Slashdot Mirror

I have a mirror / cache of the mockup screenshots. Not all of them are up there yet but I'll put them up as soon as I get them

evo2_contacts.png
evo2_calendar.png
evo2_mail.png
evo2_tasks.png
evo2_navbar_shrunk.png

I have a mirror / cache of the mockup screenshots. Not all of them are up there yet but I'll put them up as soon as I get them

evo2_contacts.png
evo2_calendar.png
evo2_mail.png
evo2_tasks.png
evo2_navbar_shrunk.png

My (Canadian) University is piloting a new VoIP infrastructure in its new buildings set to open in August.

We already have some labs with Linux too, the Penguin labs, as they are called. We also have the NT, Ultra, and "Open Source" (NetBSD 1.6) labs.

There is a wireless infrastructure too, it is very extensive throughout the student centre, Commerce, and Engineering buildings. Read about it here

My (Canadian) University is piloting a new VoIP infrastructure in its new buildings set to open in August.

We already have some labs with Linux too, the Penguin labs, as they are called. We also have the NT, Ultra, and "Open Source" (NetBSD 1.6) labs.

There is a wireless infrastructure too, it is very extensive throughout the student centre, Commerce, and Engineering buildings. Read about it here

I had to do that on Campus here, as well, however I just installed Phoenix (originally Moz) on my network shared drive since the Engineering computer labs are still using only NS4.7x. Since they are rather lax about executable programs on students' home drives, it's all good and I can have a good web browser.

But to stay on topic, yeah, the University of Saskatchewan is mostly Moz right down to the mail client. It depends on which department is doing the support (e.g. Engineering is sill not running it, but then again their computers are all much more stable than any others so it's a compromise (and no, it's not because of the mozilla thing))

I'll go ahead an say the University of Saskatchewan (in Canada) uses Mozilla as default browser and mail client in the student computer labs.

There's about 25,000 students I think.. not sure how many stations, but plenty (hundreds at the very least).

My University's web portal requires Netscape or Mozilla to use certain features like the file transfer and web tests. If you log in using IE and try to use those features it tells you how insecure IE is and gives links to download Mozilla and Netscape.

I won a free copy of Win2K during a promotional giveaway that Microsoft was running when it was first released. I've never had to pay for a Windows OS in my life, and I never will, and this way I can still run Windows legally.

My university is part of the MSDN Academic Alliance. I have legal copies of Visual Studio{6.0 Pro, .Net}, Windows {98, 2000, XP}, various servers, MSDN Library from July of 2002, MASM, and some other stuff. All of it is free (as in beer) to Computer Science majors, and some Engineering students.

Yes, a local Canadian university is using a Beowulf server in their new bioinformatics research program:

Here it is, and if you browse around the page, you can see a few details on it.

I call bullshit on this one. Show some links and back up your statements.

The "BC dept. of forestry" is actually called the BC Ministry of Forests. For some information from them about wood density, you could start with this paper on hemlock density. From the summary (Page 39):

"This report describes the results of basic physical wood property analyses of 39- and 90-year-old coastal western hemlock trees from British Columbia. The results of this study show that second-growth western hemlock trees can produce stemwood densities equalling the old-growth standard of 0.42 even in relatively open stands."

Here is some info on biodiversity Disturbance is a natural part of succession, and any removal of trees interferes with the forest ecosystem. Many forest systems depend on a major disturbance such as fire for regeneration, which is why properly managed clear cuts can actually be beneficial for some species (hint - look at the age distribution of trees within old growth stands - they are often within a few years of age for species such as fir). Biodiversity is greatly impacted by succession, and while poor forest management (guided by short-term economic goals such as unemployment rates) will screw things up, it is only a question of degree.

As I understand it, the critical factors in managing the forest are how much impact a given management practice will have:

• what type of harm would cutting the trees do?
• what are the extents of the impact, and what are the consequences to the forest ecosystem?
• whow much environmental impact is the community (those people impacted by the loss of habitat / ecosystem structure / diversity) comfortable with for a given economic return?
• what are the impacts on forest succession?

It is a gross simplification to say that clearcuts are bad, let alone to say that clearcuts are bad for all tree species in every biogeoclimatic zone.

Maybe you should check your facts first. Saskatchewan is an emerging leader in several high-tech sectors. Consider the synchrotron and a thriving biotech sector as just a couple of examples. At least do a little search next time before you imply such negative stereotypes.

This is standard MSDNAA practice. At my school, we have an MSDNAA agreement. We can distribute MSDNAA software amongst our CS and Engineering students. I personally have acquired:

* Windows 2000 Pro
* Windows 2000 Advanced Server
* Windows XP
* MSDN Library
* Visual Studio 6.0 Pro
* Visual Studio .NET

All for free. The licence is given to you on a sheet of paper when you sign it out, it essentially says that you can use if for free for non-commercial use as long as you're a student.

Also, check out the book "Aaron's Code: Meta-Art, Artificial Intelligence and the Work of Harold Cohen" and Dr. Dobbs article.

Having said that...

www.cs.usask.ca/classes/371/projects/98group11/tut orial/test/quiz1.html

Mind you, this is a CANADIAN university, so maybe this doesn't count? Or, because we didn't force people to pay for this, it doesn't fall under the scope of the patent? Anyhow, someone with knowledge of how to report patent abuses such as this could hopefully use this as prior art.

Is mathematics discovered or invented? Isn't software mathematics? Is mathematics really not an invention, and rather a discovery of the way the world works? In other words, should the patent belong to the Deity who created the mathematics of the universe (tabling argument regarding whether or there's a deity or the universe just happened).

Not to get too far off topic here, but I think that there are two key points here to consider:

1. Isn't software mathematics? I'd suggest that the answer here is no. I think there's a trichotomy here: theory, method and software. Mathematics is clearly a body of theory -- it might tell us the structure of certain abstract objects (say, weighted graphs). Now, we can derive methods from this body of theory (like, Dijkstra's Algorithm), and this is what I'd call computer science more than mathematics. (Things get complicated because there is a mathematical theory of algorithms: we can know and prove things about them in a systematic way. However, this doesn't break the trichotomy -- making algorithms is C/S, studying algorithms is math.) Finally, we have actual software, which implements the algorithms in a usable way. I'd suggest (as a non-developer), that there's much more to software development and engineering than simply implementing algorithms, and that although algorithm implementation is clearly a big part of the foundation of software development, it isn't the whole house.
2. So the question "Is mathematics really not an invention, and rather a discovery of the way the world works?" loses much of it's force in this area. All sorts of things which (assuming that you don't have a fundamental problem with patents in general) are clearly patentable are reflective at some level of an understanding of "a discovery of the way the world works" (heck, they all probably are at some level), but the issue is the implementation of that understanding at the level of the protected invention. I clearly cannot patent, say, facts about polymer chemistry, but I can patent my synthetic engine lubricant based on an application of those facts. Of course, I'm not sure how much this matters here. . .

I think your main claim is correct though -- these problems arise from the status of the W3C, and if a body with some more pull (like a branch of the government) were to step in, these problems could be cleared up.

Regards,
FM

Wow, you're touchy, aren't you?

you failed to mention US v. Verdugo-Urquidez (1990), in which the Supreme Court clearly indicated that the Second Amendment protects the
right of the people, not some imagined "militia" under the guise of government.

I've read the case you cited and it does not indicate that gun ownership is an individual right.

Sure it does. Page 265, first paragraph, fourth sentence.

You might have read it, but you obviously didn't understand it. Verdugo-Urquidez upheld the legal concept that the phrase "right of the people" is used throughout the Bill of Rights to designate rights for individual citizens, not the state. Thus, the right to bear arms is, in fact, a individual right protected by the Second Amendment.

BTW, don't take my word for it. You may be interested in this link, an essay written by a prominent and published criminologist and attorney. More of Kates' essays can be found here.

Wow, you're touchy, aren't you?

you failed to mention US v. Verdugo-Urquidez (1990), in which the Supreme Court clearly indicated that the Second Amendment protects the
right of the people, not some imagined "militia" under the guise of government.

I've read the case you cited and it does not indicate that gun ownership is an individual right.

Sure it does. Page 265, first paragraph, fourth sentence.

You might have read it, but you obviously didn't understand it. Verdugo-Urquidez upheld the legal concept that the phrase "right of the people" is used throughout the Bill of Rights to designate rights for individual citizens, not the state. Thus, the right to bear arms is, in fact, a individual right protected by the Second Amendment.

BTW, don't take my word for it. You may be interested in this link, an essay written by a prominent and published criminologist and attorney. More of Kates' essays can be found here.

At my university -- University of Saskatchewan, we used a book called Data Structures and Software Development to introduce us more or less to OOP, its a second year class, and although 1st year science students learn Java, they hardly learn proper OO programming, while engineers like myself learn C/C++. The book itself was written by two profs, and is in my opinion a very good book.

Over at the U of S computer science department, you learn (if you don't already know them) Java, Eiffel, C, C++, Prolog, MIPS Assembler, OS design, UNIX systems programming, etc. Take a skim through the class descriptions.

Considering we're such a podunk town, I find it hard to believe you can't find something as good or better than it.

Over at the U of S computer science department, you learn (if you don't already know them) Java, Eiffel, C, C++, Prolog, MIPS Assembler, OS design, UNIX systems programming, etc. Take a skim through the class descriptions.

Considering we're such a podunk town, I find it hard to believe you can't find something as good or better than it.

I attend the University of Saskatchewan, and our computer store is telling everybody who gets a new computer to upgrade to WinXP Pro from XP Home. See here to see for yourselves at the Campus Computer Store.

I myself use MacOS X which is also supported, as is OS 9. I can even get access to their Mac software library. It's neat.

If you're a CS student, you can get all MS OSs for free with your MSDN access, as well as Visual Studio, and lots of other fun software. Thanks to that access, my PC is using Windows 2000 Advanced Server, for its AppleTalk support :)

I attend the University of Saskatchewan, and our computer store is telling everybody who gets a new computer to upgrade to WinXP Pro from XP Home. See here to see for yourselves at the Campus Computer Store.

I myself use MacOS X which is also supported, as is OS 9. I can even get access to their Mac software library. It's neat.

If you're a CS student, you can get all MS OSs for free with your MSDN access, as well as Visual Studio, and lots of other fun software. Thanks to that access, my PC is using Windows 2000 Advanced Server, for its AppleTalk support :)

I attend the University of Saskatchewan, and our computer store is telling everybody who gets a new computer to upgrade to WinXP Pro from XP Home. See here to see for yourselves at the Campus Computer Store.

I myself use MacOS X which is also supported, as is OS 9. I can even get access to their Mac software library. It's neat.

If you're a CS student, you can get all MS OSs for free with your MSDN access, as well as Visual Studio, and lots of other fun software. Thanks to that access, my PC is using Windows 2000 Advanced Server, for its AppleTalk support :)

In my first year CS class at the University of Saskatchewan the assignment used to drive home the concept of recursion was, given a set of characters, produce a set of all the possible permutated strings with those characters. There was the "eureka!" moment when the concept of recusion finally clicked.

Then there was the assignment where we had to write a program that produced itself as output...that made my head explode the first time I tried to figure out how to approach it....

Check out the Mac OSX Perl board at:

Here and specifically Here

ut in multiple drive machines where IDE drives share controllers, SCSI will always be faster

On the surface, I would agree with you. However, the planned usage of the disk space in question becomes an important point.

I had this conversation with Greg Oster, a friend from University, who wrote the NetBSD RAIDframe implementation. We were considering setting up a large network server. After doing some number crunching, something became very very very clear: unless we were going to be moving to Gigabit Ethernet, 3 IDE disks in a RAID configuration were going to be more than sufficient to fill our 100MB LAN.

The point is, whether IDE will be "good enough" depends on what you're using it for. For a large fileserver, IDE RAID may well be good enough, depending on you local LAN. For video editting and other purposes where the data is used on the machine where the disks reside, SCSI's command queueing may be the better choice.

The university I attend offers an HCI course, and also has a research group dedicated to HCI. Training could therefore take the form of a M. Sc. or Phd.

www.cs.usask.ca

No, it's dumb to assume that people who voluntarily choose to carry guns around are untrained, clumsy, fanatical, or otherwise dangerous. That makes no more sense than assuming the same of people who carry nail clippers. A gun is a tool. The rest of the emotional baggage they seem to carry for you is all in your head. So yeah, hoplophobia.

Have you looked at phonotactics for the reason it hasn't caught on? Do.

Is hoplophopia really that much clumsier than, say, achluophobia or nucleomituphobia?

You might want to see someone about that hoplophobia of yours.

Actually, it ships with 5.6.0, not 5.6.1. There are some good instructions on how to upgrade to 5.6.1 here.

This was probably quite deliberate on Tolkiens part. He was religous, Catholic, and because of his language knowledge was involved in the translation of The Jerusalem Bible a modern Catholic translation of the Bible
He was a friend of C.S. Lewis who included a lot of religous themes in his fantasy literature.
There is an article on Tolkien, religion and Lewis here

The mailing list converted tabs into spaces, causing patch to choke. Get the patch here.

If you try to cut and paste from the mailing list archives, you'll probably have spaces instead of tabs in the patch, causing patch to choke on it. I've put a tabbed patch up here.

This is valid for all people in all cultures, and overlapping windows work on this principle. So overlapping windows have come to stay, because they work so well with how our brains work.

/jeorgen

Dr. Houk uses motor vehicle regulation as an example for firearms, noting they aren't banned, but that there are regulations and licensing, cars and highways are made safer, driver behavior is strictly regulated and enforced, and, as a result, we now save 25,000 lives relative to 1980 and even greater "when compared with three decades ago when we had about 380,000 deaths per year." (It is unclear what Dr. Houk has been ingesting, since the total number of motor vehicle deaths peaked at about 56,000, and the number per 100-million vehicle miles has been declining fairly steadily for the past decade, unsteadily in the '70s, and was stable in the '60s, so the rate has been cut in half since 1960 -- a bit less than the rate of accidental firearms fatalities. That is, of course, comparing rate per 100,000 population to rate per 100,000,000 motor-vehicle miles. Doing both on a rate per 100,000 population, with strict regulation, improved cars and highways, lowered speed limits, and registration and licensing, the motor vehicle accidental death rate fell about 12% between 1960 and 1990, while the accidental death rate from firearms fell almost 150%.)

The biggest violation that you missed was perpetrated by FDR during WWII. This was the closest America has come to a "final solution" so recently (terrifying).

Previously it was the American Indian (from our modern standpoint it is fortunate for America that the American Indian lacked access [GUN CONTROL in action] to a sufficient quantity of guns and ammunition to preserve their way of life ... visit some reservations to get a clearer picture ... the ones who faught are all dead now so we can't ask why they faught)

Because the second amendment, and those championing "gun rights", have never protected their rights and they never will. NOT EXACTLY ==> Guns Save Lives [News] Stories (eleven-pages of hyperlinks ... there would be more for 2001/2000 but there seems to be growing censorship of publishing these stories - memory hole???)

California's Government Code, Sections 821, 845, and 846 which state, in part: "Neither a public entity or a public employee [may be sued] for failure to provide adequate police protection or service, failure to prevent the commission of crimes and failure to apprehend criminals." (Please check this out as I only copy 'n pasted from a non-CA gov't website ... maybe it is misquoted ... whether misquoted or not you can still "Dial 911 and [wait to] die" ;-);-);-)

Of Holocausts and Gun Control (Washington University Law Quarterly)

GAMBLING WITH YOUR LIFE Is 911 an acceptable option?

Statistics the Gun Haters Don't Talk About

The Racist Roots of Gun Control

Taking Aim at Gun Control

"Dial 911 and Die (Radio Commercial)"

GUN CONTROL: A REALISTIC ASSESSMENT

The First Million Mom March

Guns and Violence: A Summary of the Field

Gun Control Advocates Purvey Deadly Myths

Research related to "Gun Control

"Genocide Delayed"

Jews and "Gun Control": Fear of Freedom or Freedom from Fear?

The Racist Origins of US Gun Control: Laws Designed To Disarm Slaves, Freedmen, And African-Americans

Post your mailing address so I can send you a yard signs and window stickers that say "The people in this home are unarmed. We depend on 911" and "Protected by 911"

I would post more links to DATA but the hour is late and we are beginning to go off topic from the First Amendment issue. Although I raised the other twenty-six Amendments as a "tangential editorial comment"

The biggest violation that you missed was perpetrated by FDR during WWII. This was the closest America has come to a "final solution" so recently (terrifying).

Previously it was the American Indian (from our modern standpoint it is fortunate for America that the American Indian lacked access [GUN CONTROL in action] to a sufficient quantity of guns and ammunition to preserve their way of life ... visit some reservations to get a clearer picture ... the ones who faught are all dead now so we can't ask why they faught)

Because the second amendment, and those championing "gun rights", have never protected their rights and they never will. NOT EXACTLY ==> Guns Save Lives [News] Stories (eleven-pages of hyperlinks ... there would be more for 2001/2000 but there seems to be growing censorship of publishing these stories - memory hole???)

California's Government Code, Sections 821, 845, and 846 which state, in part: "Neither a public entity or a public employee [may be sued] for failure to provide adequate police protection or service, failure to prevent the commission of crimes and failure to apprehend criminals." (Please check this out as I only copy 'n pasted from a non-CA gov't website ... maybe it is misquoted ... whether misquoted or not you can still "Dial 911 and [wait to] die" ;-);-);-)

Of Holocausts and Gun Control (Washington University Law Quarterly)

GAMBLING WITH YOUR LIFE Is 911 an acceptable option?

Statistics the Gun Haters Don't Talk About

The Racist Roots of Gun Control

Taking Aim at Gun Control

"Dial 911 and Die (Radio Commercial)"

GUN CONTROL: A REALISTIC ASSESSMENT

The First Million Mom March

Guns and Violence: A Summary of the Field

Gun Control Advocates Purvey Deadly Myths

Research related to "Gun Control

"Genocide Delayed"

Jews and "Gun Control": Fear of Freedom or Freedom from Fear?

The Racist Origins of US Gun Control: Laws Designed To Disarm Slaves, Freedmen, And African-Americans

Post your mailing address so I can send you a yard signs and window stickers that say "The people in this home are unarmed. We depend on 911" and "Protected by 911"

I would post more links to DATA but the hour is late and we are beginning to go off topic from the First Amendment issue. Although I raised the other twenty-six Amendments as a "tangential editorial comment"

I work at a synchrotron facility that will go online in 3 years and the beamlines people tell me that the protein crystallography guys take data at 150 MB/s, or 1 TB/2 h. By the time we are supplying beam, it'll be 4 TB/h or ~100 TB/day! Now where the heck am I suppose to cache that?!

Actually, as a general rule, genetic modifications to an edible plant are from something else edible, such as the soybeans which contain a gene from brazil nuts. If the corn in question here is the corn I'm familiar with, it produces its own pesticide - but one found in a common soil bacteria - Bacillus thuringiensis. We've been eating that pesticide for quite a while already in "natural" foods - organic farmers apply the bacterium to the undersides of leaves to combat insects "naturally". Here's a page on it:

http://www.ag.usask.ca/cofa/departments/hort/horti nfo/pests/bt.html

- Rei

The trouble with Python is that it isn't a mainstream language. A CS program should really only teach a few languages, and as such the ones that are taught must be choosen carefully, and be fairly mainstream.

I disagree strongly. A CS program should teach several languages, and the issue of whether those languages are popular or not should be irrelevant; rather, the languages should be chosen to be the ones that best facilitate the teaching of the particular course. A non-mainstream language actually has a small advantage for the first year intro to programming course, since it means that few students coming in will already know it and be bored out of their skulls.

You then also still need to teach them a "heavy" mainstream language, and may not have time (even in 4 years) to teach them another mainstream language.

I agree that one of the languages learned during a four year CS should be strongly mainstream (probably C, the current lingua franca of computer languages), but if a four year CS student can't pick up several languages during that period, something is wrong. In my alma mater's CS department, computer science students learn four new languages during the second year alone (Eiffel, C, Prolog, and MIPS assembly) for the required classes. In third and fourth year, which are all electives, most classes require learning new languages as well. With a strong foundation on a good teaching language in first year, upper year CS students should be able to learn new languages fairly easily.

Python makes an excellent language for teaching beginners. In no way should its lack of popularity be held against it in that role, save possibly the lack of introductory CS textbooks using it.

since no one has mentioned it I thought I'd dig up a few links I remember reading.

• From the PostgreSQL FAQ: "What is the maximum size for a row, table, database?"
• semi-old article on why not to use mySQL
• a comparison of mSQL, mySQL, and PostgeSQL: part 1, part 2, part 3
• and if your lazy: google search for "linux sql database"

From the PostgreSQL FAQ, linked above:

• Maximum size for a database? unlimited (60GB databases exist)
• Maximum size for a table? 16 TB
• Maximum size for a row? unlimited in 7.1 and later
• Maximum size for a field? 1GB in 7.1 and later
• Maximum number of rows in a table? unlimited
• Maximum number of columns in a table? 250-1600 depending on column types
• Maximum number of indexes on a table? unlimited

If you couldn't tell I like postgres but as a business you should get what you think is best. From what I've heard Oracle on Solaris is where it's at if you can afford it. (I can't)

Leknor

They definitely could be running somthing else. Inferno comes to mind.

There was an ad in a magazine recently, comparing it to embedded Linux; a scan is at:
http://homepage.usask.ca/~aam396/Inferno.jpg

--

If you want cheap replication and a consistent db, your best bet (for now) is to use pg_dumpall to make periodic backups of the db, transfer them (perhaps using scp and host-based authentication), and then use psql to restore them. To see how the dump/restore process works, look at the man page for pg_dumpall. You can likely do this all from a cronjob.

If you do it with stock pg_dumpall, you will probably need to take the site down for a few minutes or else risk odd service interuptions. However, "pg_dumpall -d" will dump tuples as SQL insert statements; this will allow you to put the data in a running db. Be aware that the dump/restore process can be quite taxing (especially on a production db where you likely don't want to turn off fsync() calls for the bulk copies). I don't know the requirements of your application, but you'll likely want to strike some sort of compromise between speed and up-to-date correctness.


HTH.
~wog

True, but with a difference. All of my textbooks are chosen by my professors. And since all publishers deal in dead trees, my professors can choose the best textbook from a huge variety of choices from different publishers. I have ten textbooks on my bookshelf behind me from seven different publishers. What happens if a book that a professor holds in high regard isn't available from the Vitalbook service that his university just signed an exclusive with? My EE materials professor wrote his own textbook which is used for the undergrad classes he teaches. What if Vital doesn't offer that text?

And another small point, will Vital charge twice for the same text if it's used in more than one class? Heck, I used the same $85 Calculus text for four classes in four consecutive semesters.

I was involved in a project at the University of Saskatchewan in 1991-92 that was doing exactly this. We were working on a NeXTSTEP system to provide a user interface for blind users. I was doing the programming and another senior student was doing the hardware. The basic idea was to provide auditory and tactile feedback so that blind users could manouver through the NeXT's GUI. We included a very nice Text-to-Speech system that used the NeXT's built in DSP, as well as audio signals. The software took advantage of some of the really nifty things that NeXTSTEP allowed in terms of the OS and the application environments to basically capture events before they got to the app, and to capture screen info (from the Disply PostScript system) to feed to the mouse.

So, my first real programming job was in an OO environment like none I have seen since. I am a highly paid Java consultant with now 9 years of solid development experience. I have never programmed professionally in any other paradigm but OO (not that I haven't experienced others: structural (C, Pascal), functional (Lisp, Miranda), other declarative (Prolog), etc. etc.). Objective-C is a cool OO language that has strong type checking, but also allows weak typing (remember id?). Dynamic runtime binding is the rule. Method invocations could be forwarded. Classes were true objects in their own right which meant that static methods could refer to self and access the _current_ class (kinda like this accesses the instance it occurs in, in Java).

The Interface Builder tool, even in it's early iterations was incredibly slick. No friggin' unstable code generation - instead a really stable flexible system similar to Java's serialization, but more flexible because of the dynamic typing (don't tell me Java comes close). The UI for the interface builder was cool and putting together the GUI for a prototype app was often just a few moments of click and drag. It wasn't just painting: it was putting in the connections between the Controller and all the live gui widgets.

Ahh... those were the days...

WebObjects is a very similar environment for building web apps. It has an interface builder that is slightly different from the NeXTSTEP one, but also very flexible and powerful. And of course OSX will continue the legacy that is still unrivaled (AFAIK).

Hmmm... Here's a screenshot from the advanced options of the Win98 System Configuration utility. Are you saying that all that the last option there does is check EXEs for F0 0F C7 C8 and avoid running them? Where'd you find that out?

Canada has banned many different firearms, and uses registration information to enforce bans.

In 1995, Canada passed 'Bill C-68' which put strict limitations on firearms ownership:

• Requiring a license to possess, allowing the justice minister to ban any firearms without further legislation.
• All pistols that are .25 or .32 calibre and/or have a barrel length of 105 mm or shorter will be destroyed if they were not registered to a person on February 14, 1995 (the day the bill was first tabled in Parliament). That means that pistols belonging to businesses and museums will be destroyed without compensation.
• any pistols made after 1945 that are .25 or .32 calibre or have barrels that are 105 mm or shorter will be destroyed when the current owner dies.
• In Canada, 58% of over 1,000,000 handguns, legally registered, have been declared prohibited.

Canada proves my point... the only purpose of registration is confiscation.

Unlike most other database systems which use locks for concurrency control, Postgres maintains data consistency by using a multiversion
model. This means that while querying a database each transaction sees a snapshot of data (a database version) as it was some time ago,
regardless of the current state of the underlying data. This protects the transaction from viewing inconsistent data that could be caused by
(other) concurrent transaction updates on the same data rows, providing transaction isolation for each database session.

The main difference between multiversion and lock models is that in MVCC locks acquired for querying (reading) data don't conflict with
locks acquired for writing data and so reading never blocks writing and writing never blocks reading.

If you're interested in doing research on raid, you might want to have a look at RAIDframe, which is a system for prototyping disk arrays. It was added to NetBSD last November. It includes a simulator as well as a device driver for doing RAID on real disks, and supports levels 0, 1, 4, 5, hot spares, and more. The base code for level 6 and parity logging is also in there, though I don't know how well it's working.

There's a web page with current notes on RAIDframe on NetBSD here.

cjs