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and you've seen me in the neighborhood a couple times with some known violent criminals

Like Pinochet, Noriega, Khomeni, Hussein, Bin Laden et caetera? Those kinds of violent criminals?

The real question for you Sun apologists is this: What has Sun contributed to Linux?

Thats a tough question. Most of Sun's contributions to the open source community aren't necessarily linux specific, like Xemacs, Open Office, Internationalization code for X11, work on gnome, etc. But I do have a Linux specific contribution for you which was developed on Sun's nickel, the NFS version 4 implementation, which is now in the 2.5 kernel. Does that count?

You seem to be spreading quite a bit of FUD yourself. Lets ask a few clarifiying quetions.

You speak of "indemnification FUD." What do you mean? Nobody besides Sun who is selling Linux will offer any indemnification at all. Why doesn't that bother you? Why does it bother you that Sun is indemnifying people that use their Linux desktop solution? Indemnification is potentially a serious problem for Linux. So really, you are spreading FUD about the only vendor of a desktop Linux solution that offers their clients indemnification.

You say that they are "helping to fund SCO's ongoing legal assault." Sun licensed drivers from SCO to try and make Solaris X86 a better product. Are you saying that they can't do that? How far does your zone of exclusion run? Is it OK to buy from anyone who does business of any kind with SCO, or is that all "helping to fund SCO?" Or is this more anti-Sun FUD from you?

Sun is a Linux vendor, and the only Linux hardware vendor trying to make a serious run at establishing a corporate Linux desktop. If you were really a Linux advocate you should be praising them, but instead it's FUD, FUD, FUD of the anti-Sun variety.

I think that at this point your views are clear: Nothing that Sun does short of dropping Solaris and replacing it will Linux will satisfy you.

Your views are quite narrow.

Cheers.

http://www.engin.umich.edu/labs/csdl/ME350/motors/ ac/induction/
http://www2.latech.edu/~dalea/instruction/motorac. pdf

-Fred

-Fred

I see he's smart enough to know when to use duct tape.

If you think this guy is brilliant, take a look at this guy's page. He built a CYCLOTRON(!!!) when he was in his senior year of HS! (he's now doing grad school work at Fermilab, what a shocker)

I have a relative who is really into the Bigfoot scene. The Bigfoot believers are quite committed. They make a lot of mistakes because of that, though. What is really interesting to me is how so many of the same thought errors get made in radically different areas of human belief.

Carl Sagan's The Demon-Haunted World is an interesting investigation of the entire phenomenon.

It is a terribly complex mental exercise to absorb all of the information in modern life and make intelligent decisions. The fact is that there are far too many claims to investigate for anybody to examine all of them with the necessary care. So we have to rely on the consensus of experts to make decisions. And the organizations necessary for consensus have the same flaws as all human hierarchal bodies.

Here are some of the various brands of kooky ideas that I have come across:

The AIDS Myth The medical analysis is surprisingly deep. A lot of qualified people have weighed in on this idea.
Carbohydrates not calories. They claim that our genes are still adapting to the modern high-carbohydrate diet, and that is why so many of us are so fat. (Enter Atkins.)
Democracy is not good government
Global Warming. Discussed on Slashdot a number of times
Shakespeare did not write Shakespeare Joe Sobran thinks that the Earl of Oxford wrote everything attributed to Shakespeare of Stratford on Avon.
Race and IQ Probably true, but kooky nonetheless.
Multiregional Evolution You can find most of Wolpoff's papers that are cited here somewhere online. I recommend "Bottlenecks and Pleistocene Human Evolution" and "Modern Human Ancestry at the Peripheries: A Test of the Replacement Theory." Wolpoff is kooky because there are very few anthropoligists left who will side with the Multiregional theory over the Out of Africa theory. (Wolpoff technically supports an Out of Africa theory, but that is how everyone refers to the debate.)

And here is one that I will actually advocate: Bohmian Mechanics It is about as kooky as you can get for a physicist, but I am convinced that it beats QM on the merits.

This is a lawyer' dream retirement project...at least until SCO runs out of cash. Since this is a public company the Feds and State can get involved and end this non-sense er I mean string it out for years with no meaningful outcome.

Those that do not learn from the past are doomed to repeat it.

That is a very good point, although my answer is the same: the best design approach is to separate applications into security-critical and non-security-critical parts, and minimize the size of the security-critical code. Luckily some people are already doing this.

The University of Michigan is deploying a VoIP system... all the (public) details are here. I'm not sure if it's as technically specific as you'd like but it gives a good overview of what they're doing.

What is your definition of "recently"? Apparently it's about two years.

• Klez.E was first sighted in January 2002
• Some Nimda variants did it in September 2001

Apollos were well networked, and it was possible to manipulate the parameters of the windowing system on one machine from another machine (like you can with X Window system, given sufficient permissions).

The Apollos had a command to change the mouse speed (similar to the X "xset m" command). It took a numeric value specifying the pointer distance to travel per unit time. The bug was that if you specified a negative value, the mouse pointer would travel backwards. No big surprise really, and not very interesting.

When this bug was discovered but not yet fixed or widely known, someone decided to play a practical joke, and walked into a fellow hacker's office and sat at his workstation and started playing with his mouse. A few seconds later (with the help of a hidden assistant in another office), the hacker says, hey look, there's something wrong with your mouse, it's all backwards. Sure enough, the mouse is acting all upside-down. The prankster then says, hey, I know what's wrong, have you cleaned your mouse lately? You must have put your mouse ball in upside down. He then pops the mouse ball out and pops it back into the mouse, and sure enough (with hidden assistance), the mouse works normally again. The victim of the practical joke was, of course, entirely puzzled.

check out OpenBSD's systrace:
http://www.citi.umich.edu/u/provos/systrace/
http://www.openbsd.org/cgi-bin/man.cgi?query=systr ace&apropos=0&sektion=0&manpath=OpenBSD+Current&ar ch=i386&format=html

Sorry, but Rand here and elsewhere is spouting apologetic nonsense, to justify the strong taking from the weak without compassion. She has no understanding of the many possible senses of self or types of selfishness (beyond a narrow conception of self as solitary body). If you had stopped paying attention in your history class :-) and instead lucked into some stuff written from other than the perspective of the current victors, you would have discovered that the United States of America's prosperity was built in large part on the genocide of the native peoples and theft of their land (including by use of biological warfare) [which destroyed many cultures far more egalitarian and generally pleasant than at present], the slavery of black people ripped from their native worlds and treated more cruelly and peversely than most slaves throughout the ages, the theft of patents and copyrights and trade secrets from old Europe, and the exploitation of seeds and plants and animals imported from a variety of countries by immigrants (as well as indigenous ones cultivated for millenia like corn, potatoes, and tobacco again taken without just compensation from the natives), assistance from countries like France which saw value in the US prospering to the detriment of England, as well as clever politics and global economic strategy which helped destroy Europe during two world wars and led to immense profits from the destruction and reconstruction of those countries (including by the Bush family). Yes, there was a lot of hard work involved too by some -- usually not those who got most of the riches. Try reading the book A People's History of the United States or the book Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong or even the online: Confessions of a Recovering Economist. Never forget that there are two human components to wealth (beyond a healthy natural world underlying it all) -- labor and rent (or other monopolies enforced ultimately by state violence including patents and regulatory powers). It is in the control of rent monopolies that the greatest wealth is to be had -- and usually the greatest unfairness. And the trail of control over monopolies rarely leads entirely to labor -- except perhaps of an ingratiating or militaristic sort. Much of the generally undertold and underappreciated history of the US from the Trail of Tears to the fight for the forty hour work week (now being lost again) revolves around power struggles over monopoly power to make decisions about some resource (i.e. who has the right to use a piece of land or set working conditions in some factory).

If we are very lucky, robotics may bring us back to a level of spiritual and economic prosperity enjoyed by many native peoples for thousands of years, but supporting larger populations (maybe quadrillions around the solar system with self-replicating space habitats powered by sunlight and using asteoridal ore). Most anthropologists now accept that agriculture and related work was a huge step backwards in health and living conditions for most people, and only happened because of rising populations and ever more sophisticated militaristic bureaucracies.

The Honeyd people just added a section on how to automatically disable the blaster worm. It seems that open source is ahead again of industry. You would just wish that more people were running such a setup.

The Honeyd people just added a section on how to automatically disable the blaster worm. It seems that open source is ahead again of industry. You would just wish that more people were running such a setup.

The system uses a unique approach to detecting malicious software by looking at traffic flowing to Internet addresses that aren't assigned to specific computers, trying to isolate computers on a network that attempt to infect others.

IBM says its prototype combines the strength of analyzing traffic directed at IP addresses assigned to computers on a network with the ability to look at the unassigned addresses worms also target.

Doesn't this sound like honeyd?

Lynn Conway, who co-wrote Introduction to VLSI Systems.

Great, but that's a very silly argument you're trying to make. With a population of over 1 billion, your 59.5% literacy statistic still works out to twice the entire population of the United States. And it is simply not true that "most Indians" don't learn English until university. Let's try to stick to the facts, okay?

yours

This page explains about water burns.

I have attended both small, unknown and big, prestigious universities, and the quality and quantity of teaching is certainly better at the bigger schools.

While that may be your individual case I also have attended a small, relatively unkown school (Hillsdale College in Michigan) and then a big, prestigious university (UofM Ann Arbor). While I am receiving a much deeper (though narrow, biological chemistry specifically) education now than my small college could ever hope to offer, the quality of my undergrad education was top notch. Definitely exceeding the education 98% of UofM undergrads receive. I don't think you can compare undergraduate and graduate value in specific regards to size / prestige.

Also coming from a true liberal arts college I particularily appreciate this quote:

In the complexities of contemporary existence
the specialist who is trained but uneducated,
technically skilled but culturally incompetent,
is a menace.
-David B. Truman, Dean of Columbia College

Anyways, just a controlled rant because I truly believe the value of small liberal arts colleges are severely under-appreciated.

~Dan
http://www.pbase.com/efatapo

Maybe what we really need is an OS that supports an easy-to-configure "sandbox" for each app to run in. That way if you are worried about Application X sending out network packets on the sly, you can just tell the OS to disallow network connections from that app.

OpenBSD ships with systrace, which does exactly what you describe. Systrace is also available for NetBSD, Linux, and Mac OS X.

Of course, with the exception of Mac OS X, these aren't really platforms where you have to worry so much about software phoning home to the vendor or other forms of spyware. On Windows you can always use ZoneAlarm, though.

Sorry, I thought it was well known. I used to have a DOE report around - I don't seem to have it at the moment - but random googling turns up one from a national lab:
The main sources of radiation released from coal combustion include not only uranium and thorium but also daughter products produced by the decay of these isotopes, such as radium, radon, polonium, bismuth, and lead. Although not a decay product, naturally occurring radioactive potassium-40 is also a significant contributor. The population effective dose equivalent from coal plants is 100 times that from nuclear plants.

On Three Mile Island, a random physicist says:
Despite the impression that the people of Middletown, PA were irrevocably damaged by the radiation released at Three Mile Island, the exposure was small compared to the exposure from natural radiation. A generous estimate of the radiation exposure due to the accident was 100 rems over the area within a 20 mile radius of the plant.[9] For comparison, the average American is exposed to 200 mrems per year from naturally occurring radon gas, and nearly 500 mrems over all sources.[10] It is likely that the natural levels of radiation near Three Mile Island are even higher than average since there is an unusually high level of radon gas in the area because of naturally occurring uranium deposits. [11] In this context, the amount of radiation emitted over such a large area is small compared to what is experienced naturally. (plenty of sources cited)

Here's another interesting aspect, anscillary health issues:
Since air pollution from coal burning is estimated to be causing 10,000 deaths per year, there would have to be 25 melt-downs each year for nuclear power to be as dangerous as coal burning.

That would be a smart-card with corresponding reader and software.

and another .... Mars Movies 2

and, try listen to ... Jeff Wayne's War Of The World's". It's a classic.

The cube tastes like sugar. You are suddenly surrounded by
a herd of moose. They start talking to you about a moose-load of things.
One walks over to you and whispers, 'Fa Lowe, why her?'
You find yourself staring at your toes
for a long time, and enjoying it.

The lights dim. A massive door on the east wall
opens revealing a bank of computers, generators, and misc.
electronic gear. The generators start to scream.
The lights dim more. Suddenly sparks start to fly from the
equipment. The body on the table starts to jerk around.

As suddenly as it started, the generators turn off, the
wall closes. And everything returns to normal.....
Then the body rises, removes its sheet and it is a monster.

The monster approaches you and says 'Trick or Treat'

Like you, I'm surprised that this is news. A similar solution was posed some time ago, because archeologists were trying to figure out the use of the "cradles" they occasionally found.

This article - http://www.atse.org.au/publications/focus/focus-pa rry.htm - provides a picture of a cradle found in Egypt, and shows tests, both model and full scale. The full scale tests included raising a 2.5 tonne stone up a 1 in 4 ramp slope. Rampe slope is a critical factor - a 1:4 ramp uses a lot less material than a 1:10 ramp.

This theory is given further backing here - http://www-personal.umich.edu/~imladjov/pyramids.d oc - by the finding that a number of blocks apparently had "this side up" inscribed on them. This supposedly only makes sense if blocks will be rolled in such a way that one could lose track of which side should be up.

" Maybe they have smaller cubicles? Maybe they don't air-condition their buildings for their workers. Yes... "
No, Companies like Infosys and Wipro have offices that would put any american company to shame. Infosys has the second biggest campus in the world after Microsoft's richmond one and take it from someone who's been there, seen that.. it's damn impressive! They have to keep the programmers comfortable since there is always another company dangling money in front of these programmers to take them away. From swanky offices to built in gyms and swimming pools and golf courses (yes, they have golf courses in office campuses in bangalore), they are the exact opposite of sweatshops. So get your facts straight before you shoot off.

Apple dominates the desktop publishing market. Apple and Avid dominate the pro-video editing market (and if you think Macs are overpriced, you won't believe what Avid charges). Apple is the single largest vendor of professional audio editing machines in the music business. The only market Apple doesn't have significant market share is in the low-end desktop market, which is used for word-processing, spreadsheets, and accounting software. Apple makes high-end machines with good margins to fuel their R&D. The low end of the desktop market is a cutthroat, bloody mess! Look at Compaq, Packard Bell, AST, NEC, and many others who lost their shirts. Dell is the only company doing well in it because they don't do the R&D thing.

Interesting. I'll check my phone book (I live in a city of 300,000 [Kitchener, Ontario] as far as the yellow pages are concerned):

DTP - 11 hits
Video Production (the only hit for video editing that retuns significant matches) - 32 hits
Audiovisual Production Services (the best I could find for Audio Editing) - 8 hits

Total: 51 shops.

Now, let's give you the benefit of the doubt. Every single one of these places is a Mac shop, because that's what dominates, you say. But let's be fair, let's say my city is pretty average (I think it is -- they run a lot of test trials for products in the city next door).

That means, in ALL OF CANADA, there are: 51 * 100 = 5,100 stores using macs. Let's even say they all have 10 machines (a bit much, but you never know). That means, in all of Canada, there are 51,000 Macs.

?You call that DOMINATING? There's probably 51,000 PCs between all the universities in my town, never mind every single other shop outside those margins that have PCs.

I'm generous when I say Macs have 10% of the market. VERY generous.

Next point...

I also have an old Pentium II machine which can be upgraded to...a faster Pentium II, but not an AMD processor, nor a Pentium III or Pentium IV, because Intel's CPU slots are PROPRIETARY.

BULLSHIT. You can drop in your choice of P II, P III, or C3 processor. If your motherboard is simply too crappy, well, it's not my fault you invested in PC Chips junk.

And, more bullshit, yes, you can upgrade even your 486 motherboard to a P IV. It's called a PCI slot motherboard, and it's the same bullshit "upgrade" that Apple is feeding you. Except they pretend it's a good idea. It isn't.

>Apple embraces more open standards than Microsoft or Intel.

LOL! Show me some Jaguar source code! Why did it take so long to get the iPod working on windows? Why did Apple put Appletalk on your old Mac? Why are all firewire ports I've seen called i.Link, S-400, or IEEE1394?

>Apparently they are, since this article was about Sony's new 12" Powerbook Killer.

Oh yeah, that 12" powerbook. It's so innovative to squeeze a bunch of high-tech into a small box! Look, if you want innovative, look at Gateway's Handbook. Now THAT'S innovative. Heck, I remember those being made back some time around '92 with 286 processors! Apple just dusted off some history books.

The G3 kicked the Wintel machines butts.

Did it? Dollar for Dollar? MIPS to MIPS?

Or was it just in specially optimized applications?

The high end G5 beats the best PC you can build right now with dual Xeon CPU's, and by the time you add all the features the G5 has, the price comes out to within a couple of hundred bucks of the G5.

Fine. And a P4 3 Ghz processor will make the G5 crap its pants if the application isn't designed for multiple processors.

Yeah, except Windows doesn't do 4 CPU's unless you go to their server edition, and for that you have to buy a server licence for every 2 CPU's, which puts the price about $1500 higher. Or you could use Linux, but now you're s

In OpenBSD, Matthieu Herrb patched XFree86 to use privilege separation so that the main X process can drop root privileges and run as a normal _x11 user. The privileged portion just grants it the ability to open devices it needs and send certain signals.

There's no reason why these guys couldn't do the same if they care about security ... it's not hard, just requires the OS to support descriptor passing.

The ReVirt system of the CoVirt project does exactly that, using virtual machine monitors. Also see the paper.

The ReVirt system of the CoVirt project does exactly that, using virtual machine monitors. Also see the paper.

There are several several groups who have published rulebooks. The end of game scoring is very strange, and each rulebook has a different system, so players of this game are advised to carefully determine which, if any, are correct.

The UM solar car, SpectrUM, has four wheel steering - the rear wheels are servo actuated with the front being mechanical linkages. It is alos a two person car - the tradoff is that you can have a larger solar array if you carry two people.

I got to see them in a test run a week or two ago, and it's very odd to see the car moving in one direction, but pointing 10-20 degrees off its path. The race page indicates that steering failure caused the car not to finish the prequalifier - probably due in part to their more complex system.

As a note, the previous car did have four wheel steering, but the rear two wheels were locked during the races. I understand the reason is that the fairings (covers to keep wind drag down) became too large and the drag was greater than the benefit of having four wheel steering.

There is a ton of technology in the cars - both in and on the cells and within the shell - which you can't see because they like to keep an edge over other teams. Even though the cells appear to be flat on the back they are designed to take light in at a particular angle (or as close as one can get to that angle) and so I assume the four wheel steering is to enable them to point the cells more effectively into the sun.

-Adam

"Michigan will not be participating in the 2003 American Solar Challenge. While qualifying for the race in Wisconsin, the car suffered steering system failures which did not allow SpectruM to qualify for and enter the race.
...
The team is also exploring the possibility of racing SpectruM this October in the World Solar Challenge in Australia, as well as participating in the inaugural 2004 Phaethon Hellas Solar Rally held in Greece before the 2004 Summer Olympic Games in Athens."

umich.edu/solarcar

As of this writing there is no single standard for PANs, but Apple has developed a short-range networking technology, called Bluetooth, that is already in use, and the IEEE is creating a standard named P802.15--dubbed the wireless personal area network (WPAN).

--"Guide to Networking Essentials" by Greg Tomsho, Ed Tittel, and David Johnson

This makes a lot of sense, really: the big bottlers all take the municipal water source, purify it, and then carbonate and add syrup to it. Bottled water is simply soda with no carbonation and no syrup.

I'd really like to post a link listing all the sources, but I can't find one, so I'll make do with this Michigan Daily article about a controversy over the source of bottled water. Which is six years old, but I don't think things have changed.

'And wow! Hey! What's this thing coming towards me very fast? Very very fast. So big and flat and round, it needs a big wide sounding word like... ow... ound... round... ground! That's it! That's a good name -- ground! I wonder if it will be friends with me?'

ref

The spaces are added to any long string of non-space characters. This is so that long lines can't be added to make the tables that the default site scheme uses unusually wide. A better fix would be not to do the site layout with tables, but I digress!

However, you should probably be creating HTML links anyway:

• source of nsDiskCacheMap.cpp
• Linux Kernel Hashtable Behavior: analysis and improvements

HTML links are much nicer than bare URLs!

This shows how to set up the whole Internet in a single computer. Pretty interesting

This shows how to set up the whole Internet in a single computer. Pretty interesting

You can download it from here. But you may have to use this as a compiler.

The University of Michigan College of Engineering distributes "blue hat", now referred to as CAEN Linux.

:w

It would be interesting if the Mormon Prophecy predated skyscrapers. Do you have a reference?

According to the Book of Mormon, the prophecy in question was received about 600 B.C. A skeptic would put it in the 1820s, when Joseph Smith translated it.

However, the text actually says "great and spacious" and "large and spacious", rather than "tall and spacious", so I don't think you could easily call it a prediction of skyscrapers. And, even if it did say "tall", I still wouldn't necessarily call it a prediction of skyscrapers, since "tall" is a relative term -- to the author of that part of the book, "tall" could have meant three stories. It is mentioned several times in chapters 8, 11 and 12 of 1 Nephi, during the relating of Lehi's and Nephi's dream about the Tree of Life.

You can find a nice, searchable on-line copy here.

Hey, I know COBOL, and I'm "only" 28.

Now, to be honest, I've never worked with COBOL professionally. The reason why I decided to learn COBOL is in fact pretty much related to the subject: At 26 I had just quit my job. As I browsed the job market, I realized that the jobs related to languages like COBOL and Fortran has sky-high salaries. That's why I sat down and read lots about COBOL.
Not just for the money, but also to help keeping a rare language alive.

And, well, you guessed it - I never got the COBOL job.

The reason most of the employers ask for COBOL programmers age 40+ is because they often have lots and lots of experience that a 26 year old never will have. Maybe I'll get one in 10 years, who knows. :)

Well, I'm 28 now, and I am currently learning C++, and I find it pretty hard to pick up. I started with BASIC at 9 and continued with assembler from 13 to 24, then I went on with Perl, Pascal and ANSI-C.

In fact I find it hard to learn C++ since I have the assembler "in my vains", to put it that way.
If I chose something else than asm back then, I'd probably pick up C++ easier today then what I do now. In contrast, I find it easier to pick up "functional" languages and other assembler variants.

By the way I'm the oldest guy where I work right now - the others are 18-25. :-o

There have been a lot of posts claiming that Microsoft is "dumping" XP on the market at below cost to drive away competition. There is a problem with this: as another poster has mentioned, "dumping" is defined as selling an item below the variable cost (i.e. per-unit cost). A full XP box set costs less than $50 to produce, so this is not "dumping."

Dumping - Export price that is "unfairly low," defined as either below the home market price (normal value) (hence price discrimination) or below cost. With the rare exception of successful predatory dumping, dumping is economically beneficial to the importing country as a whole (though harmful to competing producers) and often represents normal business practice.

Phillip.

I developed a technique for making snapshows, or animated snapshots. The idea is to take a series of digital photographs from slightly different angles and link them into an animation (sample, sample). The effect is similar to "bullet-time" -- a picture with a little bit of motion and 3-D depth.

Snapshows require a format that can store a full-color animation of just a few frames long. GIF is out since it's limited to 8-bit color, and MPEG is too complicated and lossy. MNG worked just about right. The biggest problems were that the available editors were a bit weak and buggy and the only browser with MNG support was Mozilla. I hoped that MNG would catch on in the mainstream. Sad to hear that it's falling out of even Mozilla.

AlpineR

I developed a technique for making snapshows, or animated snapshots. The idea is to take a series of digital photographs from slightly different angles and link them into an animation (sample, sample). The effect is similar to "bullet-time" -- a picture with a little bit of motion and 3-D depth.

Snapshows require a format that can store a full-color animation of just a few frames long. GIF is out since it's limited to 8-bit color, and MPEG is too complicated and lossy. MNG worked just about right. The biggest problems were that the available editors were a bit weak and buggy and the only browser with MNG support was Mozilla. I hoped that MNG would catch on in the mainstream. Sad to hear that it's falling out of even Mozilla.

AlpineR