers have begun, slowly, to try to fix the situation by creating a high-quality, peer reviewed online journal called Philosopher's Imprint. The Mission and Rationale can be found here:

http://webapps.itcs.umich.edu/blogic/about.php

Oh yes they most certainly do.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burden_of_proof
In civil law cases, the "burden of proof" requires the plaintiff to convince the trier of fact (whether judge or jury) of the plaintiff's entitlement to the relief sought. This means that the plaintiff must prove each element of the claim, or cause of action, in order to recover.

http://www.forensicmed.co.uk/burden_of_proof.htm
Legal Burden of Proof - Civil Cases

The general rule is that "he who asserts must prove", i.e., the burden rests with the plaintiff (the party bringing the action).

The exceptions to this rule include an allegation of frustration where a plaintiff sues for breach of contract. In this situation a defendant would have the legal burden of proving that he was unable to complete the contract due to the fault of another person, or another act, e.g., fire etc.

http://www.ogc.umich.edu/faq_judicial.htm
The plaintiff goes first because the plaintiff has the burden of proof. The burden of proof in a civil case is a preponderance of the evidence, often characterized by attorneys as merely 51%.

And finally;
http://usinfo.state.gov/dhr/democracy/u.s._legal_s ystem/civil_cases.html
The burden of proof in a civil case is lower than in a criminal trial. Instead of "guilty beyond a reasonable doubt" -- the criminal standard -- jurors or judges render a verdict on the basis of the "preponderance of the evidence."

Still, the burden of proof rests with the plaintiff. Although most civil defendants present evidence, a defendant has the option of simply arguing that the plaintiff did not meet the required burden of proof. (emphasis mine)
------------------

So the defendant in this case is essentially saying, "Prove this number is valid." instead of rolling over and paying the RIAA their extortion money. It is the RIAA's responsibility to PROVE their case is worth it.

What is it that makes people think rocket science is such a black art? It's really not that hard to understand, no moreso than most other engineering fields.

How to become a rocket scientist:

1. Apply to Michigan (College of Engineering)
2. Take lots of calc and physics
3. Declare aero as your major
4. Graduate
5. Profit!!!

Personally, I think there are a lot harder things than rocket science. ChemE was always difficult in my mind, as was VLSI. I don't see what's so special about rocket science.

What is it that makes people think rocket science is such a black art? It's really not that hard to understand, no moreso than most other engineering fields.

How to become a rocket scientist:

1. Apply to Michigan (College of Engineering)
2. Take lots of calc and physics
3. Declare aero as your major
4. Graduate
5. Profit!!!

Personally, I think there are a lot harder things than rocket science. ChemE was always difficult in my mind, as was VLSI. I don't see what's so special about rocket science.

Perhaps the fact that the shuttle was being developed at the same time as ADA might have something to do with it. Or do you recommend using a not even fully designed, coded, and tested language for controlling the most complex piece of equipment that man has ever built?

Here's one analysis of the increase in traffic fatalities after 9/11: http://www.umich.edu/~urecord/0405/Nov22_04/09.sht ml

"Current wisdom?" Who is that?

Thanks - no mod points for me, please mod parent up max!

Let me add: Some times a movie may show a diabetic with a "low"[1] getting an injection in the emergency room. That injection is not insulin, because that would kill him, it's glucagon, which stimulates the liver to release glucose.

The rest of us would do well to give him a non-diet sweet drink, a piece of candy, or almost any kind of food.
Unfortunately some type 1s have died in police custody because cops mistake a low for a roaring drunk.

[1] This explains about "lows".

As soon as I read this I immediately though of radmind, which, by the vague descriptions seems to do exactly what is going on above. I encourage everyone to take a look!

First and oldy but a goody
http://www.nrcs.usda.gov/about/history/speeches/19 330131.html

The Black Belt of Central Texas: This region, whose fame as a cotton-producing area is known to the ends of the world, once was a real black belt of highly productive black clay, rich in lime, humus and plant nutrients. Vast changes have come over the region since it was broken out of the prairie sod some 30 to 50 years ago. It is no longer an unbroken black belt, but a mixed black and white belt with countless areas scoured off to the underlying white chalk or marl.

Erosion in the Red Plains Region: A large part of the 36 million acres of predominantly red sandy lands extending from western Oklahoma far down into Texas has undergone terrific erosion during the past generation,

Effects in the Corn Belt: A tremendous amount of land has been severely impoverished in the rolling counties of northern Missouri, southern Iowa, eastern Kansas and southeastern Nebraska, and many farms have been abandoned as the result.

These are from 1933.
Do you think it we have reclaimed any of that lost land?

More recently
http://www.globalchange.umich.edu/globalchange2/cu rrent/lectures/land_deg/land_deg.html
The world's croplands are in decline due to the pressure of human activities. The figure shows the regional and global trends in the total available area of the world's croplands. ...
Worldwide the amount of cropland per capita has declined due to population growth. North America and the former USSR have substantially more cropland per capita than the rest of the world. ...
  The total loss of arable land can be summarized in the following figure. Of the total available (1500 million hectares, signifant components have been lost due to the combined effects of desertification, salinization, erosion, and development activities. ...
  Summary
# Degradation of land includes soil erosion, salinization, nutrient depletion, and desertification. The rate of degradation has increased dramatically with growth in human populations and technology.
# Severe land damage accompanies large scale agriculture. Restoration is very problematical.
# Continued loss of arable land will jeopardize our ability to feed the world population.
# Land degradation is worldwide - both developed and developing countries.

On the oceans...
http://agonist.org/20060803/the_dying_oceans
First global map reveals rapidly shrinking hotspots for tuna, marlin, swordfish - Diversity has declined by up to 50% over 50 years due to fishing

http://www.net.org/marine/fish.vtml
What's left behind is a dead zone, like a forest after being clearcut, except that it takes centuries rather than decades to grow back.

---
I'm not so pessimistic as these folks are. I think it could recover in a generation if we would stop killing everything. But as the human population increases- there are not any more real fish out there.

So what's more likely-- 9 billion or 3 billion? I'm thinking 9 billion and my investments in scarce resources and global luxury property (fidelity has a nice new fund just for this which I'm not in yet) are doing nicely.

I agree with you on the waste. We deal with it inefficiently because it's cheap. But again the root problem is too many people. If the world population was 50% lower, the trash would be less and there would be a lot more places to put it.

It's bad.
It's going to get worse.
And we can't or won't do anything about the fundamental problem-- too many people. Every exit scenario I see is very bad. I'm hoping I get to die comfortably before that point.

I don't think those percentages are sensible. Both technology and population have increased exponentially - there would be very little difference in most ways between a 2000-year setback and a 5000-year setback. Look at this page on population growth. When you say "set back one or two thousand years" in terms of population, you really are talking about the deaths of 95% of the human race.

From a technological perspective, being kicked back a thousand years doesn't necessarily mean the remainders of the human race can actually operate at 1000CE levels. The easily accessible natural mineral resources have been used up. Whether the 'unused stock' in the form of buildings and machines would be sufficient to sustain 1000CE-level technology for several generations doesn't seem to be an question to answer.

So no, I'd say we would lose more like 90+% of the actual gains the species has made.

Weapons grade uranium has a risk of zero of carving hole sin your body, unless you happen to set it off, then you have MUCH larger problems to worry about then... Holes being carved in your body, more like holes being carved in your side of the planet. WGU's radiation is mostly alpha particles which won't even penetrate your skin, let alone get to living tissue.

http://www.umich.edu/~radinfo/introduction/lesson/ properties.htm

as nonproductive leeches that might be considered necessary in medieval medical practice.

You may want to rethink your attitude on leeches, research is being done on the use of leeches in medicine. Here's a page on Hirudo medicinalis, medical leech from University of Michigan Museum of Zoology. And another one on Molecular Genetics and Gene Therapy of Neuromuscular, Cardiovascular and Neurodegenerative Diseases from Royal Holloway, University of London, School of Biological Sciences

as nonproductive leeches that might be considered necessary in medieval medical practice.

You may want to rethink your attitude on leeches, research is being done on the use of leeches in medicine. Here's a page on Hirudo medicinalis, medical leech from University of Michigan Museum of Zoology. And another one on Molecular Genetics and Gene Therapy of Neuromuscular, Cardiovascular and Neurodegenerative Diseases from Royal Holloway, University of London, School of Biological Sciences

In a typical update scenario you would:

1. Install the update on a freshly radminded Mac.
2. Use the radmind tools to create a difference transcript from the updated filesystem against the copy on the server.
3. Upload, again using the radmind toolset, the new transcript and files to the radmind server.
4. Then on the server you add the new transcript to the command file for the workstations you wish to update and they get the new filesystem the next time radmind runs on them.

I'm deploying it at work right now and it's been great. I know other Fortune 50 admins that are deploying it or use it as well. The largest deployments are in the edu space and I know admins there that use radmind to manage upwards of 10,000 Macs.

It's an open project that lives at sourceforge if that strokes your geek ego as well. I'm using it as a wedge to push acceptance of OSS at work.

True it is a very different philosophy, file system management vs. package management, than using an ARD task server, but it gives you things like rollback that ARD or the system Installer can't provide.

Wow, that would be really, really impressive.

If land voted.

This may be hard for you to understand, so I'll go over it slowly.

People living in sparsely populated areas tend to vote Republican, while urbanites lean Democrat. Because of this, vast tracts of farmland look red on the map, while dense hives of citizens look like small blue dots. Consider the 2000 election map, helpfully linked to from that page. While the blue team won the popular vote, the map is still overwhelmingly red. This is because maps show land, not people, which, as you know, does not vote. If the map is scaled so that areas with equal population cover equal area, it looks more like this.

I've seen that map on t-shirts, and it looks real impressive until you give it a bit of thought. Does it still seem impressive to you? Do you manage to suppress critical thought, or do you convince yourself that the map's apparent implications are "fake but accurate"?

Radmind is also a great tool for managing installs on OS X and UNIX/Linux machines. It might be worth a look.

The University of Michigan teaches MIPS assembly, though apparently we don't use it in the projects.

If anyone is interested in looking at more conventional 2 and 3 legged passive dynamic walkers here's a nice article on a tinkertoy version and a site with lots of video of one that needs a mechanic's workshop rather than a toybox.

A couple of years back when I was looking around at this sort of thing I found video of a great little robot with a couple of legs that spun them rather than swinging them... it was amazingly fast. But I can't find the link again :(

Well, first of all, this is a state school, and the professor is a Government employee. So state conflict of interest laws apply.

First, North Carolina State University permits faculty to own copyright in instructional materials: "NC State does not, however, claim ownership of faculty-created instructional materials or courseware merely because it requires faculty members to teach courses as part of their regular responsibilities."

However, the department has the option of taking title to such "Directed Works": "Directed works also include works created by faculty or staff in an institute, center, department, or other unit that, with approval of the Provost, has adopted rules providing that copyright in materials prepared by such faculty or staff in the course of their work with that unit vests in NC State and not in its creator. NC State holds copyright to Directed Works."

However, see Conflicts of Interest and Committment Affecting Faculty and Non-Faculty EPA Employees. "Activities requiring disclosure for administrative review ... An EPA employee requiring students to purchase the textbook or related instructional materials of the employee or members of his or her immediate family, which produces compensation for the employee or family member."

Provided that the professor made the proper disclosures and those disclosures are in his personnel file, he's probably OK. The university has the option of taking over this business from the individual faculty.

Policies vary with the school. The University of Michigan permits commercial note-taking services but prohibits faculty from selling notes. (This resulted in a note-taking startup, Versity.com, which was acquired by CollegeClub.com, which dumped the note-taking business to focus on entertainment content.) Yale is at the other extreme; they let faculty control their content. That's what you'd expect; state schools have to be much more careful about conflict of interest issues.

Luckily most college CS degrees still teach assembly. Sure most students hate it, but I few pick it up. Especially the ones interested in hardware development.

Really? Think so?

Here is the course catalog for a very well-respected, nationally reknowned computer science program at a Big 10 school.

Other than "Computer Organization" and "Design of Microprocessor-Based Systems", neither of which is truly a programming class, show me another class which even mentions assembly language in the course description. Those two courses are it, and neither one is really focused on assembly language, but are more or less computer architecture classes.

We have big companies just like they do: Red Hat, IBM and large parts of Novell.

IBM is a horrible example of profitable free software. They sell hardware, license technology, and do consulting to the tune of millions. Without free software, they would still have their millions - open source's contribution to IBMs bottom line is negligible.

Novell initially profited by gaining a monopoly in the 80s. They created their own proprietary network standards (IPX/SPX) and sold the then-expensive cards that actually used these standards at cost, driving out competitors. This is called "predatory pricing" and allowed them to lock in consumers. (Does monopolistic lock-in sound familiar to anyone?) When the Internet Protocol we all know and love was adopted and the quality of Novell's competing IPX software began to degrade, declining profits forced them to make a mad dash towards interoperability. Granted, their migration to Linux is welcome - but, it's merely an attempt to salvage the closed source that used to make them millions.

Red Hat is actually a good good example of Open Source being profitible, but I think their business model is somewhat underhanded. Perhaps I'm citing out of context or the article is misleading (The latter I doubt, as it originally came from Open Sources: Voices from the Open Source Revolution), but the following lines illustrate exactly how they leverage free software into profit:

Drinking water can be had in most industrial countries simply by turning on the nearest tap, so why does Evian sell millions of dollars of French tap water into those markets? It boils down to a largely irrational fear that the water coming from your tap is not to be trusted. This is the same reason that many people prefer to purchase "Official" Red Hat Linux in a box for $50 when they could download it for free or buy unofficial CD-ROM copies of Red Hat for as little as $2.

It's nice that Red Hat is able to make a living spreading Linux; the fact that they do it by convincing people that "bottled" Linux is better than "tap" Linux is asinine. It's unfair to say that this is their only business model - they also supply support and consulting services like IBM and Novell - it's just the least virtuous.

To pretend that it is not extremely profitable is entirely moronic.

Microsoft is "extremely profitable." Red Hat is merely "profitable." Open Source is a superior software development model; as of yet, it's not a superior economic model.

But, back to the grandparent's original point: Why would I ever become a software developer if there was no money in it? You cited three examples of how there is money in Open Source - just not any for the developer. Code is written by a skilled, volunteer community - emphasis on volunteer. This is Open Source's main advantage: many eyes looking at code. If you actually paid any of these eyes, the "many" part would necessarily go away. In other words, there's little room for the professional software developer in Open Source, which I believe to be the grandparent's point.

Before I get dragged down to the level of a troll, don't misconstrue anything I say as a slander on OSS. My points are simply that

• Open Source produces superior software, not superior profits.
• Although there's money to be made with OSS, there's little of it for the developer.

The Making of America project (at Cornell and the University of Michigan) has literally thousands of old newspapers and magazines dating back to the early 19th century. The whole project is infinitely searchable (albeit with a clumsy interface) and it's free.
Links: http://www.hti.umich.edu/m/moagrp/ [Michigan], http://cdl.library.cornell.edu/moa/ [Cornell].

From what I read from the article, you'd get exactly the same content from these two sites, with a hell of a lot of additional content that Google would exclude.

Monday morning, Miller said the commission would go with Duderstadt's compromise language, which he called "an improvement in the draft" that "does not require and will not be put to a vote."

Later that morning, Elliott gave in, writing: "I support Jim's paragraph as well."

I think Cliff Lampe is working on a Slashdot-based Ph.D. (actually on Internet community interaction, but using Slashdot as the primary example.)

Please (Physical)
Do (Data link)
Not (Network)
Throw (Transport)
Stale (Session)
Pizza (Presentation)
Away (Application)

I do not know why this is still in my brain, I learned it 5+ years ago and have essentially never used it. It's like what Dave Barry said: "[W]hen I was in college, I had to memorize -- don't ask me why -- the names of three metaphysical poets other than John Donne. I have managed to forget one of them, but I still remember that the other two were named Vaughan and Crashaw. Sometimes, when I'm trying to remember something important like whether my wife told me to get tuna packed in oil or tuna packed in water, Vaughan and Crashaw just pop up in my mind, right there in the supermarket. It's a terrible waste of brain cells."

".. a rare blend of monster raving egomania and utter
batshit insanity"

Cosma Rohilla Shalizi on S.Wolfram, A new kind of science

http://cscs.umich.edu/~crshalizi/reviews/wolfram/

If you look at the actual Bush/Kerry geography, particularly those done in purple shades, such as http://www-personal.umich.edu/~mejn/election/, the idea that the coasts are all that liberal and that the interior is all right-wing breaks down pretty quickly.

radmind for Windows is finally out. We'll be looking into using RfW next year, but we already have a respectable radmind installation for our Mac network. This finally helped me determine which users were the ones with real problems and which were the helpless losers ("Oh, you mean I shouldn't delete system fonts?"), because all of our machines are identical as of 4 AM every morning (excluding preferences files, which do occasionally go corrupt (are you listening Quark?)). Anyhow, radmind is more than just a tripwire/software management program. Ever wondered what, exactly, that installer put on your machine? Radmind will tell you exactly what it put there (and if that program is made by Macromedia, it's ugly). Radmind for Windows is supposed to extend its tripwire functionality into the registry.

Radmind uses rsync to transfer images, so you're only transferring the part of the image that changed. If your OS installation + applications is 3-4 GB, you would be taking a huge hit on your network, even with GigE. Even with the kinds of things users can do to F-up their machines, it is unlikely that they'll need more than a few megabytes here and there daily. BTW, radmind uses an HFS+-safe version of rsync, or at least encodes HFS+ information before it is sent, so Mac files are safe, even if your radmind server is not a Mac (ours isn't-- it's OpenBSD).

Questions, questions. The first degree is obviously psychology (either alone or as part of another degree. Usually a M.S.)

http://www.si.umich.edu/msi/hci-reqs.htm

http://informatics.iupui.edu/academics/hci/hci_ms_ requirements.php

"I've always been fascinated by HCI but have yet to be able to pursue this in a work-related setting (where I tend to write backend code, basically as far away from users as you could possibly get)."

You may already have some of the requirements (see above). Fill in the rest, either self-study, or part-time schooling. But you have to be serious about this field. It's a LOT of work to become good.

Here's an example of some of the things HCI produces.

Google is still in business: see here for example.

the Mersenne Twister plus any unknown piece of data as a seed is good enough at resisting everything our current understanding of mathematics can throw at it. ... [blah blah blah] ... in terms of practical application this gets a near zero.

Oh, so you would not want to have an $85 seed generator would you? If 1.3 million possible combinations are not good enough for you, you could always combine more hits to get any resolution you wanted. Then you feed that back into your twister or whatever. This eliminates the non random nature of your seed, which is a traditional weak point.

Well, accoring to Dawkins, sermon generators would be explicit tools for the carrying of a viral message.

I think the program may be working properly as designed.

Ryan Fenton

Frankly, ZoneAlarm is goofy.

AppArmor is vastly superior, in that it also can be used to regulate resource privelidges on a per-application basis, but instead of only controlling network access, AppArmor works on a system-wide basis. Furthermore, AppArmor can isolate applications from one another. The GUI isn't so bad.

Oddly enough, we have "Ask Slashdot:" articles discussing the very technology that underlies AppArmor, LSM, and how one might be able to find a similar thing on Windows.

Furthermore, the types of issues that cause you to use ZoneAlarm aren't nearly as prevalent on Linux. You don't get malware, and OpenSource and/or high-end pro software tend not to phone home randomly.

If you're really, really, really determined to have lots of really, really annoying popsups (remember that things like keyloggers are resolved by AppArmor), you can use either Program Guard or SysTrace for Linux. Program Guard annoys you about TCP/IP access on a per-application basis, while SysTrace annoys you about everything.

TuxGuardian is apparently another app like this

NetLimiter: I do not understand the point of this application. Why would you ever want to do per-application bandwidth shaping when you can do global L7 QoS? Furthermore, it seems to me that you can use a combination trickle for hard "per-application" limits (which, IMHO, don't _ever_ make sense_, and global QoS to acheive any combination of features you could potentially acheive with NetLimiter.

This is a list of GUI iproute2 QoS configurators, but I think you're pretty much fine running Wondershaper, and perhaps watching pretty graphics go by with MasterShaper.

As it is, I run 6 desktops, 3 vonage lines, and 3 laptops over a Comcast 8Mbps/768kbps connection. I use one firewall on the router, running linux, with QoS enabled and global L7 traffic shaping. We have no problems when simultaneously running Limewire, Bittorrent, Vonage, and generalized web access (everything remains responsive).

The real problem with pointing at these sorts of applications is that this kind of functionality is just not needed on Linux. Proper application isolation, lack of malware, high quality global QoS, and decent packet filtering means that these kinds of annoying GUIs that are really nothing other than system maintenace and mundane micromanaging are not needed. I don't need to rate limit my downloads or uploads in order to preserve network responsiveness; I don't need to watch my applications to see if they are phoning home or not. I don't need to worry about whether or not my financial data is being read by malware; I don't need to worry about whether compromised user-apps on my system are affecting admin-level system services.

If you really, really, really, really want, the tools are out there, in proper Java, QT, and/or GTK form. But the reason they aren't widely deployed is because you really shouldn't be using them; a computer is a tool for work or entertainment, not an adventure game on its own. We don't live in the Tron world; and much like you don't need to have pressure gauges and per-pump control over your automobiles fluidic systems, you don't need to have direct control over this stuff on Unixy systems. It just works, and that's good enough for 99.9999% of non-super-geeks out there. For the remaining .0001% of us, we write our own GUIs, hunt out little known programs, or use the commandline. But the vast majority of computer users out there shouldn't need to be familiar with a tool like ZoneAlarm, and shouldn't have to worry about all those bloody popups. For the m

IMO, the job OP is looking for doesn't exist, and probably never existed. Government labs are probably the closest thing still available. I have a friend working for the NSA, who describes his job as similar to what OP wants.

// Nate Clark
// http://www.eecs.umich.edu/~ntclark

Safer link to Systrace

I find it really slow, and prefer to use Fugu for my SFTP needs:

http://rsug.itd.umich.edu/software/fugu/