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More specifically it was a U of M graduate student:
http://www.ns.umich.edu/htdocs/releases/story.php?id=7537

I invite people to read more about your inaccurate statement. Copy paste much?

http://www.si.umich.edu/CAMILEON/domesday/domesday.html

It's a NEW Domeday, not a scan of the old one. Emulating old computers is not that hard. COPYRIGHT seems to ne the real problem.

There's a reason why a 16 yr old is many times more likely to wreck a car than a 19 year old.

You are right. And a big part of that reason is that they have less experience driving. A 19 year old with a learner's permit can be just as dangerous as a 16 year old with one. This is why insurance companies will charge you less the longer you've been insured without interruption.

If age was a more significant factor than experience, wouldn't we have raised the driving age? In reality both play a part, but the difference between a year of experience and two is about 10% as crash likelihood goes, whereas a year of age nets you half that.

The ones I got were pre-labelled and didn't require any crimping (just stripping the outer shell off). It looked more or less like this - http://www-personal.umich.edu/~csev/hng/book/06wiring/female.jpg

Those clipped into the faceplate and my walls look nice and professional -- even though I did it myself. Regular pre-made cables from the wall to my devices.

What a great thing -- lots of reliably generated power that is greener than burning fossil fuels.

If, by greener, you mean, less polluting, yes, Nuclear is better than Fossil fuels... however, in terms of water usage, Nuclear and Fossil Fuel plants are very thirsty power-generation solutions. Do we have any idea of the water usage of these new plants? As we keep hearing these days, fresh water will be the next scarce resource (one of the primary reasons China needs Tibet).

You are seeing the red state/blue state sort-of lie. We don't really have that division as much as we have red areas, primarily rural and suburban, and blue areas, primarily major metropolitan areas. You can see it on the larger election maps, most fixate on the entire statewide breakdown and how the vote went in total there, but if you look at it state by state by state, the same red/blue split shows up, and it is primarily urban versus "other".

    So what happens is the metro areas in most of the states dominate politics, they have the edge in population a little bit, in most states now, and institute policies and laws that never really fit their *entire* respective states. What you said about Illinois and Chicago is true facts, the same applies to like NYC and the rest of NY, or here where I am, Atlanta versus the rest of the state.

Here is an interesting site that breaks this political split down more with various maps and corrected projections. It is quite interesting and there are links to more detailed analysis. The gist of it is, in the big elections and the general political pull of the nation, it is urban versus everyone else all the time. It fluctuates a little bit, but not much really.

http://www-personal.umich.edu/~mejn/election/2008/

The quickest way to see it on that page is first look at the normal state by state red/blue split (this is a look at the 2008 election), then scroll down to the first "Election results by county" map. The differences are very easy to see there and profoundly obvious.

Causes all sorts of problems all the time, and will continue to do so. And it isn't fair either way you look at it, from either perspective. There really needs to be a different political arrangement, so the major urban areas can have various laws that fit them much better, but without insisting on the same exact laws in the rural areas, and vice versa. As in maybe drop the notion of the political boundaries we have now and switch to what the boundaries really are, smallish city-states and huge "other than that" states as separate political entities.

    We have federal and state governments that keep trying to hammer square pegs into round holes and it just doesn't work very well, there is no real compromise even possible that would work and be more acceptable to all concerned.

    And it's not like this wasn't anticipated back at the beginning of our Union, this was the original idea with having both senators and representatives, instead of just representatives...That fix didn't last long, primarily I think because they didn't think it through far enough ahead in time to the point where there would be so many multi million person large cities, inside virtually every state in the nation. They thought it would remain like less populated states versus more populated, not realizing the political split would fall inside every single state for the same reasons, that urban realities are just different from the rural and suburban.

CubeSats are the "cheap access to space" needed for research and technology risk reduction that's been needed since the dawn of the space age.. and it didn't require some magical new propulsion method or even new economies of scale in launchers, just good standards and a very big customer, the Airforce academy.

For those of you who find the article a little light on details, here's the scientific paper:

    http://sgc.engin.umich.edu/erps/IEPC_2007/PAPERS/IEPC-2007-145.pdf

This preliminary work is now being flight tested.. and, if all goes well, it'll soon be commercially available. When's soon? 3 to 5 years. That's what CubeSats give you, a reduction in lab-to-market from 10 years or longer to 6.

The cut between local governments and various sports franchises are as varied and individual as the number of entities involved. There is only one constant: they do NOT make money for the local communities.

Link
"But there’s no evidence that using public money to build stadiums is a sensible economic strategy."
Something economists largely agree upon
obligatory wikipedia link
obligatory single issue blog
This is an old issue, and well settled, except among some sports fans, and most muni governments

uint32 randInt();
uint32 randInt( const uint32 n );
double rand();
double rand( const double n );
double randExc();
double randExc( const double n );
double randDblExc();
double randDblExc( const double n );
double operator()();

inline MTRand::uint32 MTRand::randInt( const uint32 n )
{
uint32 used = n;
used |= used >> 1;
used |= used >> 2;
used |= used >> 4;
used |= used >> 8;
used |= used >> 16;

uint32 i;
do
i = randInt() & used;
while( i > n );
return i;
}

And here are the missing comments:

Access to 32-bit random numbers
integer in [0,2^32-1]
integer in [0,n] for n < 2^32
real number in [0,1]
real number in [0,n]
real number in [0,1)
real number in [0,n)
real number in (0,1)
real number in (0,n)
same as rand()

Find which bits are used in n
Optimized by Magnus Jonsson (magnus@smartelectronix.com)
Draw numbers until one is found in [0,n]
toss unused bits to shorten search

v1.0 Revised seeding to match 26 Jan 2002 update of Nishimura and Matsumoto
Allowed for seeding with arrays of any length
Added access for real numbers in [0,1) with 53-bit resolution
Added access for real numbers from normal (Gaussian) distributions
Increased overall speed by optimizing twist()
Doubled speed of integer [0,n] generation
Fixed out-of-range number generation on 64-bit machines
Improved portability by substituting literal constants for long enum's
Changed license from GNU LGPL to BSD

Did you fully understand the code by itself? Are any of these comments harmful? Would anyone seriously rather have the code without the comments?

Long ago a famous mathematician/scientist (Lagrange?) said that nearly any physical phenomenon can produce a straight line on a log-log scale. I can't remember who. Here it is again.

Cosma Shalizi rants a lot about scientists' (often physicists') claims about having found a power law description of some empirical phenomenon (upshot: finding a straight line on a log-log plot isn't enough). See the following:

http://cscs.umich.edu/~crshalizi/weblog/491.html
http://cscs.umich.edu/~crshalizi/notebooks/power-laws.html

Cosma Shalizi rants a lot about scientists' (often physicists') claims about having found a power law description of some empirical phenomenon (upshot: finding a straight line on a log-log plot isn't enough). See the following:

http://cscs.umich.edu/~crshalizi/weblog/491.html
http://cscs.umich.edu/~crshalizi/notebooks/power-laws.html

While it's nice to hear of new species being discovered, 94 is not a large number in this context, and you certainly don't need to travel all round the globe to find new species. They're everywhere around us, in every nook and cranny of the biosphere, in the air and inside rocks (even a few miles down), living on the surface of larger organisms and also inside. Even our bodies are hosts to unknown species --- like all higher animals, we're really just mobile habitats for smaller forms of life, and wherever there is life, there is unknown life as well.

We've catalogued roughly 1.4 million species, but biologists estimate that 10 to 30 million are still unknown to science. This page from University of Michigan gives a detailed breakdown of the state of our species catalogue circa 2006. It puts TFA's study into perspective rather well.

Though the story is newsworthy, this has the misleading title of the century. They didn't unlock it. They sequenced it. There's a big, big difference. It's the difference between having a map of South America and doing Sharon Stone on the throne of the Lost City of Gold.

http://seqcore.brcf.med.umich.edu/doc/educ/dnapr/sequencing.html

But I personally haven't heard of major criminal enterprises based on numbers running or football betting causing too much trouble in the united states.

The first is due to governments taking over that industry; ever here of the lottery? Many states have them.
As for sports: http://www.ur.umich.edu/9899/Nov02_98/12.htm This mentions it also: http://www.ncaa.org/wps/ncaa?key=/ncaa/ncaa/media+and+events/press+room/current+issues/sports+wagering

In case anyone is interested, there's an online video of an interesting talk given by US Attorney Terrence Berg about the investigation and prosecution of the Ralsky case:

Terrence Berg's info & links to the presentation

I think it provides insight into how they have to approach these kinds of cases, and how difficult it can be to go from "knowing" someone is violating anti-spam laws to getting the right kind of evidence to "prove" that someone is doing something illegal. It was also kind of fun to hear about some of the details before they became public (I think the video may still have those parts edited out, though).

The talk was at this year's SUMIT conference at the University of Michigan, an annual one-day information security event that brings in some great speakers (I've been to all of them, and I think this year's was the best so far). All of the talks are online:

SUMIT_09 Videos

If you have time, check out Moxie Marlinspike's talk about SSL and Alex Halderman's talk on the cold boot attacks (this isn't particularly new stuff, but I thought the talks were very entertaining and interesting).

In case anyone is interested, there's an online video of an interesting talk given by US Attorney Terrence Berg about the investigation and prosecution of the Ralsky case:

Terrence Berg's info & links to the presentation

I think it provides insight into how they have to approach these kinds of cases, and how difficult it can be to go from "knowing" someone is violating anti-spam laws to getting the right kind of evidence to "prove" that someone is doing something illegal. It was also kind of fun to hear about some of the details before they became public (I think the video may still have those parts edited out, though).

The talk was at this year's SUMIT conference at the University of Michigan, an annual one-day information security event that brings in some great speakers (I've been to all of them, and I think this year's was the best so far). All of the talks are online:

SUMIT_09 Videos

If you have time, check out Moxie Marlinspike's talk about SSL and Alex Halderman's talk on the cold boot attacks (this isn't particularly new stuff, but I thought the talks were very entertaining and interesting).

http://quod.lib.umich.edu/cgi/m/mec/med-idx?type=id&id=MED12891

There were giants in the earth in those days; and also after that, when the sons of God came in unto the daughters of men, and they bare children to them, the same became mighty men which were of old, men of renown.

There are giants in our day. Not really the stuff of conspiracy theories. It certainly doesn't say in that passage of the bible or any other that the giants bred with the son of man, nor the daughters for that matter. As for the sons of God in that verse, wouldn't that mean the followers of God? You could interpret it as aliens, but then what of Occam's razor?

Yes, I modded you down, and icebike too. Not because I "disagree", but because both your posts are patently false. It doesn't take a bible scholar to search the web.

You want to know the biggest block of demographic opposition to gay marriage? Blacks and Latinos

So, what... blacks and latinos can't hate gays? Interesting, given both communities are known for being deeply intolerant toward homosexuals (which is sadly ironic):

Latinos do not differ from Whites and are more tolerant thati Blacks on the morality dimension of attitudes toward homosexuality but are less tolerant than either of the other groups on the dimension measuring approval of civil liberties for homosexuals.

Citation:

In fact, even after homosexuals emerged, like Blacks a generation earlier, as an offi-
cial "minority" (Barron 1975), research has shown that African Americans possess
disproportionately negative attitudes toward homosexuals (Lorde 1978; Staples 1981).

Citation:

So all you've illustrated is that those who hate gays aren't "no-necked, knuckle-dragging, fag-bashing, Republican-voting, Judy-Garland-hating neanderthals"... rather, they're "no-necked, knuckle-dragging, fag-bashing, Republican-voting, Judy-Garland-hating neanderthals", and/or black/latino. They, nevertheless, still hate gays, and their opposition to same-sex marriage is simply a symptom of that fact.

An example is a hypervisor level rootkit, such as SubVirt or BluePill. http://www.eecs.umich.edu/virtual/papers/king06.pdf http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_Pill_(malware)

Wow, go-go-gadget misinformation. Mac OS X Server is BSD based, and I've had great success installing any open source project that I needed, using ports, fink, gems, or CPAN if what came with operating system didn't do what I needed.

Also, the vast majority of services available on OS X Server are open source, which Apple does contribute back. So if you don't like how the Server Admin tool works, you can be a r3@l l33t h4xx0r and edit the config files in vi or emacs and do it yourself.

As for the submitter's original question, there are a number of useful tools available for mass deployments of Macs across a network. Tools like radmind, LanRev, Apple's PackageMaker, InstaDMG, and Casper Suite all have varying degrees of management of machine images, image distribution, etc. Also consider at least downloading the PDFs Apple provides for their built in services to learn the ins and outs of their tools allow you to do and not do. You can even modify existing services to use more recent versions of projects that come with OS X if you're missing something or need to upgrade to a newer version for some reason (although this will likely make you have to freeze your OS version in place, or else future updates will probably overwrite your changes.)

Administration of a network of Macs falls somewhere in between an Active Directory environment and a roll your own Linux/BSD network. The client administration is great, but not as comprehensive as Active Directory. However, you still have the freedom to tinker with the services that come with OS X Server and borrow and add capabilities from open source. There are also many other forums out there that have a much lower troll count than what you'll find here, with many knowledgeable and helpful folks who will actually attempt to address and answer your question.

Because seriously, why go to Slashdot if not for the trolling?

Mod parent up. Radmind is the only way to deploy a managed Mac OS environment.

I managed a deployment of roughly 800 Macs across the campus of a large university using Radmind. I've also managed the campus Linux, Solaris and OpenBSD kerberos servers, web servers and file servers with the same software. Radmind's learning curve is a little steeper at first, but it's one of the most flexible deployment options out there once you get the hang of it.

Radmind's not really a competitor with tools like NetRestore. When used correctly, NetRestore is great for total reimaging of deployed hardware: nothing beats a block-copy installation for speed. Where NetRestore falls down is when dealing with deployment entropy. After imaging, the machine is in an unknown state ("post-image"), and the only way to be sure all machines are in the same state is to blow away the entire disk and reimage, usually at a cost of gigabytes of bandwidth per machine.

This is where Radmind excels. It's basically a tripwire with software deployment and roll back, all based on the differences between what should be installed and what's actually on the disk. The core utility, fsdiff, looks at all files and directories designated as managed by the administrator and generates a list of differences. You can capture those changes as a loadset and upload them to the Radmind server for deployment to other machines, or you can undo any changes detected by fsdiff and restore the client to a known good state.

The great thing about this method of management is that there's minimal bandwidth used. If fsdiff detects no changes on the filesystem, there's no reason to download anything: your system is in a known good state. On the other hand, it makes deploying Apple's system and security updates pretty damn easy. Grab the updater from Apple's website, install, and run the Radmind tools to capture the changes. Store the changes on the server, add the new loadset to your machines' profile (command file), and let your clients pull down the changes.

The Radmind community is very helpful. Most questions to the mailing list (hosted on SF.net, Google groups mirror here) are answered very quickly, and people are eager to share details about local setups and scripting solutions. A typical setup for a Radmind-managed Mac OS X client usually involves a few possible methods for initiating updates, most of which involve iHook as the UI:

1. Check for updates on Radmind server during logout, update client if found.
2. Run a nightly tripwire regardless of updates from server.
3. Run a Radmind update during boot if a special flag file is found on the disk.

Since we relied on students to help run our labs, we also deployed a special, unprivileged local user account, whom the students could log in as. This also triggered a Radmind update. And of course you can trigger updates over ssh (which works well in combination with something like pdsh).

We combined Radmind with NetBoot for rapid, consistent deployments. Once the hardware was in place and on the network, we netbooted, used ASR to install a minimum and relatively recent system, and let Radmind bring everything up to date, including per-host license files and location specific software.

Radmind's not perfect. It manages at the file level. If you want something to manage, say, config files on a line-by-line basis, Radmind isn't going to fit the bill (yet). Generally speaking, though, Radmind manages Mac OS X with ease. Once you've got Radmind managing your Macs, you'll find you have a lot of extra time to do interesting things instead of troubleshooting problems brought on by stale deployments.

The Radmind wiki is a decent place to start looking. Good luck.

Apple Software Restore, which comes "in the box". We set up a base machine, populate the /System/Library/User Templates/English.lproj/ and then make a disk image to our fileserver using ASR. Then, boot new machines in Target Disk Mode and deploy the image using your workstation.

We could probably come up with something clever using a boot partition, but this works fine for us. If you want to get fine-grained, have a look at Radmind but keep in mind that Adobe apps will thwart your every attempt to manage them at that level.

All of the above are Free/free. We handle patching using Apple Remote Desktop (not free, but well worth the money). You can also configure your machines to authenticate against an Active Directory (like we do); if you're willing to modify your schema, you can even manage your installation from your MMC snap-ins like you can with Windows boxen.

It's been mentioned a couple of times, but mostly with -1 scores, so it's easy to miss: Radmind. It's a very powerful deployment tool with a totally transparent mechanism so you can tweak it to do *exactly* what you want in terms of mucking with files on the disk. I've seen people complain about it being hard to use, but I thought it was pretty straightforward -- install an app, run the change detector, tweak as desired (if at all), build an app image, deploy.

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

Actually, I'd be curious as to a reference for this. While I'm sure you are right once you start talking about 1000's of books, I'm equally sure the production of 1 paperback book is not 'extremely wasteful and bad for the environment' compared to one e-book reader. The key, of course, is how many books you read on your e-book reader before it, too, becomes e-waste.

A little googling revealed this Master's Thesis on exactly this topic. I haven't read it in-depth yet, but it looks to strongly favor e-readers.

Sigh - I LIKE my printed books.

Where are they supposed to get those 10 million square kilometres of forest?

Annoyingly I can't find any other sources for the size of forests than this: http://www.globalchange.umich.edu/globalchange2/current/lectures/deforest/deforest.html

South America has about 7 million km^2 of forest, but not that many people (386 million), so they wouldn't need to clear that much forest.

Africa has about 1 billion people but only about 3 million km^2 forest.
Asia has about 3.9 billion people and they about 4 million km^2 forest.

So, even if we completely levelled every single forest in Asia and Africa, we'd still be about 3 million km^2 short. We could take that from South America of course, but I don't think that's a realistic option.

Look at it another way. He saved one billion people from starvation and saved 10 million km^2 of forest at the same time. That means you can feed 100 people per km^2 forest. But this is only useful for localized food distribution, so we need to know how many people need to be fed locally:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starvation#Hunger_statistics
1970s statistics applied to new population figures. And I'm assuming every single country on a continent is a 3rd world country:

South America: 386 million people, 37% starvation: 143 million people meaning about 1,4 million km^2 forest cleared.
Africa: 1 billion people, 37% starvation, 370 million people, meaning about 3,7 million km^2 forest cleared. That's more than available, so either 70 million Africans would die or move elsewhere, and the former is more likely.
Asia: 3.9 billion people, 37% starvation, 1.4 billion people starving, giving us 14 million km^2 forest cleared. Asia only has about 4 million km^2 forest (12 including Russia's 8 million km^2), leaving us with 2 million km^2 missing or 200 million dead people.

Now, that's assuming perfectly stable, altruistic governments. But, do you really think Russia and China would agree to deforest their 10 million km^2 of forest to help the people outside their countries? I really doubt it. And not only would they have to deforest their entire forested areas, but they would also need to move those starving people into their countries as well. That'd be an extra 200 million for the Chinese and 800 million for the Russians.

This all assumes that you could manage to go from forest to harvest by snapping a finger, that none of the countries that would have to turn their forests into farmland would mind, that everything went peacefully and perfect infrastructure. None of these things are even close to being realistic.

Now, do I doubt that Borlaug's work has provided food for an extra billion people who would otherwise have starved to death? No. Do I doubt that if you wanted to provide food for this billion people without the work he did, you would have needed an extra 10 million km^2 of farmland? No, that sounds perfectly reasonable.

Do I doubt that these 10 million km^2 of forests would have actually been turned into farmland? Yes, very much so.

Yes, I am very much aware that humans completely screwed themselves over on the Easter Island. And with the figures I pulled out of my ass, it makes perfect sense as 1) They'd only have space for about 16,000 people (compare to the now 3,800) and that's with modern techniques. A few hundred years ago, I doubt you could feed that many people on the land.

You said it yourself:

you can bet starving people would have cut down every tree they could lay their hands on

Couldn't agree with you more!

In BeOS, _every_ application had a _minimum_ of 2 threads. One for the UI, one for the processing. Multi-threading was forced upon apps. Threading in Windows sticks. Ever try to put in a bad CD-ROM and have all your apps just _STALL_ is just bad design.

"Thread level parallelism of desktop applications"
http://www.eecs.umich.edu/~tnm/papers/threads.ps

Conficker racked up $9 billion in damages during its first quarter. That's far from the only worm out there. Old windows malware doesn't go away it's just added to the zoo.

Compare that to the estimated development costs for your average linux distro run about $1 billion.

So the savings of eradicating MSFT products for just three months would, using those numbers, give enough money to start linux from scratch 9 times over and still break out even. The more polished linux distros are now quite a few years ahead of Windows in most areas. In the areas they aren't $9 billion could buy a lot of improvement. Of that hypothetical $9 billion, it wouldn't cost but a fraction to make Filezilla as nice as Fugu or cyberduck.

Oh, but wait. There's the long tail of the worm. The windows worms run for years.

Microsoft products just aren't engineered for security. Xp, Vista and Vista 7 show us that nothing changes on that front. That's not a technical problem any more, that's an HR problem. Get rid of the MSFT boosters and you raise productivty.

Seriously considering plugging electronics into our brains? coz that'd remove the need for screens/keyboards...

Thank goodness for the spambot writers and other criminals. China couldn't care less about the censorship and Internet freedom moaning and groaning. They didn't want to turn the country into a giant botnet from the gaping security holes in Green Dam.

Given that he (allegedly) tried to sue because of a citation, this should not come as a surprise. Especially since that case was about an employee researcher whose proof (that rule 110 is capable of universal computation):

From this review of 'A New Kind of Science'

So this essentially means that no-one will want to do anything generally useful with alpha, if they won't benefit from their work?

This is a dangerous idea, because it will either cost Amazon money since they won't be able to maintain their business model on expired works ...

You are extremely misguided in your analysis of this situation. To address your immediate concerns, the books have been scanned digitally. What's done is done. Amazon's Surge process is print on demand. So there's no loss of anything right now. Not one sale could be made and little cash would be lost as no books would be printed. Granted, these soft cover bindings aren't the nicest books, they're books. And you're also overlooking the fact that now libraries can have public domain books in physical copy on the cheap. Let's look at the FAQ:

Q. What is provided for in the agreement with BookSurge, part of the Amazon group of companies?
The University of Michigan will make thousands of books -- some rare and one-of-a-kind -- available on Amazon.com as reprints on demand. BookSurge will use the digital copies of the original works from the U-M Library collection to create a soft-cover reprint and mail it to customers.

Q. How long does the agreement run?
The initial agreement is for two years.

Q. Is this an exclusive agreement?
No. The agreement does not limit the U-M to offering reprints only on Amazon. In the coming year, the university will be extending the program and working with other potential printing and distribution partners.

Q. How will this work?
The public will be able to search for a title through the U-M Library or on Amazon.com. On the U-M Library Web site, for instance, there will be a "buy this book" link added that will allow users to order a reprint. Anyone with a link to the Internet and a credit card will be able to order reprints.

Q. When will these additional titles be available for purchase?
We expect to have the books available for reprint later this summer. We'll continue to add titles as books are digitized for the next several years.

Q. Where are the original books?
All of the titles offered for reprint are books or other publications that exist in the U-M Library collections. Some are very rare. Some are deteriorating badly and cannot safely be handled. All are being carefully preserved.

Q. Who will buy these reprints?
We think there will be wide interest in public access to these books. History enthusiasts, scholars, students, teachers and other libraries are among those we believe will make use of this new, low-cost reprint service.

Q. What will the reprints cost?
We estimate that costs will range from as little as $10 to about $45 for larger and longer books. Books will be mailed directly to customers.

Q. Who sets the price?
The U-M determines the list price of each book, which will be based on the length and size of the book. Amazon may discount that price, but may not charge more than the list price.

Q. Will the U-M make money on the reprints?
Yes, but that is not the primary goal. We want to make these books more available to the public and to scholars and this agreement accomplishes that. The books will be priced to cover the costs of production and a small profit. The university will use its proceeds to cover the cost of production and some infrastructure costs related to the digitization effort.

Q. Why would Google agree to sales on Amazon?
The university has an agreement with Google to do what it does best: Create digital copies of these books. Now the university has an agreement with a unit of Amazon to do what it does best: Sell books and other items very efficiently on the Internet. We think both are great partnerships and the companies

I've been working on cloud at work and we broke it down this way.

Cloud as a service: Which is like you said a platform to deliver distributed processing on various tasks. For example, do all your virus scanning on a network service that provides virus scanning so that you don't have to bother with keeping virus defs up to date, and provides other benefits.

Cloud as computation engine: Which is where you use the cloud to actually do the compute intensive tasks sort of the way google uses it. Following our AV example, if you use the cloud to do calculations on how many machines have had virus X on it, and then store all the viruses in the cloud to compare their various similarities and evolution and deployment patterns, you might come up with some very interesting conclusions about the sources of malware and their future. This uses the cloud too as a database to store the results for easy query ala BigTable. So in effect you're doing more traditional 'beowulf' type calculations. (insert slashdot joke here about beowulf ;)

http://www.cse.umich.edu/~jhalderm/pub/gd/

If this is to be believed (I haven't tried verifying it myself), then they've committed the most ancient web browser vulnerability I know of (accepting a URL into a fixed size buffer).

Do we even have a defense budget as a state?

$102.5M in 2004 according to this

Privilege separation doesn't mean not having the capability, it just means that the front end runs in a limited container with a thin API connection to the privileged process that can actually carry out the commands and authentication. The idea is that if an attacker manages to get a shell in the front-end's container, all they get is a shell that can't see anything. Even if they manage to retain the communication with the back-end, they still have no way to authenticate any commands they might send it. While I wouldn't go so far as saying that it makes the front-end's security irrelevant, it DOES limit the security sensitivity of the front-end.

See this for a high level overview of privilege separation in OpenSSH.

McAfee? Wow.

I happen to do a little work for a local in a town that some of us are familiar with. She happens to be involved with the local university who also uses McAfee as their supported antivirus solution. I got called in a panic by this person because her system was crazy infected. It turned out that the infection disabled the McAfee framework service (which can't be started in safe mode) and totally owned her laptop.

The reason? The updates stopped working. I opted to put AVG free on there asked her to try it out, and if she wanted to we could look into purchasing the more complete suite if she wanted.

Point of the story? I'm rather upset that CMU, or other schools would *force* a particular AV solution. I'm more upset that they force down one that has, IMHO, a critical flaw in design. Namely, you can't update, install, or uninstall the scanner in safe mode (yes, safe mode with networking). It just sets up too easily for a massive infection. Fortunately, the policy of the University I mentioned earlier did not have restrictions on AV, so this was still acceptable.

I don't know what deal McAfee has with pretty much everyone that provides AV to "non-commercial" users... but I find it terrible, resource intensive, and just too easy to knock out.

McAfee? Wow.

I happen to do a little work for a local in a town that some of us are familiar with. She happens to be involved with the local university who also uses McAfee as their supported antivirus solution. I got called in a panic by this person because her system was crazy infected. It turned out that the infection disabled the McAfee framework service (which can't be started in safe mode) and totally owned her laptop.

The reason? The updates stopped working. I opted to put AVG free on there asked her to try it out, and if she wanted to we could look into purchasing the more complete suite if she wanted.

Point of the story? I'm rather upset that CMU, or other schools would *force* a particular AV solution. I'm more upset that they force down one that has, IMHO, a critical flaw in design. Namely, you can't update, install, or uninstall the scanner in safe mode (yes, safe mode with networking). It just sets up too easily for a massive infection. Fortunately, the policy of the University I mentioned earlier did not have restrictions on AV, so this was still acceptable.

I don't know what deal McAfee has with pretty much everyone that provides AV to "non-commercial" users... but I find it terrible, resource intensive, and just too easy to knock out.

And that rats also giggled when tickled.
A reference from 1998 might be uselful for those interested.

Both languages are old and the tools you have to deal with are incredibly complicated. I really don't think it will matter which you pick (I personally see Verilog used more in universities, but that doesn't make it the right choice). What you do need to worry about is coding style. Most students learning an HDL for the first time will come in with programming experience. They're going to try to use programming constructs and loops that, while appropriate for normal code will not represent synthesizable hardware. With that in mind you need to pound style rules into their heads. Since one of primary functions of each language is simulation (as opposed to synthesis) using legal code may lead you into trouble. Get around this by enforcing strict style rules. Example set of Verilog rules: http://www.eecs.umich.edu/eecs/courses/eecs470/tools/verilog_guidelines.pdf [eecs.umich.edu copied from C. E. Cummings, âNonblocking Assignments in Verilog Synthesis, Coding Styles That Kill,â SNUG 2000. (http://www.sunburst-design.com/papers/CummingsSNUG2000SJ NBA.pdf)) Every time you code remind yourself "I am writing hardware".

Well, it's hardly surprising, as Stephen Wolfram is a well known egomaniac who refuses to admit that anyone other than himself can possibly achieve anything. http://www.cscs.umich.edu/~crshalizi/reviews/wolfram/

I came across this link about Wolfram and his litigious ways - if this is true its kinda disturbing:

Book Review of New Kind of Science: "A Rare Blend of Monster Raving Egomania and Utter Batshit Insanity"

If true im not really going to be all that interested in this search service. Although as others have pointed out, whilst the idea is cool, typically I may want to see the document or other source of evidence that provided the answer.

Does OpenBSD have any of the SELinux type security features?

systrace is a different kind of tool. It does allow you to set access policies, but for the system calls. Also, SE Linux is an add-on for the Linux kernels only. Systrace is available for Linux and the BSDs, which would include systrace for OpenBSD, You'll have to check if OS X is still covered.

I knew I should have looked this up before clicking submit: this makes Wolfram Alpha 1.25 million times more complicated than the entire universe, which Wolfram expects to be expressible in 4 lines of Mathematica.

It is a pity that people talk about virtual reality and related fields without even understanding the basics - but that is the consequence of media hype surrounding this field, together with people calling non-immersive, often even non-interactive applications "virtual reality". Computer games, SecondLife, QuicktimeVR are not VR, period - you cannot really achieve meaningful feeling of presence there. Of course, it sounds and sells better if you stick a gee-whizz sticker on the box ...

I love when people decide their definition of a phrase is the right one and that the rest of the world is wrong.

Word!

http://www-vrl.umich.edu/intro/index.html#NonImmersive
http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1029964
http://www.fiu.edu/~mizrachs/VR.html
http://www.agocg.ac.uk/reports/virtual/37/chapter2.htm
http://www2.parc.com/istl/groups/uir/publications/items/UIR-1993-07-Robertson-Computer-NonImmersive.pdf

The University of Michigan has http://mprint.umich.edu/ which accepts pdfs and plaintext and can print to most of the computer labs across campus and bills your student account.

On a couple occasions I would snag a spare monitor as you described, especially when the labs were crowded, because then I could take the out of order computer, but for the most part I just converted all my homework to PDF, and printed through mprint to the lab closest to my next class. Picked it up on my way in and score! Interesting thing was I was sometimes printing across town.

At the University of Michigan, where I attend, there is a huge amount of software that engineering students have access to on any of the CAEN (computer aided engineering network) computers. All my complaints aside, the engineering network is one of the most useful resources. I have a fair amount of University storage space, access to all my files on any CAEN computer, and generally a lot more computing power available than on most student's laptops.

Yeah, James Hilton tried to push his get-rid-of-the-labs agenda while he was Provost at Michigan and it didn't go far. Either Virginia's IT sucks enough that cutting the labs will no big loss (heh), or he's simply managed to get the folks there to drink the kool-aid by old fashioned politicking.

That being said, the (non-CAEN) Virtual Sites program at Michigan is a great success. They might have a tough time scaling it up though, the MS licensing for all those remote desktops gets really expensive after a certain number of users I hear.

I wonder how long he held on? Unless he was sheltered from the airflow I find it hard to believe that he could have held on once the shuttle reached any real speed. It's hard enough to hang on in a wind tunnel at subsonic speeds

Probably frozen in place. They try not to have ice on the tank because it keeps breaking off and smashing tiles... that was the end of Columbia. Still some builds up.

http://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/handle/2027.42/44545

Is a technical article "A millimeter wave technique for measuring ice thickness on the Space Shuttle's external tank" from 1991 where they basically built a radio telescope to measure the temperature of the ice/insulation etc. They don't directly discuss ice thickness, but all their calibration curves ran from 0 to 15 mm thickness. So unless they totally screwed up, they don't expect more than 15 mm of ice.

Most bats are somewhat thicker than 15 mm (err, are they? thats about half an inch). That is probably enough to freeze it onto the tank though.

Since the ice likes to shake loose and crash into the shuttle as it falls, likely the bat didn't make it to space. I don't think the ice would sublimate fast enough in space that if it made it, it would "stage separate" from the tank. So, if it made it up there, it rode the tank back down.

Personally, I'd worry alot more about bats nesting in the engine turbopumps than "chilling out" on the cryogenic fuel tank.